From Chaos to Context: Optimizing Content & Data for AI-Driven Personalization with Adobe Experience Platform

The common thread isn’t a lack of vision — it’s a lack of foundational readiness. Whether it was related to departments working in silos, DAMs that have grown out of control, or being locked into a technology decision that bottlenecked their efforts, these conversations illustrated the need for a strong digital foundation to support personalization, AI, and tools like Adobe Experience Platform (AEP).  

These folks are not alone in their struggles either. A recent industry report found that 80 percent of organizations struggle to gain real value from AI because their existing systems are not up to the task, citing issues like fragmented systems, poor governance, and outdated infrastructure. It’s not always the technology itself that holds companies back from using modern personalization tools. More often, the challenge is the quality and structure of the content and data inside those systems.  

Today, content and data are just as valuable as the products and services you offer because they serve as the gateway to your customers. As the saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out.” A system is only as effective as the data and content it has access to. Having a strong digital foundation ensures that your content, including both the assets and the data that give them meaning, is organized contextually and can power personalization and AI systems effectively.   

At its core, personalization in marketing is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. These systems are powered by equal parts content and data. Data identifies who the user is and what they might want, while content provides the building blocks to deliver an experience that feels relevant.  

Utilizing a platform like Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) as the base of your digital foundation creates a unified, single source of truth for all your company’s content and data. AEP is a customer experience management platform that houses a wide range of services and tools to manage data, AI, and personalization at scale. It serves as the central hub for this ecosystem, helping companies ensure their content and data are aligned, well-structured, and ready to deliver personalized experiences. To fully unlock the power of AEP and similar platforms, it is crucial to understand what makes up a strong digital foundation. 

Digital Foundations to Power the Future  

Content without context is just noise, and data without context is just numbers. Personalization isn’t magic; it’s logic applied to identity, context, and behavior. Good data should show who the client is, what they are doing, where and when this is happening, and what is already known about them.  

For example, imagine an online video game store retailer wants to suggest games that match the user’s consoles and purchase history. AEP, together with Adobe Target, can analyze user data in real time and dynamically select relevant game recommendations. But that only works if the underlying data is clean and connected — and that insight can only be activated if the content is structured and accessible.  

Without a strong digital foundation, personalization cannot deliver real value.  

Cleaning up your existing content and data helps ensure you are targeting the right customers, delivering seamless cross-channel experiences, and applying AI or machine learning with confidence. 

While it may sound like a huge undertaking, you do not have to clean everything at once. Start by focusing on the data that supports your highest priority use cases. For example, if you’re working to reduce cart abandonment, look closely at how you’re capturing product views and cart additions. Evaluate how you’re leveraging both Content and Experience Fragments in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to deliver that content dynamically.  

If email targeting is your goal, start with cleaning email fields, consent statuses, and engagement history. Let use cases guide the cleanup process. Clean, connected data paired with modular content is what makes personalization work at scale.  

Preparing Your Data for Personalization  

Before jumping straight into the data, consider auditing your current data ecosystem.  

1. Identify all data sources; these can be CRM, CMS, analytics platforms, e-commerce, or ticketing systems. 
2. Evaluate what each system is collecting, and determine which data points are necessary. In many cases, data is collected and duplicated across platforms, but not all platforms will be equally useful for personalization.  
3. Next, assess the quality of the data itself. Keep an eye out for missing values, outdated entries, duplicate records, and inconsistent field formats. Flag high-risk fields that contain data that is manually entered or questionable; it is important to not delete anything yet. As part of this process, standardize common values, like country or product SKUs, across platforms to prevent mismatching or stale data. Once you have identified problem areas with your data, you can use that to establish or update a data governance procedure to ensure that any data that is collected going forward follows standards that will allow your data to scale and thrive. 

AEP’s Intelligent Data Foundation will help to normalize the data coming in and stitch it together to create rich customer profiles. The goal is not perfect symmetry across every system, but enough alignment to support personalization with accuracy and scale.

Preparing Your Content for Personalization  

While the data drives decision-making, content delivers the experience. It’s important to understand your content readiness level when preparing for personalization. The same preparation points for data apply to structured content under its applicable context, where the actual “data” of each asset exists via its type, taxonomy, hierarchy, and other metadata. This is how your data knows what content to serve.  

This does not require starting from scratch. Instead, begin by tagging your assets, restructure your Marketing Fragments, and break down larger pieces of content into smaller, reusable models. When content is modular and well-tagged, it can be dynamically assembled based on what your data knows about the user. 

Applications such as Adobe Workfront are now more important than ever to ensure that as content is created, guardrails are established to ensure that any new assets or content can provide context to AI and personalization systems. Without thoughtful workflows and governance, even the most advanced personalization tools can struggle to find the right context at the right time.

Leveraging the Adobe Experience Platform  

Once your digital foundation is in place, AEP becomes the connective tissue that links your customer data and personalized content together, creating a central hub to help deliver meaningful customer experiences across channels. Stitching together data to create Real-Time Customer Profiles, AEP continuously keeps them updated with new behaviors and interactions as they occur. An integrated ecosystem like Adobe’s can help organizations maintain this elevated level of security.  

While AEP keeps your data unified, it can also integrate with tools like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to deliver modular, tagged content at scale. Applications like Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) run within AEP, allowing you to create personalized journeys for users in real time across platforms.

Build the Foundation, Then Build the Experience  

Personalization is not something you add at the end. It is the outcome of a strong digital foundation built on structured content and connected, reliable data. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) are powerful tools built to deliver meaningful, real-time experiences — but their success depends entirely on the quality of what they are fed. Your data and content are the product, not just the materials that surround it. When treated with the same care as any customer-facing asset, they become the backbone of relevance and value across every touchpoint. With structured content, clean data, and connected systems, your organization is not only equipped to make the most of today’s platforms, but it’s also positioned to lead through whatever comes next. 

Our team of Adobe-certified experts help organizations build the foundations needed for personalization at scale. Whether you’re assessing your data readiness, structuring your content, or optimizing your AEP investment, One North can help you move from complexity to clarity.

Photo Credit: Hulki Okan Tabak | Unsplash