As AI dominates martech investment across Asia Pacific, a new report from Braze has revealed that the biggest barrier to effective personalisation is not a lack of artificial intelligence, but a lack of unified data, measurement discipline and clear business outcomes.
The Braze Media & Entertainment Personalisation Report, featuring insights from leaders at Kayo Sports, Sportsbet, TVer, Tuned Global and other major media, music streaming, gaming and entertainment brands, found that organisations generating measurable returns from personalisation are focusing less on AI sophistication and more on data foundations, testing frameworks and commercial accountability.
Contributors include:
● Anthony O’Byrne, Managing Director, Growth, Kayo Sports
● Tim Armstrong, Director, Mangrove Digital (Former Director, Digital Capability and Data at Nova Entertainment)
● Josh Jones, CRM Capability and Enablement, Sportsbet
● Josh Marton, General Manager, Public Affairs and Marketing, Golf Australia
● Peter Filopoulos, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer – Consultant, Canadian Soccer Media & Entertainment (Former Chief Customer, Brand and Marketing Officer for Football Australia)
● Con Raso, Managing Director, Tuned Global
● Yudai Goto, CRM Team Lead, Experience Design, TVer
According to the report, many brands continue to invest heavily in AI-powered customer engagement while struggling to connect personalisation efforts to revenue, retention and customer lifetime value.
“AI amplifies whatever strategy and infrastructure sits underneath it,” the report states. “Without strong foundations, AI simply helps organisations automate inefficiencies faster.”
Drawing on direct practitioner experience from streaming, sports, gaming, and music brands across Asia, ANZ, and the GCC, the report examines the pressures driving change in the industry, the capability gaps holding brands back, and the personalisation strategies, data foundations, and AI applications delivering measurable results.
Building unified fan profiles from interactions
Most brands already collect plenty of data. But the report highlights the problem is identifying which signals are actually useful for engagement decisions. Every interaction is a signal, but not every signal is equally meaningful. What people watch, click, buy, ignore, and return to all tell a story, and separating useful signals from noise is where most brands fall behind.
Peter Filopoulos, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer with Canadian Soccer Media and Entertainment (formerly with Football Australia), frames the goal in terms of quality over quantity.
“The goal isn’t more data. It’s better signals. Who is this person? What do they care about? What’s valuable to them now?” Filopoulos said.
Sport offers a natural testing ground for second-screen engagement, because fans are already pulling out their phones during live moments. Josh Marton, General Manager of Public Affairs and Marketing at Golf Australia, notes: “For us to take it to the next level, we need to be stronger in setting up triggerable automations linked to the golf experience that genuinely add value for players.”
Growth patterns and consumer behaviour across Asia, ANZ, and the GCC
According to the report, Asia’s streaming and gaming markets are the region’s primary growth engines. Online video revenues are expected to rise from about US$64 billion in 2024 to roughly US$89 billion by 2029, with streaming set to overtake traditional TV by 2027. Engagement flows through platforms, creators, and social ecosystems, with mobile as the dominant screen.
Con Raso, Managing Director of global music cloud platform Tuned Global, notes that telcos operating music streaming services across Asia can reduce friction with bundled data, direct carrier billing, and large-scale distribution.
“Telco-powered services outperform global platforms on relevance, particularly when discovery and promotion mechanisms are tuned toward domestic talent,” Raso said.
Superfan models are also gaining traction in Asia, where platforms layer mechanics like exclusive content, artist tipping, and community-driven engagement on top of streaming to drive higher retention and new revenue streams.
Sport now competes directly with all entertainment, not just other sports. With fans following six to eight sports on average, any single property is fighting for attention year-round against a much wider field.
Yudai Goto, CRM Team Lead, Experience Design at TVer, Japan’s ad-supported streaming platform operated jointly by the country’s major commercial broadcasters, sees the retention challenge arriving from an unexpected direction.
“One of the major shifts in the video streaming landscape compared to two years ago is the rapid rollout of lower-priced, ad-supported plans. While this has made it easier for users to subscribe to multiple services on a whim, it also means brands now need a much stronger hook or a unique value proposition to be the one that truly gets chosen,” Goto said.
Start narrow, then scale
The report details how effective personalisation often starts simpler than brands expect. Three approaches consistently work. Showing different content based on preferences, coordinating messages across channels, and triggering actions based on behaviour. Dynamic content does not always need machine learning. Showing basketball content to basketball fans can outperform complex algorithmic recommendation in some cases.
“Stop overthinking it. Start with triggers, add dynamic content, coordinate channels. The sophistication can come after the basics work,” Tim Armstrong, Director at Mangrove Digital, said.
Where to invest to get more out of personalisation
Experts in the report agreed personalisation fails when it is treated as a marketing project. When it is owned by one team, measured by campaign metrics, and disconnected from product and data decisions, it cannot scale. The strongest returns come from foundational capabilities rather than features. Unified data, a single fan identity, clear ownership, simple journeys, and organisational alignment consistently outperform more sophisticated but poorly grounded efforts.
“Personalisation succeeds when it’s treated as a capability, not a campaign. You can only scale personalisation so far without a solid data structure,” Josh Jones, who leads CRM Capability and Enablement at Sportsbet, said.
The report highlights how most effective starting point is use cases that clearly impact the customer experience and align with business goals, rather than trying to personalise everything at once. The technology landscape is also changing quickly, and brands need the ability to move with it rather than locking their roadmap to a single provider.
“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,” Anthony O’Byrne, Managing Director of Growth at Kayo Sports, said.
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