Omnicom Publishes Guide to Delivering Personalization at Scale

Omnicom, the world’s leading marketing and sales company, has published a comprehensive guide aimed at helping brands deliver 1:1 personalization at scale. The guide addresses a critical gap in the industry, where despite significant investments in customer data platforms (CDPs), data management platforms (DMPs), and marketing technology (martech) stacks, most customers still receive generic experiences.

According to Omnicom, the primary reason for this gap is the fragmented architecture that connects systems and resolves customer identity, as well as the organizational design that governs it. This fragmentation is not limited to any single industry but is prevalent across retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG), media and entertainment, financial services, healthcare, travel and hospitality, manufacturing, and high technology sectors.

Omnicom provides several examples to illustrate the issue. In the healthcare sector, health systems send broadcast appointment reminders to patients with detailed care histories in electronic health records (EHRs), despite clinical and marketing systems never being connected. In financial services, different divisions hold separate records for the same individual, making it impossible to personalize experiences across the full relationship. In the travel and hospitality industry, loyalty programs send the same promotional emails to every member because the loyalty system and delivery platform do not share a customer key.

Omnicom identifies identity resolution as the most critical gap. A single customer can appear as a newsletter subscriber, a loyalty member, an anonymous device ID, a customer relationship management (CRM) contact, and an offline event record. Without resolved identity, systems treat each record as a separate person, leading to contradictory signals about who the customer is. Omnicom notes that adding more data sources or point solutions only compounds the fragmentation when identity remains unresolved.

To address this issue, Omnicom recommends a three-layer architecture that builds personalization on unified identity. The first layer, identity and data unification, connects disparate data sources into a single, resolved customer record. The second layer, personalization orchestration, uses unified data to inform the right message, creative variant, and channel for each individual at the moment of engagement. The third layer, privacy and governance, ensures regional regulations and individual consent apply across every data point and message.

Omnicom’s framework emphasizes that the layers build on one another, with identity as the foundation. The company points to its integration with Adobe, where Adobe Real-Time CDP, creative production, and campaign orchestration operate on connected infrastructure. Performance data then feeds back into the profile to refine the next interaction.

Marketing, data, and technology leaders can download the full whitepaper, including seven industry use cases, a phased implementation roadmap, and return on investment (ROI) outcomes, on Omnicom’s Adobe Practice website.