Escape the media doom loop and reclaim the human experience
Opinion
When advertising experiences dehumanise, the data we get back from them is equally shallow. So we optimise for the wrong things and stop connecting with people.
It must have been some time in the early noughties when the industry started talking about the impending paradigm shift in media. It all sounded pretty dreamy. Greater relevance. Seamless personalisation. A deeper connection between people and brands.
We imagined media that would understand us, anticipate our needs and serve us more meaningfully.
So what happened?
Instead of a utopia of personalised relevance, we’ve ended up with media experiences that feel more invasive than insightful. People are tuning out more than they’re leaning in.
And the data tells us they’re right to. A recent Harris Poll found that 81% of people feel personalisation is more invasive than helpful, while 79% said digital advertising is more of a concern than their personal safety on these platforms.
Havas’ own Meaningful Brands study shows that 73% want more regulation of AI on media platforms.
We’ve created a media ecosystem optimised for efficiency, not empathy. One that delivers scale and speed, but not connection on any human level.
Emotional uncanny valley
We’ve entered what you might call an emotional uncanny valley. Ad experiences that look personal but feel cold and soulless. They know your behaviours, your browsing habits and your purchase history. But they don’t understand your mindset, your beliefs, your mood. It’s relevance without resonance. And people know it.
It isn’t helped by the dehumanising language we use in our industry. People have become “digital IDs”, “eyeballs”, “leads” to be monetised. We talk about “owning the customer”. When our language becomes mechanical, the advertising experiences follow.
This all feeds into what we call the “media doom loop”. By that I mean when advertising experiences dehumanise, the data we get back from them is equally shallow. We stop learning anything real about people. The algorithms learn nothing human. So we chase easier metrics. Optimise for what we can see. And, in doing so, we lose sight of what matters.
Goodhart’s law says that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The more we optimise for shallow interactions, the less we connect. The more we personalise for the next predicted action, the more people feel like they’re being stalked, not understood.
And it’s beginning to show. Trust in brands in the UK is falling. Our UK Meaningful Brands study shows a 16% drop in brand trust and a 31% fall in the belief that brands improve our quality of life in the last five years.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The good news is the tools aren’t broken. They’re just being used in service of the wrong goals. We don’t need less data or less tech. We need a better intention behind how we use them.
Listen to Wieden and Levitt
How do we get out of the loop?
We start by planning for what matters and measurement will follow. Not just impressions or conversions, but the human impact of our media. Every media plan should be able to answer the question: what human experience are we attempting to shape with each brand interaction?
We also need a reframe of personalisation, from targeting behaviour to understanding the wider human context. How well do we understand the real-life context, the wider emotional or social moment, to think beyond the next immediate action?
And we have to reclaim creativity in media as the human glue that holds everything together. Empathy turns relevance into resonance. As Dan Wieden famously said: “Just move me, dude.” How can you best leverage your innate human ingenuity to beat the algorithms your peers are stuck in?
This clearly isn’t a new idea. In fact, it goes right back to the roots of marketing as Theodore Levitt reminds us: “Marketing is an integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.”
That’s always been the job. We just lost sight of it in the race for the next shiny thing.
The human behind the data
This isn’t a nostalgic plea for a simpler time. It’s a call for more thoughtful progress.
The brands that will win in the next era won’t just be the most automated or efficient. They’ll be the ones that remember the human behind the data. The ones who use tech to make people feel more seen, not more stalked.
Take Ocado, which is one of the top-ranking human experience brands from the Meaningful Brands research. Ocado is one of the UK’s most technologically advanced retailers, but you’d barely notice — and that’s completely intentional. As Laura Harricks, its chief customer officer, recently discussed with us, the whole brand experience is designed to be in service of deeply human needs: certainty, control and trust.
To escape the doom loop, we don’t need to put down tools or invent new ones. We just need a new intention. One rooted in empathy, not just efficiency. The future can be dreamy once again if we reclaim the human experience.
Chetan Murthy is executive strategy director at Havas Media Network