Media and entertainment brands are under growing pressure to prove that personalisation delivers measurable commercial returns, as AI investment accelerates across streaming, sports, gaming and entertainment, according to a new report from Braze.

The Braze Media & Entertainment Personalisation Report finds that the brands generating the strongest returns from AI-led personalisation are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated models, but those with the cleanest data foundations, clearest use cases and strongest measurement discipline.

Drawing on insights from practitioners across Asia, ANZ and the GCC, the report examines how media and entertainment brands are moving beyond fragmented marketing tools and campaign-level metrics to build personalisation strategies that can be tied directly to retention, revenue and customer lifetime value.

According to the report, AI has dominated marketing technology conversations for the past two years, with personalisation one of the areas where expectations have been highest. However, the report warns that AI amplifies the quality of the strategy and infrastructure beneath it.

Without connected data, clear commercial goals and human oversight, AI risks accelerating fragmented customer experiences rather than improving them.

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Fragmented tools are holding back personalisation at scale

The report finds that many media and entertainment brands have accumulated point solutions over time, creating disconnected systems that were never designed to work together.

Close to a third of media and entertainment marketers still use channel-specific solutions that fragment the customer experience, limiting their ability to deliver timely, coordinated and commercially measurable personalisation.

Braze says the shift to more effective personalisation requires both technical integration and organisational alignment. Brands need to simplify their technology stacks, connect customer data to activation platforms, and ensure teams are equipped to use these systems effectively.

Centralised data warehousing is becoming a critical foundation, but the report argues that consolidation should not be positioned simply as a cost-reduction exercise. Instead, it should be treated as capability building.

The report also warns against assuming that unified personalisation requires a single technology provider. Instead, many high-performing brands are adopting open architectures that allow best-of-breed tools, such as data warehouses, recommendation engines and orchestration layers, to work together.

“You don’t want to be stuck in the mud of ‘I’ve gone all in with this provider, and therefore my roadmap becomes their roadmap for the next ten years.’ You want the openness of a buy model for modules that you add on, and the ability to replace them when you need to,” said Anthony O’Byrne, Managing Director of Growth at Kayo Sports.

Behavioural deltas, not vanity metrics, prove personalisation works

The report finds that media and entertainment brands must move beyond engagement metrics such as open rates and click-through rates if they want to defend ongoing investment in personalisation.

While these metrics can indicate direction, the report says personalisation success should be measured against outcomes that matter to the business, including retention, repeat engagement, lifetime value, viewing frequency, churn reduction and conversion velocity.

The most reliable indicators are behavioural deltas: what happened because of personalisation that would not have happened otherwise.

According to the report, brands need a stronger testing culture, including the use of control groups across on-product, off-product, communications and back-end initiatives, to isolate the real impact of personalisation.

Revenue remains the ultimate commercial metric, but the report also recommends identifying a North Star metric that strongly correlates with revenue and can align teams internally.

For sports streaming platforms, incremental viewing can become one such metric. By measuring how much additional viewing each personalisation initiative drives across product, communications and services, teams can connect daily engagement activity to longer-term subscriber retention.

“If you can’t connect personalisation to revenue, you will be unable to defend the investment. You need to determine what happened because of personalisation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise,” said Tim Armstrong, Director at Mangrove Digital.

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AI is becoming decision support, not decision authority

The report finds that the practical role of AI in personalisation is more specific than much of the current market hype suggests.

Rather than replacing marketers or creative judgement, AI is increasingly being used to support decisions around timing, recommendations, prediction, audience prioritisation and automation.

Braze says this is particularly important for fast-moving, event-led media and entertainment businesses, where timing and relevance can determine whether a customer engages, lapses or returns.

AI can help determine what to recommend, when to send, who is at risk of churn and which customers are most likely to respond to an offer. However, the report warns that AI must be directed toward the right outcomes.

The risk is that brands optimise for low-value activities that do not improve retention, revenue or customer value.

Human oversight remains essential, particularly in setting brand boundaries, defining commercial outcomes, managing risk, and ensuring recommendations align with editorial, cultural and regulatory standards.

Self-learning AI shows the value of sustained investment

The report highlights self-learning reinforcement AI models as one example of how AI can compound value over time when applied to clearly defined use cases.

These models can run thousands of micro-tests each day, identifying which actions lead to better outcomes and continuously refining decisions.

O’Byrne said this approach has delivered measurable results in customer reactivation.

“When we launched our reactivation use case, only 50% of people that we were sending a special reactivation offer to were incremental. So 50% of them were going to come back regardless,” O’Byrne said.

“After two months that had gotten to 80%, and after six months it got to and has consistently stayed over 95% incrementality. We could see firsthand how the AI decision agents were learning to get better at which customers to target, and what was the best offer for every individual.”

The report says these results demonstrate that AI is most effective when it continuously improves decisions within a defined use case, rather than being treated as a standalone strategy.

Personalisation is becoming a commercial discipline

Braze says the media and entertainment brands generating durable returns are treating tooling, measurement and AI as parts of the same operating discipline.

Unified platforms make coordinated action possible. Behavioural deltas tied to revenue make the investment defensible. AI deployed against well-defined use cases compounds value rather than activity.

Without all three, the report warns, personalisation risks remaining a series of disconnected campaigns that may improve engagement metrics without moving the business.

The full Braze Media & Entertainment Personalisation Report explores the market pressures driving these shifts, the regional dynamics shaping personalisation across Asia, ANZ and the GCC, and the first-party data strategies underpinning effective AI-led customer engagement.

To download the full report, click here.