BEX – Brand Experience Summit 2025
Theme: “Personalization at Scale: From Insights to Impact in a Data-Driven, Immersive World”.
Keynote Session Topic: “Unpacking the Role of AI in Reshaping Consumer Experiences and Enabling Personalization at Scale”
We live in an era where a single moment, one notification, one video, one tailored interaction can spark emotion, shift perception, and drive action. But here’s the challenge: how do we create these emotionally resonant, deeply personal experiences not just for one customer, but for millions all at the same time?
That is the holy grail of marketing today, personalization at scale and AI is the catalyst making it not just possible, but powerful.
My Own Journey into AI Innovation
A few months ago, TVC Communications made history by launching Nigeria’s first AI-powered multilingual news anchors delivering digital news bulletins in English, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Pidgin. This wasn’t just a tech stunt. It was a bold move to make information more personal, inclusive, and immediate for a culturally diverse audience.
Why? Because we recognised that relevance is currency and in an attention-scarce world, relevance at scale is the new competitive advantage.
AI as the Bridge Between Data and Emotion
Let’s talk about what AI actually does for marketers and brand experience professionals: AI isn’t just about automation. It’s about intelligent orchestration.
It takes raw data, clicks, views, preferences, location, history and turns it into understanding. But here’s the magic: that understanding is then used to craft experiences that feel human sometimes even more human than human. Picture walking into a store where every shelf rearranges itself based on your tastes. Or getting a message from a brand that feels like it was written just for you. That’s not a dream. That’s AI already at work.
Four Real-Life Brand Examples
Let’s ground this in reality:
- Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign is a global It is an annual marketing campaign and personalized data-driven experience where Spotify users can review their listening habits for the year. It’s a highly anticipated event that provides users with a unique summary of their top artists, songs, genres, and total listening time, encouraging them to share their personalized results on social media. Obama has once shared his Spotify playlist. You can imagine what brands can do with that information.
– You may be wondering, why was this popular? It is because it doesn’t just show data, it reflects identity. AI makes that possible by analysing billions of listening hours and curating insights that make each user feel seen.
- Steven Bartlett -Host of Diary of CEO -The most downloaded Podcast in the UK as of 2023 according to Apple’s end of year He said in his book and said that he doesn’t believe the podcast was hugely successful only because of his personality, neither is it because the questions are significantly better or their editing is the best or even that they have the most famous guests in the world but they sweated the small stuff with data and used AI to enhance the experience of everyone involved. So, before a guest arrives, they research their favourite music and play it softly in the background when they arrive. No guest has ever mentioned this, but they believe that it will put them in a better, more open mood. They test the title, thumbnail and promotion of each podcast episode using AI and social media ads weeks before the podcast is published to the public. They even hired a full-time in-house data scientist and had him create an AI tool that translates the podcast into multiple languages, so if you click on the YouTube version of the podcast while you’re in France, for example, both the host’s and the guest’s voices will be automatically translated into French. They’ve built a data-driven model that informs them which guests they should book, the best-performing topics the guest has previously discussed, the optimal length for a conversation, and even how many characters long the title of a podcast should be. Isn’t that something!
- YouTube’s Contextual AI Advertising – Some years ago, YouTube unveiled a suite of tools, most notably AI-powered contextual ads, exemplified by a feature dubbed “Peak Points’’. The “Peak Points” Revolution is of the most talked-about This feature is designed to leverage AI to place ads at moments of maximum viewer engagement within a video. It’s a bold move, aiming to capitalize on heightened attention. YouTube employs Google’s advanced AI model, Gemini, to identify moments of high emotional engagement or “peaks” within video content. The AI analyzes various elements, including video frames, transcripts, and potentially other cues like vocal tone and even inferred facial expressions, to pinpoint these optimal ad insertion opportunities. The idea is to serve an ad precisely when the audience is most “locked in” or attentive, such as immediately after a dramatic reveal, a heartfelt moment, or the climax of a story. For instance, in the popular movie, Love in Every Word produced by Omoni Oboli, when the Odugwu Pararan was asking his Achalugo to date him, and she gives various excuses and keeps saying no, no, no, …. Until that moment she finally accepts and says Yes and boom! An advert for a luxurious wedding destination pops up! What do you think will happen to the minds of the viewers. They will relate it to the movie and immediately think to themselves, what a beautiful wedding they will have at that destination.
The potential benefits of this are:
- Increased Ad relevance: The Ads are not just contextually related to the video’s topic but to the viewer’s immediate state of
- Higher Engagement Rates: A captive audience is more likely to notice and pay attention to the ad and watch till the end rather than skipping the
- Improved Brand Recall: Emotions play a powerful role in memory Ads shown during emotionally charged moments are likely remembered more vividly. Research consistently shows that advertising with an emotional appeal tends to outperform purely rational messaging , and ads that generate an emotional response often see increased brand recognition and engagement.
This is a perfect example of personalisation at scale and AI is the catalyst making it not just possible, but powerful.
- And closer home, in TVC newsroom, our AI anchors don’t just speak your They reflect your world, your culture, your identity, your pace. This is mass intimacy. AI enabling millions to feel personally spoken to, simultaneously.
Why Does This Matter for Experiential Marketing?
For experiential marketers, this is a game-changer.
Traditionally, we built experiences for the average. Now, AI lets us design for the individual within the crowd. You can now know which product demo resonates best with Funmi in Ibadan versus Chuka in Enugu, not based on guesswork, but on insight. You can test, learn, adapt, and deliver in real time. That is personalization at scale.
And beyond the tech, it means we can start telling stories that are contextually intelligent, emotionally aware, and culturally responsive, just like our AI anchors.
Sound a note of warning, caution and responsibility
I’d like to be clear and state emphatically that AI is not a magic wand. It’s a mirror. It reflects the values of those who wield it. We must be intentional, as ethical AI is not optional. We must ask: Is the personalisation respectful? Is it transparent? Are we building connection or just conversion? As we scale experiences, we must not scale surveillance or bias. Responsibility is the price of innovation.
Prepare to Roundup
As I round up, let me tell you about a Yoruba tradition I love, we have the concept of “Oriki”, a personalised praise poem that speaks directly to the identity, history, and essence of a person. {Play my paternal Oriki on my phone}.
Imagine if every consumer interaction felt like an Oriki uniquely crafted, deeply personal, and emotionally resonant. That is the promise of AI in experiential marketing. It is the “Oriki” of the Future!
Conclusively, as we gather here today, let’s not ask what AI can do. Let’s ask what we will do, with the insights, the tools, and the responsibility we hold. Because in this data-driven, immersive world, the brands that will win are not the loudest, but the ones that feel the closest.
Thank you.