If you’ve been running Braze for a while, you probably know that a feature retirement is rarely as simple as it sounds. The feature may disappear, but the campaigns built around it don’t. Neither do the customer journeys, audiences, creative, reporting, and internal processes that grew around it. That’s what makes the retirement of Braze News Feed interesting for Marketing Ops. Yes, there’s a technical migration involved. But there’s also a bigger question worth asking: If News Feed goes away, what should those customer experiences look like now?

That is a much more useful question than simply asking what replaces it.

News Feed wasn’t just a piece of technology

Different teams have used News Feed in different ways. For some, it was a place to showcase offers. For others, it was used for product announcements, account updates, loyalty content, or messages customers might want to come back to later. The channel was the same. The reasons for using it weren’t.

That’s why moving everything into a new format isn’t necessarily the right answer. Before deciding what comes next, Marketing Ops should understand what each experience was actually trying to achieve.

Content Cards or Banners? It depends on the experience

For many teams, the decision will come down to Content Cards or Banners. But neither should automatically be treated as a direct replacement for News Feed. Think about what you want the customer to do.

If the customer experience is…	Consider	Why
A collection of offers, updates, or content customers can browse	Content Cards	Gives customers a persistent place to discover and revisit content
Personalized content customers may want to return to	Content Cards	Suits a feed or inbox-style experience
A promotion tied to a specific product or page	Banners	Keeps the message where it’s most relevant
An upgrade or cross-sell opportunity	Banners	Puts the message close to the action you’re trying to influence
Something that needs immediate attention	Another Braze channel	A persistent placement may not be the right fit

A simple way to look at it: Content Cards are useful when the customer needs somewhere to browse. Banners are useful when the message needs to be part of the experience they’re already having. And sometimes, neither is the right answer. That’s okay. The point of a migration isn’t to find a new home for every old campaign. It’s to make sure the right customer experience still exists.

Start with the customer journey, not the SDK

This is where Marketing Ops should get involved early. Before Engineering starts replacing legacy implementation, build a picture of what’s actually running. Look at the News Feed campaigns, the Canvases or campaigns that orchestrate them, the audiences behind them, the content being served, and the action each experience is supposed to drive.

Then ask a few basic questions:

• Is this experience still needed?
• Who is it for?
• What is it supposed to achieve?
• Does the customer need to come back to it?
• Would it make more sense in context on another screen?
• How will we measure whether it works?

Those questions can lead to some surprisingly useful discoveries. You may find campaigns that still perform well and absolutely need to be rebuilt. You may also find experiences that haven’t had a clear owner in years. Don’t automatically migrate the second group.

A migration is a good excuse to clean things up

Most large Braze instances have some amount of accumulated baggage. That’s not a criticism; it’s what happens when a platform supports years of campaigns, teams, launches, and changing business priorities. But a forced migration gives you a reason to revisit it. Instead of asking, “How do we move every News Feed campaign?” ask: “Which of these experiences are worth carrying forward?”

A simple Keep / Rebuild / Redesign / Retire review can help. If something still has a strong business purpose, rebuild it. If the customer need has changed, redesign it. And if nobody can explain why it still exists, don’t spend engineering and Marketing Ops time preserving it just because it was there before.

Marketing Ops and Engineering need to work together

Marketing Ops doesn’t need to own the SDK work. But it shouldn’t sit on the sidelines either. Engineering will naturally focus on the technical questions: SDK versions, legacy News Feed references, application components, analytics, and platform dependencies. Marketing Ops brings a different, and equally important, set of questions:

Which experiences matter? Who should see them? What should they do? And how will we know they worked?

Getting those answers clear before implementation saves a lot of back-and-forth later. The best migrations aren’t really two projects. They’re one project with technical and marketing workstreams running together.

What happens to measurement in Braze?

A change in placement can change customer behavior. If a News Feed experience becomes a Banner, for example, customers may encounter it differently. That can affect engagement, clicks, conversions, and even how you interpret performance. Before launching the replacement, revisit the measurement behind the experience.

At a minimum, make sure you can still answer:

• Are we reaching the intended audience?
• Are customers seeing and interacting with the content?
• Are CTAs and deep links working?
• Are conversion events still being captured?
• Can we tell whether the new experience is performing better or worse?

A migration isn’t complete just because the new message appears on screen. You need to know whether it still achieves the outcome you cared about in the first place.

Look beyond News Feed

There’s another reason this change is worth paying attention to. Braze will continue to evolve. Features will change, SDKs will be updated, and new ways of engaging customers will emerge. The enterprises that handle these changes well aren’t necessarily the ones that move fastest. They’re the ones that know what’s running in their Braze environment, why it exists, who owns it, and how it contributes to the customer journey.

That means a News Feed migration is a good time to look for things like:

• Campaigns and segments that are no longer used
• Canvases without clear ownership
• Duplicate or overlapping journeys
• Personalization logic that needs a review
• Reporting that doesn’t clearly connect engagement to outcomes

You don’t have to fix everything at once. But you can avoid carrying unnecessary complexity into the next version of your Braze program.

Mavlers perspective

At Mavlers, we see changes like this as a chance to take a step back. Yes, there may be SDK and implementation work involved. But the bigger job is making sure the customer experiences built around that technology still make sense.

That means bringing Marketing Ops, CRM, Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Creative into the conversation where they need to be, and making a clear decision about what should stay, what should change, and what no longer needs to exist. Sometimes the answer will be Content Cards. Sometimes it’ll be Banners. Sometimes the best decision will be to retire the experience completely. That’s the point. The goal isn’t to recreate News Feed. It’s to create the right experience for the customer today.

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If News Feed is still part of your Braze setup, don’t start by asking: “What do we replace it with?” Start by asking: “Why did we build this experience in the first place, and is that still what our customers need?” Once you have that answer, the technology decision becomes much easier.