🤔 What's the Point of Personalisation?
🎬 An advertising special.
I know a guy who moved out of his London neighbourhood because the owner of the local sandwich shop started to recognise him. He’d go in for his lunchtime sarnie and they’d say to him, “The same as always?”, and our protagonist would recoil.
In the end, he left London. Because people recognised him in sandwich shops everywhere? We can’t say for sure.
But almost certainly not. His visa was up, so maybe it was that.
Still, he serves as a stark point of contrast to the prevailing narrative in marketing today:
And:
When I say “in marketing today”, I mean “in marketing today.” The examples I’m sharing were literally published on July 13.
Then we get to this little quandary:
What I’m saying is, this self-serving story we perpetuate in marketing is heading for a clash with reality. We simply won’t have access to the data we needed to fuel our crass version of personalisation any more.
Now, I’m not actually here to bang the same drum as always. I’ve already covered the marketers and consumers are from different planets angle enough.
Instead, I’d like to propose that this “post-cookie world”, in which it will be much more difficult to track customers as they browse the web, should be a moment of creative liberation for digital marketers.
Digital ads are truly offensive to the eye and the mind, but the backslapping measurement the tech companies use makes it look like we’re getting good results.
They’re always going on about personalisation too, when really they mean this:
I believe that the Sisyphean, self-imposed demand for “greater personalisation” is a contributing factor in the erosion of ad quality. We can buy millions of ad spots for a wallet-friendly price, and we can keep showing our targeted audience that one product they looked at once. So that’s what we do.
Would this ad be any more effective if instead, it said “Think Different, Jim-Bob”?
Would this Prada ad be more likely to win your custom if it had a picture of you in it?
I’ll recreate the pose one day and we can compare conversion rates.
At the heart of this jocularity, there is a point hidden somewhere.
Distance makes advertising work, not proximity.
Oh sure, that varies by industry, it varies by customer need. However, advertising works on the imagination - if it is to work at all.
It projects an imagined future state in which we can attain some of the allure contained in the image, if only we buy the object they are selling. And it can never deliver fully on that promise, which is precisely what keeps us buying more. An appetite that feeds only on itself.
Whether I am imagining myself as the suave, island-hopping Mediterranean man in a linen shirt, or just “man-who-no-longer-has-a-broken-oven” when I look at a repairs ad, there is a gap between Current Me and Future Me that the ad promises to bridge.
Thoughtful personalisation can be a wonderful thing, too. My friend from today’s introduction is an extreme example of one school of thought, but I imagine most of us would subscribe to another. It is pleasant to feel appreciated by businesses that we enjoy or admire, from the sandwich shop to the linen shirt emporium.
However, we must first establish that rapport. Otherwise, it is simply creepy.
If I walked into my local sandwich shop for the first time ever and they set off a confetti cannon, then the owner came out exclaiming, “Ah, Mr Boyd! At last, you are here! Try the brie baguette, we sent away specially to get your favourite - super creamy! This day shall forevermore be known as Clark Day!”, I’d be honoured but a little unsettled too.
The studies1 find that a similar thing happens online. Those “personalised” retargeting ads that hound people can work, but not like you think.
The ad on the left here is a classic “brand” ad. It’s not specific to any resort, but sells the idea that Sandals gives you a peaceful, tropical getaway.
The one on the right is a dynamic ad that is triggered by the user’s browsing on the Sandals website. In this instance, they looked at this specific resort and they are now condemned to see it everywhere until they enter the gates of Hades:
The researchers found that the one on the left is more effective in >80% of use cases.
The one on the right works really well, but only when the browser is very close to making a purchase. At that point, they are close-to-convinced and that extra reminder brings them back.
In all other occasions, the non-dynamic one wins.
Why? Well, a few reasons, but the key one is that the one on the right narrows the consumer’s horizons.
The one on the left lets their imagination join the dots. It doesn’t presume to “know” the consumer just because they looked at one thing one time.
And most importantly for the brand, it keeps them top of mind. The researchers found that these ads had a significant defensive role to play, by dissuading the user from browsing on rival vacation sites.
I can’t put it any better than good old John Berger:
The more convincingly advertising conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him.
The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be.
“Envious of himself as he might be.” That is still a pivotal insight in advertising, yet it is one we are ready to forget online.
Personalisation sounds like an exalted pursuit, as though we were providing each customer with their own pixellated butler to handle their needs. Instead, they maybe see their name in an email headline. It takes a lot of effort to deliver so little.
The new age of digital advertising will not even permit us to go on such a forlorn pursuit, anyway. Instead of continuing to try and give people a limiting form of tailored service they never asked for, we’d be better served by going back to big ideas that put the brand at a tantalising distance from the user, before bringing them closer over time.
Those campaigns will win online, like they always have offline.
The same as always.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/88160