Anti-personalization: The best ad for one, is the best ad for all

Samuel Brealey and Michael Taylor

In this article the authors highlight how a focus on data and martech may be undermining long-standing advertising effectiveness principles.

Over the last ten years, marketers and advertisers have become obsessed with the idea that more data is better; that never-ending complexity and one-to-one communication is the future, negating not only history itself but also the evidence which is piled high against the idea of ideas such as ‘personalisation at scale’.

Part of the issue lies in a lack of fundamentals; you don’t know what you don’t know. No marketer wants to be the first one to hold up their hands and say, “we don’t need more data, let’s get back to basics”. Focusing on fundamentals is what actually works,...

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