How personalised advertising can become problematic advertising

Personalisation is defined as “tailoring a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals”.

In advertising, personalisation is tailoring and delivering a bespoke message to a user, and this is technically done through applying specific data points into the process. A common example of personalised advertising is the inclusion of a specific product in an ad to users that have shown an interest in it historically. 

The level of personalisation that can be achieved in advertising is driven by how well advertisers know users or, as some might describe it, how much data advertisers can access on users.  

Where personalised advertising becomes problematic 

Advertisers don’t need to know everything about the users they are addressing and not all advertising needs to be personalised.

There’s a danger that advertisers are letting micro-targeting inform their messaging while ignoring the importance of the brands points of differentiation. 

Serving a generic, boring ad to a user because Facebook or Google told you that they were interested in a product misses the point of marketing. I’ve seen countless ads in the last week alone that gave me zero reasons to buy from the brand.

Being one of 50 advertisers targeting an audience segment simply puts your product on the store shelf, it doesn’t get it bought.  

Getting personalised advertising right  

Personalised advertising is a great way to deliver an impactful, specific message to a known user when used at the right time.  

In practice, getting it right involves using the meaningful signals that users have given to the brand directly, such as engagement with their websites, apps and media or by leveraging relevant third-party data where a brand may have access to minimal signals themselves.

For example, the Amazon DSP can do this very well for retailers who are new to marketing or with lower budgets.  

Once you understand the signals at your disposal, it’s then about aligning these signals with tailored messaging that reinforces your brands point of difference. 

Keeping brand differentiation at the heart of personalisation ensures your advertising is tailored and not just targeted. When using third-party data in particular, your brand is one of several using the same signals so your creative becomes even more important. 

There are many possible ways to make this work in practice, sometimes involving additional technology, sometimes through better ways of working.

However, for greater marketing success in a cookie-redacted world, creative done well might be able to make up for the short-fall in targeting accuracy.