Personalization Is Not Targeting

Maybe I’m losing my marketing mind.

The other day I posted on LinkedIn reminding people to write their ideas down, that when you’re staring at a blank page, those notes are a gift from your past self.

I stand by it, but did it really need to be published?

And, maybe I should be wondering what my past self was thinking with this one. Because “personalization is not targeting” feels as painfully obvious.

But, here we go, it’s rude to refuse a gift…

I had a bit of rant on the Rockstar CMO newsletter about pissing people off at scale prompted by how often I hear the term “it’s a numbers game”.

AI agents assemble.

Load up the Blastomatic2026.

Spray and pray.

But it’s OK. It’s personalized!

Our tireless boiler room of robots can scrape your website, LinkedIn posts, blog or podcasts and take the game from Hi {first name} to a highly personalized letter from your mother.

(Which is a terrible example, as my Mum has no idea what this shit is)

Our robot chums can string together a correspondence dripping with relevance and intimacy.

Which is lovely, well, usually creepy, but a waste of all of our time if I am not an influencer or buyer of the product on offer, or if it is of no bloody use to me.

If it’s not targeted.

In fact, when you have this faux intimacy sitting next to a poorly targeted offering, it’s even more jarring.

Targeting requires understanding that your offering isn’t for everyone, who your ideal customer is, the market size for this thing, how you can be useful to this member of the buying group, and which channel they are likely to be hanging out on.

Or don’t bother with all that dull shit.

Spray and pray, and let the recipients decide if it’s for them.

Let them do the work.

A 1% response rate. Splendid!

Just do more.

Good selling is about reducing the cognitive load for the buyer - personalization can do that, but without targeting, it’s just spam with good manners.