The Personalization Imperative: Driving telecom growth with AI-powered marketing

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, April 2025

by GP Singh, Mahmoud Makki, Tarek Matar, and Ankit Kushwaha




Customers in every industry are demanding personalized, real-time engagement across channels, whether it is social media, mobile apps, or retail stores online and offline. They expect to be uniquely understood in the moment.

Marketers know that personalization is critical to relevance and differentiation, revenue growth, and brand value. Leaders are tackling this challenge head-on. First, they are gathering massive, proprietary data sets of customer information. Unilever, for example, is on a mission to create 1 billion one-on-one customer relationships by analyzing interactions across digital and in-store touch points for marketing insights. Second, such leaders are creating integrated marketing technology (MarTech) stacks to enable real-time personalization. McDonald’s integrated its MarTech to deliver personalized drive-through menus, mobile app offers, and in-store experiences, increasing its digital customer frequency by 10 percent and raising customer spending. Third, these leaders are exploiting real-time insights to get their concept into the market faster. Such agility allowed Coca-Cola to quickly move from a concept to the production of personalized bottles and cans in its “Share a Coke” campaign, which it launched in Australia and then expanded globally, and grow sales by 2.5 percent in a year in the competitive U.S. market.

Telecom operators are uniquely positioned to fulfill the personalization imperative. Their data sets, which include real-time location data, usage patterns, and customer service interactions, are broader and richer than those of industries such as finance or retail.

The problem is that many telecom operators are struggling to tap this gold mine of insights. In many cases, they are unable to deliver the right offer at the right place and the right time to their customers. We find that telecom companies typically utilize only 30 to 50 percent of their data. Senior telecom executives worry that disconnected MarTech stacks and skills gaps are holding them back.

Data-fueled, AI-powered marketing engines can unlock the potential for personalization. Such engines can produce the insights needed for personalized engagement, promote more informed decisions, and create the precision targeted strategies needed to enhance returns and deliver competitive advantage. Our analysis shows that for telecom companies in the early stages of their customer value management (CVM) journey, every $1.00 invested in AI-powered, data-fueled marketing can yield up to $5.90 in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) gains over five years. (Read the rest here.)