This article was based on the interview with From Optimizely Opticon 2026: Federated Hermes’ Melissa Ryan on what a replatform exposes in your content by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
A large-scale website replatform is the organizational equivalent of a deep-sea dive. The pressure is immense, the environment is unfamiliar, and every minor flaw in your equipment—or in this case, your processes—is magnified. As many of us know all too well, the stated goal might be a technical upgrade or a brand refresh, but the true journey is one of organizational archaeology. You unearth long-forgotten content, rediscover convoluted approval workflows, and force conversations about ownership that have been quietly avoided for years. It’s a stress test for your content strategy, your stakeholder management, and your team’s collective sanity.
This is precisely why these projects, while challenging, are so valuable. They are a forced moment of clarity. They compel us to ask not just “Can we build this?” but “Should we?” and “Who will maintain it?” The recent consolidation of over twenty websites into a single global platform by Federated Hermes, following a significant rebranding, offers a masterclass in navigating this complexity. In a conversation with Melissa Ryan, their Senior Digital Marketing Manager, she peeled back the curtain on the realities of such an undertaking in the highly regulated world of financial services. Her experience underscores a critical truth: the success of a new platform has less to do with the technology itself and more to do with the operational rigor and strategic foresight it demands from the organization.
The Subjectivity Showdown: Navigating Design by Committee
Every marketing leader has a story about a project that nearly got derailed in the subjective landscape of design. When you’re undertaking a complete brand and website overhaul, this risk multiplies. The sheer number of stakeholders, each with their own aesthetic preferences and interpretations of the brand, can quickly lead to a stalemate or a design-by-committee compromise that pleases no one. For Federated Hermes, which was merging two distinct visual identities and consolidating a sprawling digital footprint, getting alignment on the new look and feel was one of the most significant early hurdles.
Ryan and her team wisely sidestepped the trap of large, open-ended feedback sessions, which often devolve into a cacophony of conflicting opinions. Instead, they opted for a more structured, iterative approach.
“I would say one of the most challenging pieces was getting agreement on the design and content layout. So design can be a very subjective thing when it comes to colors, accents, and everyone has an opinion and has a favorite design. And a lot of times you’ll go and push a design firm to go a little further, and then you’re like, ‘Mm, that might be too far.’ … We would hold small internal workshops to work through the pieces that were collectively… To figure out what was collectively working and what was not, and then that feedback enabled the agency to come back with a design that reflected our favorite elements.”
This is a lesson in masterful stakeholder management. By using smaller, focused workshops, they transformed a potential bottleneck into a collaborative process. The goal wasn’t to find a design that everyone “loved,” but to identify the core elements that were “collectively working.” This reframing is subtle but powerful. It shifts the conversation from personal taste to functional effectiveness and brand alignment. It acknowledges that while a design that pushes boundaries might be exciting, in a more conservative industry, the “sweet spot” is often a more measured and intentional place. The process itself builds consensus, ensuring that by the time the final design is presented, the key decision-makers have already had a hand in shaping it.
Content’s Mid-Life Crisis: From Legacy Bloat to Future-Ready Architecture
A replatform doesn’t just give you a new content management system; it forces a full-scale audit of your entire content library. It’s the perfect opportunity to retire outdated market commentary, consolidate redundant pages, and impose a much-needed governance structure. For an asset manager like Federated Hermes, where content is not only time-sensitive but also subject to strict compliance, this process is non-negotiable. The launch of the new site became the catalyst for establishing a more disciplined approach to the entire content lifecycle.
Beyond just setting guidelines and deadlines, however, the team made a forward-looking decision that will pay dividends for years to come. They re-architected their content’s underlying data structure with the next wave of technology in mind.
“We’ve also enhanced our meta tagging to be LLM and personalization friendly, allowing us to serve our content to the right audience where they are.”
This is where the strategic thinking separates a simple migration from a true digital transformation. It’s one thing to tag content for today’s SEO and on-site search. It’s another entirely to structure your metadata with Large Language Models (LLMs) and future personalization engines in mind. This means thinking about content not as a monolithic block of text on a page, but as a collection of structured, machine-readable attributes. By creating a rich taxonomy that describes the topic, audience suitability, timeliness, and regulatory context of each piece of content, they are building the foundation for more sophisticated applications. This “LLM-friendly” approach will enable them to power AI-driven search, generate automated summaries, and, most importantly, fuel personalization engines that can assemble relevant content components for specific users on the fly. It’s a prime example of preparing your house for the smart technology that’s coming, rather than having to rewire everything later.
The Pragmatic Path to Personalization in a Regulated World
The promise of personalization is alluring, but in industries like financial services, the path is fraught with regulatory peril. The need to ensure that specific content is only seen by attested, role-appropriate audiences means that the free-flowing, behaviorally-driven personalization common in e-commerce is often a non-starter. Federated Hermes faces this reality head-on. Their site requires users to self-identify upfront, a necessary gate to ensure compliance. This might seem like a barrier to a modern customer experience, but it’s a non-negotiable constraint.
Instead of fighting this reality, Ryan’s team has embraced a pragmatic “crawl, walk, run” methodology. They are building the technical infrastructure for personalization within the platform now, even if they can’t fully leverage it on day one.
“During the implementation, we established additional bones within the system that will allow us to begin to personalize specific sections as we collect data. And then down the line, our plan is to build out those personalized sections and then leverage these areas for experimentation and pass this information along to build out customer journeys, so sort of a crawl, walk, run approach.”
This strategy is both realistic and astute. It acknowledges current limitations while preparing for future possibilities. By building the “bones” of personalization—the data models, the audience segments, the content tagging we discussed earlier—they ensure that as they gather more compliant data and as regulations evolve, they can activate these capabilities without another massive technical lift. The initial focus is on experimentation in controlled sections of the site, allowing them to test hypotheses, measure impact, and build a business case for broader implementation. For marketing leaders in any complex B2B environment, this approach offers a blueprint for making progress on personalization without taking on undue risk. It’s about building the capabilities in parallel with the strategy, so when the time is right, you’re ready to move.
The Platform as a Catalyst
The launch of a new website is not the finish line; it’s the starting pistol for a new era of marketing operations. As Melissa Ryan’s experience at Federated Hermes demonstrates, the true value of the undertaking is not the shiny new front-end, but the organizational rigor and strategic clarity forged in the process. The project forced essential conversations about design governance, created a mandate for a modern and future-proof content architecture, and laid a pragmatic foundation for a sophisticated, long-term personalization strategy. These are not technical outcomes; they are business transformations catalyzed by a technology project.
Looking ahead, this foundational work is what will enable Federated Hermes to engage with the next frontier: the thoughtful application of AI. The conversation in the market is rapidly shifting from the novelty of AI use cases to the economics and strategy of its implementation. As Ryan notes, the future will be about “how to use, get the best use of AI for your money,” evaluating the trade-offs between human capital and agent capital, and optimizing for efficiency. By having already established LLM-friendly content and the structural “bones” for personalization, her team is perfectly positioned not just to participate in that conversation, but to lead it within their industry. The hard work of a replatform, it turns out, is the essential prerequisite for what comes next.