“Blasphemy!” you say.
At minimum, the way personalization is being executed and discussed is ripe for disruption. What marketers think is improving their brand’s relevance could be having the opposite effect. Hyper-targeting a consumer doesn’t make a brand relevant. It just makes spam more specific. If businesses are struggling, and consumers are unhappy, who’s actually winning?
Of course, brands that make an authentic effort to personalize their product and CX to meet a customer’s needs win our undying gratitude. Uniqlo gets it. My favourite Starbucks on Queen Street in Toronto where Dawn has been working for the past 10 years gets it (Tall, extra hot, oat latte not too foamy). Levis has done it for years. This is not what is often called personalization, however. Serving up ads for down pillows (about 5 minutes after I ordered down pillows) is what passes for personalization these days.
Are you feelin’ that customized vibe from advertisers? Despite their best efforts, I’m not. Case in point. My weight hasn’t changed in 26 years but apparently Wegovy thinks I need to lighten-up a bit. 6 times this week alone. I’m getting a complex.
And I don’t even know what my “security posture” is, much less why I need Akamai. And thank you for the offer, Globe and Mail, but I’ve been a subscriber for 15 years and this offer isn’t valid for me. I checked.
Even when a company has ample first party data, the result is not always better. The bank with which I’ve held two mortgages, multiple savings and chequing accounts, insurance and credit cards since 1990 thinks I’m in the Old-straight-white-couple-Single-middle-aged-white woman-Black-young-professional-New-Canadian-from-the-Philippines target profile. That’s not even macro-targeting.
Yet the juggernaut of personalized digital spend seems to know no bounds. 77% of Alphabet’s $307 Billion in revenue comes from search and digital ads. 98% of Meta’s $161 billion (+22% in 2024 VYA) came from its ad sales. North American digital ad spending was up 12% last year and now accounts for +75% of total media investment.
With this “deep personalization,” business is booming and consumers feel incredible love, right? Hmmm. 2024 GDP growth in Canada (+1.5%) wasn’t exactly blazing. And Kantar found that in 2024 only 31% of consumers find ads on social capture their attention, down 12 points versus prior year. A healthy percent of consumers (62%) don’t trust digital ads – a stat that hasn’t improved much in all the years Nielsen has been tracking this sentiment. Not a great case for building relevance.
We know a blend of performance and equity advertising improves overall sales impact of media (see WARC’s Multiplier Effect study), but the current approach is not resonating. The paradox is that for many, too much personalization gives them the ick while at the same time they find ads not personally relevant enough. With business stagnating and consumers disengaging, it feels like the only ones benefiting here are the mega platforms.
I read Leo’s 2025 HumanKind study and attended their event with great interest. Canadians, particularly the younger cohort are already striving to reduce their social media usage. Likely the first thing they’ll avoid is branded content. This study found a paltry 13% of people trust that brands and companies have their best interests at heart. Why would they engage in digital ads?
Perhaps we’re trying too hard – and not hard enough. What if instead we strive to say something generally interesting about the brand? Or have a brave point of view? Or an idea that people want to talk about? And then show up in surprising ways – heaven forbid – on broader or local media. Isn’t that a more sustainable way of driving differentiation and relevance (two scores that are in decline across brands in North America according to WPP’s Brand Asset Valuator)?
Besides, if all marketers use platforms’ algorithms in similar ways with content of similar format, is there any doubt why consumers are disengaging? Marketers might even take some of the millions going into the ad tech stack (and Google’s pocket) and plow it back into product and service innovation.
Here are a few brands using a simple, broadly relevant insight. Had to go back a bit – which tells you something:
IKEA
ORANGE
SNICKERS
Just because we can precisely target doesn’t mean we should. I’ll take a brand that’s generally relevant and interesting over one trying to market-time my pillow purchases any day.
Arthur Fleischmann
Arthur is an Executive Advisor at Listenmore where he applies his deep expertise in advertising agency leadership to help clients make informed decisions about their existing and prospective agency partnerships.