Case Study: The Motley Fool lowers cost per acquisition and optimizes ad spend with Segment Personas

How The Motley Fool uses Personas to optimize return on ad spend

The Motley Fool, a financial media company that offers free content and premium subscription services, needed to improve paid acquisition for its premium memberships. Their existing data platform couldn’t reliably distinguish prospects from current paying members, forcing the BI team to manually pull and upload static member lists to ad platforms—an inefficient process that led to outdated targeting and wasted ad spend.

By implementing Segment Personas, marketing teams could build and activate real‑time audiences without BI as a bottleneck, suppress active members from acquisition campaigns, and share first‑party data with tools like Chameleon to personalize onboarding and upsell. The result was democratized data, automated processes, lower cost per acquisition, improved member personalization and retention, and a rapid return on investment.

The Motley Fool

Nate Wallingsford

Head of US Marketing Operations and Optimization