News Analysis
The Gist
- AI-driven personalization at scale: Contentful now integrates Ninetailed’s AI to offer hyper-personalized content with minimal latency.
- Marketers get a boost: The acquisition gives marketers the ability to test, optimize, and personalize content seamlessly, driving higher ROI.
- Competitive pressure rises: Contentful’s move challenges competitors to ramp up their AI-driven personalization solutions or risk falling behind.
Contentful's acquisition of Ninetailed last month represents a strategic consolidation in the content management and personalization market. By integrating Ninetailed's AI-driven personalization technology into its composable content platform, Contentful aims to address the growing demand for scalable personalization.
This move potentially strengthens Contentful's position against its competitors, many of whom have long-standing personalization solutions. However, it also presents integration challenges and may disrupt existing customer workflows.
As the content management industry increasingly gravitates towards AI-powered solutions, this acquisition could accelerate the trend, prompting competitors to enhance their own AI capabilities or pursue similar strategic partnerships.
Contentful CEO Karthik Rau told CMSWire that acquiring Ninetailed is part of Contentful's long-term vision to deliver AI-powered solutions to their customers.
"By combining Contentful’s leading composable content platform with Ninetailed's leading personalization, experimentation and insights platform, we are enabling marketers to seamlessly optimize their content and create highly personalized experiences at scale,” said Rau, who emphasized that the acquisition was designed to give marketers the ability to deliver higher ROI from existing investments in content and data.
Contentful and Ninetailed: Who Are They?
Contentful: API-First Composability
Contentful offers a composable content platform, known for its API-first architecture, which allows brands to create, manage and distribute digital content with agility. The platform’s composable nature enables businesses to integrate tools from other vendors into their digital ecosystems, allowing additional flexibility in content delivery.
Ninetailed: Personalization and Experimentation
Ninetailed, based in Berlin, is built around AI-driven content personalization and experimentation. Its technology allows businesses to adjust content, based on real-time user behavior. Ninetailed’s role in experimentation means businesses can run A/B tests and implement data-driven insights.
Contentful and Ninetailed: Existing Partnership
The two companies have collaborated before, aligning their visions to deliver integrated, personalized digital content. Contentful’s acquisition of Ninetailed is built around their shared goal of providing customers with scalable, AI-enhanced personalization. With Ninetailed built into Contentful's API-first, composable platform, company officials say the partnership provides businesses the ability to both scale their content operations and create highly personalized experiences.
Ninetailed will likely push Contentful further into the competitive market of personalized digital experiences. This reflects a broader industry trend, as companies look to differentiate themselves through smarter, data-driven content.
MACH Foundation at Play
Eric Feige, managing director at VShift, an enterprise-scale digital strategy, design and technology agency, told CMSWire that Contentful is a prominent MACH-native (microservices, API-first, cloud/SaaS, headless) composable content platform with a large, growing global client base. Feige said that Contentful competes with MACH-native composable content management platforms and traditional, so-called monolithic digital experience platforms.
"Contentful’s acquisition of Ninetailed fills a ‘natively integrated personalization capability’ gap within the MACH-native market space by not relying on 3rd party 'add-ons,'" said Feige, who is a CMSWire Contributor.
Ninetailed, he added, is an artificially intelligent composable personalization engine that has historically been available to Contentful clients within the Contentful marketplace as a 3rd party composable ‘add-on’ personalization tool.
Related Article: Contentful Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Ninetailed
Why Did Contentful Acquire Ninetailed?
Contentful’s acquisition of Ninetailed was driven by the goal of enhancing its AI-driven personalization capabilities to meet the growing demand for tailored digital experiences. Personalized content is critical today for driving customer engagement, satisfaction, and ultimately, revenue.
Chuck Gahun, principal analyst for content management and digital experience technology at Forrester Research, told CMSWire that according to Forrester’s research, personalization is the least valued capability that CMSes can successfully deliver today, yet also one that is highly desired in digital experiences by B2B and B2C brands and consumers.
“Contentful’s acquisition of Ninetailed is poised to accelerate ‘AI-driven personalization’ at a time when most brands are still struggling to deliver personalized experiences to consumers due to their tech stacks, content proliferation and customer data,” said Gahun, who added that this gets more complicated in B2B scenarios, where buyers prefer to stay anonymous across complex journeys, making personalization an even bigger challenge.
The acquisition of Ninetailed is strategically aligned with Contentful's long-term vision of enhancing its AI-powered offerings. By integrating Ninetailed’s capabilities in personalization, experimentation and insights with Contentful’s composable content platform, the company aims to empower marketers to enhance content performance and deliver highly personalized experiences at scale.
“Through this acquisition, Contentful’s customers will benefit from a fully integrated, AI-native personalization solution, paired with a pure headless CMS solution through smooth workflows, code-free experiment creation and connectivity to customer data,” said Gahun. “There is opportunity for gen-AI driven personalization to uplevel and impact B2B and B2C digital experiences — which is what Contentful is ultimately after through this acquisition.”
How Will Integration for Contentful-Ninetailed Work?
Ninetailed’s technology will be integrated into Contentful’s platform, combining both systems to enhance its AI-powered personalization capabilities. By incorporating Ninetailed’s tools, Contentful’s composable architecture will enable more flexible content delivery across multiple channels. This integration is expected to improve Contentful’s ability to offer real-time, data-driven personalization, allowing businesses to tailor content based on customer behavior and preferences. The move is aimed at strengthening Contentful’s position in a market where personalization is increasingly critical for engaging users.
Gahun said that the integration has already begun and will likely continue through most of 2024 and into early 2025. “Ninetailed’s capabilities will be absorbed into many facets of the Contentful CMS," he said.
Ninetailed’s AI-driven personalization capabilities provide ecommerce businesses with the tools to adjust product recommendations in real time, using customer behavior data. This could enhance customer targeting and influence purchasing decisions. In the financial sector, personalized content might be applied to offer tailored advice or products, potentially affecting customer engagement and retention. Media companies may also see value in using these tools to deliver customized content, such as personalized news feeds or video recommendations, which could impact user engagement and time spent on platforms.
A key advantage of this integration lies in edge delivery, which ensures personalized content is delivered with minimal latency, even for high-traffic websites or global audiences. This enhanced speed and efficiency help brands maintain optimal site performance while delivering tailored experiences.
For Contentful’s customers, this merger offers increased flexibility, particularly in industries such as retail, media, and finance, where adapting to changing customer behaviors is crucial.
Related Article: Navigating the Evolution: From CMS to DXP in the Digital Age
How Does Contentful Stack up in Competitive Market?
Officials hope the acquisition of Ninetailed strengthens Contentful’s position in the content management and personalization markets, particularly by enhancing its AI-driven, composable offerings. This move may place considerable pressure on competitors such as Adobe Experience Manager, Acquia, Sitecore and Optimizely, particularly those with less advanced AI capabilities or fragmented personalization solutions.
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Among the headless CMS platforms, Gahun noted that Ninetailed was one of the few personalization tools available for systems like Contentful, Contentstack, Storyblok and Hygraph.
“In recent weeks, Contentstack announced their Personalize Product that will deliver personalized experiences on the edge — they are building native personalization capabilities as well,” said Gahun. “Contentful has the opportunity to gain competitive advantage against pure headless CMSes by acquiring Ninetailed, largely due to their time in market and pre-existing integrations with Contentful. It’s important to note that hybrid CMS leaders like Adobe and Optimizely have had their own solutions for personalization in market for a long time.”
Can Single Vendor Deliver Composable Content and Personalization?
Ninetailed and Contentful both feature MACH architecture, Gahun added, and they have many mutual clients where their already integrated technologies "seamlessly deliver personalized content experiences.” Gahun said that his firm expects to see advanced use cases become the norm in 2025; e.g. where the monolith resident content can be accessed via GraphQL-based integrations.
“Contentful’s base of Ninetailed customers are poised to benefit the most, as Ninetailed capabilities will become native in the platform, also reducing one additional contract that needs to be managed through procurement teams,” said Gahun.
The integration of Ninetailed’s technology may lead competitors to pursue similar acquisitions or significantly ramp up their AI investments to match Contentful's capabilities.
“This is a catch-up capability for clients seeking both composable content management alongside composable personalization from a single vendor,” said Feige. “That said, for organizations ‘locked-in’ to monolithic digital experience platforms, Ninetailed within Contentful could be a much less expensive, easier-to-implement standout."
