Serving a personalized online customer experience is a top priority for marketing teams and can lift conversion and engagement substantially. However, less than 10% feel they are equipped with the right tools, skill sets, data and technology to execute successfully. Our consortium brings together smart digital professionals to elevate the practice of effective personalization.

WHAT WE DO

MEET OUR FELLOWS

John Berndt  |  Founder

 John Berndt has been continuously involved in the forefront of digital since 1991, when he founded his national digital agency, TBG, which has been one the most stable and consistent on the national scene since that time. With a background in design, writing and computing, John has been involved with many hundreds of large digital projects, and become a frequent digital strategist for major brands and institutions. Since 2002, he has also closely followed the content management (CMS) space and for the past decade has been actively involved in the forefront of personalization and multi-channel digital orchestration. He is the author of “Personalization Mechanics” (2015), a frequent speaker on contemporary personalization practice, and a Sitecore MVP (strategy). Twitter | LinkedIn

Amanda Shiga  |  Founder

Amanda is VP, Product Strategy at Marigold, where she leads a team contributing to shaping strategic direction and competitive advantage in a product portfolio offering relationship marketing and loyalty solutions. Prior to this, she led Product Strategy at Sitecore where she played a significant role in the addition of four acquisitions, driving a vision of a SaaS-based composable DXP. She also previously led Marketing Science at Nonlinear/Valtech where her practice focused on measuring, optimizing and personalizing the digital experience for a portfolio of international clients. She was a Sitecore MVP from 2012-2018 and was featured in CWSE-ON’s Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing 2016. Amanda holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science, an M.A.Sc. in Technology Innovation Management. Twitter | LinkedIn

Jaina Baumgartner |  Technology Fellow

Jaina is a 3x and current Sitecore Strategy MVP and Digital Strategist at RDA , where she is laser focused on generating customer value via personalization, analytics, and testing mainly utilizing Sitecore, Coveo, and Optimizely. She was formerly Director, Digital Strategy and Architecture at Altudo where she formed and led the Digital Solutions Group to find and solve customer problems via technology and strategy. Prior to Altudo, Jaina managed a 30 person website development and marketing team for 15 brand sites at Allegis Group (largest Staffing, Recruiting, and Professional Services company in the US). Jaina has a background in website development with a variety of CMS (including DNN and Tridion). She is the founder of Pixleration, where she blogs on all things Personalization. 

Jeff Cram  |  Technology Fellow

 Jeff is Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Connective DX, a digital experience agency that helps organizations plan, design and build end-to-end digital experiences. He consults with organizations on large scale design and technology projects with a focus on personalized experiences. Jeff resides in Boston, Massachusetts where he passionately roots for his beloved Boston Red Sox. Twitter | LinkedIn

Colin Eagan  |  User Experience Fellow

Colin is VP for Experience Strategy at Phaedon in Washington D.C., formerly part of ICF, where he directs content strategy and information design projects for Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and government clients. He is a frequent contributor to UX conferences and publications, including Convey UX, IA Summit, Ad Age, and The UX Booth. A pioneer in personalization content strategy, he has authored multiple papers on the topic including the Personalization Pyramid and the Personalization Content Model. He credits any career success thus far to not going to law school. Twitter | LinkedIn

Mara Low  |  User Experience Fellow

As Manager of Digital Strategy & Optimization at Valtech (formerly TBG), Mara Low keeps at the forefront of digital strategy, personalization and UX strategy, and grounded use of the extended feature sets of modern marketing platforms. She works to develop these practices and execute comprehensive, innovative, data-driven digital strategies for TBG’s clients. Mara has over 10 years of experience creating, planning and executing creative digital strategies and solutions for large, complex institutions. Twitter | LinkedIn

Jeffrey MacIntyre  |  Content Fellow

Jeff is an independent strategy and user experience consultant with nearly 20 years in the business of content. Bucket Studio, his New York-based practice, delivers connected experiences and martech solutions via compelling content programs. He plays at the intersection of product development, user experience, and information sciences for clients from startups to the F50. He writes Bucket List, a periodic newsletter on the design and business of personalized experience. He also host community and conversation on connected experience at Bucket Brigade. His clients include the American Museum of Natural History, Arts & Entertainment Television Networks, AutoTrader Group, Best Buy, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Condé Nast Media, NBCUniversal, News Corporation, Philips, Thomson Reuters, Universal Music Group, University of Michigan, Viacom, Vimeo, and Yahoo! Twitter | LinkedIn

Kevin Nichols  |  Content Fellow

Kevin is an award-winning thought leader, digital industry expert and author with more than 21 years of professional experience. He was a key contributor to creating MIT OpenCourseWare, grew one of the largest content strategy teams in the world at SapientNitro and has worked on content for dozens of global brands. Recently, he co-launched AvenueCX with Rebecca Schneider. He is author of Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide and co-author of UX for Dummies. Kevin is also the chair of Content Strategy Alliance Best Practices initiative. Twitter | LinkedIn

Carl Parson  |  Technology Fellow

NEW MEMBER. The CPP is pleased to welcome Carl Parson as a tech follow. Carl is the director for digital data science at Sysco. He was previously product director for digital personalization and relevance for Kroger Co, a fortune 17 company, the nation’s largest supermarket chain and the third-largest retailer behind Amazon and Wal-Mart.  He led front-end development teams, as well as back-end science as a service teams that deploy recommendation sciences for over 26 million households each year, supporting 11 million unique visits to their digital properties per week.  Academically Carl has an advanced data scientist background, focusing on optimization over time under uncertainty, and prior to his current role spent 13 years supporting the United States Air Force and Department of Defense in various analytical capacities.  LinkedIn

Lars Birkholm Petersen  |  Technology Fellow

Lars is co-founder at San Francisco based Altola, inc., a boutique agency focused on architecting personalized digital experiences. Altola is born out of Sitecore and specializes in optimizing business value from Sitecore, Contentful, Jahia and connecting the digital experience stack. Lars is also co-founder at Uniform, born out of working with multiple clients, agencies and various digital experience vendors. The focus on Uniform is to help connect existing and new digital marketing technologies, making it easier for companies to build modern digital experiences on legacy systems, as well as chosing the right stack for their needs. Uniform is bringing the JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup) to the Enterprise and help with blazing fast site performance, faster time to market and one place to create and maintain your different web and app stacks. Twitter | LinkedIn

Cruce Saunders  |  Content Fellow

Founder and principal at [A], Cruce and team work with the most complex enterprise content publishers on Earth, helping leaders move to next-generation, intelligent customer experiences. Cruce is author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World and keynotes worldwide on omnichannel customer experience, content intelligence, content engineering, content operations, content asset valuation, intelligent content, machine learning, AI, cognitive systems, customer experience platforms, and ‘intelligence transformation’. [A] operates in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Latin America and works with the leaders who own responsibility for some of the most valuable content assets in the world including Fortune 50 enterprises, knowledge-centric midmarket organizations, governments, associations, and other content-centric institutions. Twitter | LinkedIn

Randy Woods  |  Technology Fellow

Randy is a serial entrepreneur currently acting as Senior Vice President North America for Valtech, a global digital agency.  Randy co-founded Nonlinear and played an instrumental role in its acquisition by Valtech.  In previous roles, Randy has acted as CEO of Buystream, a venture-funded analytics company. He was one of the original Sitecore Digital Strategist MVPs and continues to actively help clients with complex challenges take advantage of the personalization opportunity.  Twitter | LinkedIn

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

Founded in 2017, the Consortium of Personalization Professionals is an invitation-only non-profit group of subject matter experts that seeks to convene expert discussion focused on the development of digital practices around targeted content and user experience. These discussions seek to contribute to the development of much needed creative approaches, methodologies, operational models, ways of evaluating success, and other aspects of personalization practice, working in a vendor neutral way through a series of in-person meetings and other forms of discussion and collaboration.

RECENT MEETINGS

EVOLVING DEFINITIONS

As digital practitioners, we define personalization as the collection of user data to deliver some type of targeted user experience in real-time. This can be based on first-party data (e.g. user profile information), third-party data (e.g. browser data) or many other variations. The user of the website or app is then served customized content based on this input. While many elite organizations have done this for years using proprietary algorithms (think Amazon or Netflix), personalization has now become accessible to the “everyday” digital team via optimization engines and plugins. We’ve created a glossary of terms to help better define this universe.

EXPLAIN YOUR LATEST PERSONALIZATION TECH

As a practitioner-focused organization, CPP welcomes the opportunity to learn more about the latest personalization technology. Our fellows have experience implementing personalized designs on a wide cross-section of platforms.