Core Value: CoreMedia Adds Native Personalization and Experimentation to its CMS

When I spoke to CoreMedia CEO Sören Stamer back in December, we were waxing philosophically about the year ahead. He went deep into topics like data and digital sovereignty, a persistent theme at our recent Boye & Company CMS Kickoff conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Along with the anticipated (and explosive) growth of AI – where Sören sees big potential for agentic commerce and AI-powered interfaces – he also talked about the next wave of personalization and its impact on experiences.

“Personalization isn’t new,” he told me. “What’s new is its velocity. Hyper-personalization means connecting intent, data, and content in real time, and anticipating needs before they’re expressed.” 

Personalization has certainly been one of the more elusive features for digital experience tools. Or, at least, doing it right – both sustainably and at scale. As Sören said, we’ve been talking about platform-centric and third-party personalization tools for the last two decades, but AI and new experience models are finally raising the bar. 

To realize the promise, CoreMedia has been busy innovating – and today, it launched a major evolution of its CMS that embeds personalization and real-time experimentation directly into the content workflow. 

This comes at a time when enterprises are swimming in oceans of customer data but struggling to transform it into relevant experiences for consumers. Simultaneously, users are opting for personalized experiences that are clear, transparent, and capable of solving real problems. It’s at this intersection that CoreMedia powers the potential of personalization by reducing or even eliminating the friction between insight and action.

With its new native features, CoreMedia will give teams the ability to create, test, and optimize personalized content variants inside its industry-leading CMS. Armed with this added flexibility and insight, brands can now respond to customer intent in the moments that matter most – and turn relevance into measurable growth.

“Enterprises don’t have a data problem – they have an action problem,” Sören explained. “Customer intent shows up in real time and needs to be acted upon instantly. When marketing teams are forced to work with disconnected tools and manual processes, they often miss the chance. By making personalization and experimentation native to the CMS, CoreMedia enables teams to respond in the moment intent appears. That’s where experiences are won or lost, and where relevance turns into revenue.”

CoreMedia has been actively innovating at the edge of AI for quite some time. Case in point: its CoreMedia KIO assistant brings expansive tooling for content and journey experience orchestration. As part of its integrated ecosystem, it adds a bleeding-edge dimension of functionality to help craft CX in new ways – including a conversational interface that transforms user engagement.

Along with its strides to make progressive, GEO-ready capabilities part of its elemental playbook, CoreMedia continues to offer foundational CMS features that rank strongly with global retailers that are hyper-focused on delivering world-class experiences. This includes the likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, and the Deckers family of brands – as well as B2B stalwarts like Emerson and Sonepar.

As Sören told me, one of the big bets CoreMedia is making is that the customer experience of the future will be unified. Clearly, personalization and experimentation will be vital to delivering on that holistic vision.

Here’s a bit more detail on how CoreMedia’s evolutionary new capabilities work. 

Bringing native personalization to the content workflow

Often, personalization has been a mixed domain of technologies, cobbled together to deliver a complete solution. But with CoreMedia’s native approach, personalization is no longer a downstream task handled in external tools. 

Now, content teams can create, manage, and optimize personalized variants directly inside CoreMedia’s CMS, harnessing the same familiar workspace they utilize for content production. CoreMedia already offers an elegant UX, and users will find the addition of audience insights, targeting rules, and variant controls all within arm’s reach. This promises to help teams move seamlessly – and in real time – from creation to activation.

 Personalized content variants are created, tested, and optimized in real time directly within the CMS. Source: CoreMedia

One of the biggest benefits is the speed and efficacy. Using the CMS, teams can produce tailored versions of any text block, banner, promotion, or other content asset. In seconds, they can deliver focused messages to the right audience at the right moment – all without duplicating content or managing different versions.

There’s also a composable and extensible framework supporting the engine. Segments can be created directly in CoreMedia or synced from CRM, CDP, and other systems, ensuring teams work with the most complete customer profiles. 

CoreMedia’s targeting also supports real-time signals, including lifecycle stage, browsing behavior, or location. Personalization and performance data can be exported to stay consistent across business intelligence tools, data platforms, and the wider enterprise tech stack of tools and services.

Segmentation and personalization are integrated directly into the content workflow. Source: CoreMedia

For users and teams, having everything in one intuitive platform can ease the personalization challenges while accelerating time to market. Your content variants and targeting rules are all managed in a single, uniform workplace. This eliminates the potential for fragmentation across tools and simplifies the creation, launch, and optimization of personalized experiences at a global scale.

A/B testing and real-time experimentation – right where content decisioning lives

Without question, A/B testing has become a critical asset for marketers. There's a bevy of third-party tools for facilitating test paradigms, but having a solution close to your content workflows is a key advantage. 

That’s why CoreMedia has embedded A/B testing directly into its CMS, allowing teams to validate ideas and optimize experiences as part of their standard cadence of content production. Instead of exporting content to external testing utilities and waiting for reports, editors can compare variants, monitor performance, and act on results in real time – without ever having to leave the CMS.

Test ideas, measure impact, and decide faster with CoreMedia’s A/B testing. Source: CoreMedia

One of the clear advantages of CoreMedia’s A/B testing is having side-by-side comparisons of variant performance. With quick go-to insights, you can determine which content resonates with customers and make quick, evidence-backed decisions.

Live experiment data also shows you how users interact with each variant, enabling fast adjustments when a challenger outperforms the original. There’s also continuous optimization in context, so editors can refine content directly inside the CMS. This leads to a smoother production flow and consistent momentum in experience optimization.

Semantic Search delivers control and scalability to content operations 

We’ve already mentioned CoreMedia’s investment in AI edge innovation, and search has been a key area of focus. And rightly so: as AI accelerates content creation and personalization, enterprises are grappling with the relevance, reuse, and governance associated with rapidly expanding content libraries. 

Personalization is promising. But without precision, control, and clarity, it can quickly devolve into a slow and inconsistent morass. That’s where CoreMedia’s Semantic Search comes in. Leveraging a natural language interface, it helps teams find, assess, and reuse content efficiently – even as volume and complexity increase.

Natural-language search enables teams to quickly find, assess, and reuse content directly in the CMS. Source: CoreMedia

For users, this is a godsend. Imagine conducting searches using everyday phrases like “winter campaign images” – all without relying on just exact keywords. This makes discovery faster, more intuitive, and more contextual than traditional search.

CoreMedia’s Semantic Search also brings a layer of calm to handle your content chaos. When prompted, it automatically surfaces similar or redundant assets, reducing clutter and reinforcing brand consistency. There’s also fierce governance surrounding discoverability, enabling teams to reuse assets, avoid duplication, and maintain structured libraries as content volumes expand.

The verdict

The CMS and DXP landscape is both wide and deep, but there’s a growing convergence around features – particularly those imbued with AI or agentic systems. This, in turn, is creating confusion, particularly when it comes to assessing AI features within the broader corpus of capabilities. 

The fact that CoreMedia is enriching its CMS with onboard personalization, experimentation, and search is building on its strong heritage of foundational features, and it's addressing the real challenges teams face with the exponential growth of content assets.

While composable stacks offer an array of third-party tools for things like A/B testing, brands need to move faster than ever – and having a performant, purposefully integrated solution provides a clear advantage for enterprises that are looking to accelerate. This is another check in CoreMedia’s column as a single, accountable, and trusted source that addresses critical requirements like governance and compliance. You’re not just buying enterprise software – you’re buying trust. 

In my opinion, a modern CMS should offer native testing and experimentation features to leverage content provenance and link marketers closer to actionable insights. To facilitate real-time journey orchestration, speed and efficacy are paramount. As such, CoreMedia is listening to the needs of marketers by providing built-in personalization and semantic search as onboard feature sets that accelerate time to vision. At the same time, offering a composable, hybrid headless posture allows a brand to onboard adjacent integrations that expand the core feature set.

My recommendation: CoreMedia already has a strong commerce focus, but this added tooling should present a welcome win for users across a myriad of industries and use cases. If you’re considering a move, CoreMedia’s CMS is a solid platform, but pay close attention to how your various data sources will be handled relative to fueling your personalization. Also, as an integrated DXP, I would consider the scope of your roadmap to see if there’s additional alignment within the ecosystem.

If you’re interested in seeing more, the company is offering a “What’s New” Webinar on January 28th. You can also request a free demo.

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