We catch up with the insurance company and its marketing company, Claritas, to hear how generative AI transformed their ad creation, producing 96 audio variants in two weeks, boosting results and exposing both the power and limits of AI-driven personalization in marketing.
Robin England of Progressive Insurance and Rex Briggs, chief AI officer at Claritas
At Possible, amid the noise of AI predictions and platform promises, one case study stood out for its clarity – and its candor. We sat down with Robin England of Progressive Insurance and Rex Briggs, chief AI officer at Claritas, to hear how a major US insurer quietly re-engineered its creative process using generative AI. Not just to make ads faster, but to test the limits of what automation can really deliver – and where the human touch still matters.
This wasn’t a press release masquerading as a case study. It was a glimpse into a live experiment – one that produced 96 audio ad variants in just two weeks, increased quote starts by 31% and opened up entirely new questions about how much personalization is too much.
“We were the first to apply GenAI to write the scripts, create the voices and the music beds – all of it,” says England, who leads strategy, research and analytics at Progressive. “We normally produce a handful of audio ads over seven weeks. This time, we had 96 made and approved in 14 days.”
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Claritas, a marketing intelligence company with roots going back nearly five decades, played a central role in the process. Known for its industry-standard identity graph and segmentation tools, Claritas has increasingly moved into AI-driven personalization. It acquired patented AI tech to generate and optimise creative messaging in real time, allowing brands to pair the right message with the right person – or persona – dynamically.
Briggs, who previously helped pioneer digital ad measurement, mobile effectiveness and social media analytics, came out of retirement to join Claritas. “I was supposed to be in Tahoe,” he told us. “But I read the patent, saw the potential and realized this was the biggest shift in marketing I’d ever seen.”
Together with MMA Global – a trade association representing CMOs and marketing innovators – Claritas and Progressive ran the project through the Consortium for AI Personalization, a research initiative where brands test real-world applications of AI and share what they learn.
Progressive chose audio not because it was easy, but because it was feasible. “At the time, generating realistic video using AI wasn’t quite there,” says England. “But synthetic voices and music were already good enough to put in front of customers.”
The first campaign launched on SiriusXM, then expanded to Spotify, iHeart and other major streaming platforms. The system allowed Progressive to vary script, voice and music background in real time. The result: six scripts × four voices × four tracks = 96 combinations, each tuned to resonate with different segments.
“We even talked to synthetic personas – built from decades of Claritas data – to ask what kind of music they preferred,” says Briggs. “They told us country music was popular among likely converters. That wasn’t one of the original beds. So in the next round, Progressive added it.”
The results were clearly positive. But not perfect.
“What we found is that 96 versions were maybe too many,” says Briggs. “There’s an optimal ratio – what we call the learning-to-earning balance. If you only have two people converting from 1,000 impressions, you don’t have enough data for the AI to learn from 96 variants.”
This is where Briggs offers a dose of realism often missing from AI discussions: the so-called five nines of accuracy. “Even if your model is 99.999% accurate, that’s still one wrong result in every 100,000 decisions,” he explains. “Now imagine you’re delivering 40m ad impressions. That’s 400 errors and, in regulated industries like insurance, that’s 400 too many.”
Hence, the importance of a human in the loop. Progressive’s creative director, Chris Monaco, reviewed and filtered 126 GenAI concepts to settle on the final 96. Every variant ended with the same, legally required disclaimer, voiced identically. “We didn’t cut corners,” says England. “Compliance was baked in.”
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The numbers speak for themselves. AI-enabled campaigns delivered a 197% lift over the control group. Quote starts jumped 31%. GenAI-enhanced audio ads tripled exposure and kept 98% of listeners engaged through to the end.
And perhaps most usefully, Progressive discovered a new framework for rapid experimentation – a way to test hypotheses about tone, message, offer or delivery without waiting months for insights.
“It compressed the whole cycle,” England says.
Claritas is already expanding this model to other media, including generative video and email. Briggs sees a near-term future in which 20% of brands run fully AI-orchestrated, multichannel campaigns – personalized in real time, anchored to first-party data and optimized continuously.
But even he acknowledges there are limits. “Until the models are flawless, humans still need to review what goes out.”
England agrees. “AI doesn’t replace marketing,” she says. “It just changes it. And if you’re a marketer, that means learning how to use it – now.”
Advice for brands still watching from the sidelines?
“Don’t be intimidated,” says Briggs. “But do get involved. The gap between those who experiment now and those who wait is going to be very difficult to close later.”
England’s advice is equally blunt: “Don’t think AI is someone else’s job. It’s everyone’s job. And it’s moving fast.”
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Claritas
Claritas helps marketers Identify their best customers, Deliver campaigns to those customers across channels and Optimize and measure marketing performance.