This Time It’s Personal
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men, women and families.”
So said Margaret Thatcher in 1998, unwittingly presaging the explosion in personalisation that has characterised the last twenty years in marketing generally and advertising specifically.
Today’s big data, cloud-powered, nano-pixelated world thrives on the ability to personalise marketing messages to an individual level. Add the metaverse and the burgeoning power of AI and automation and the marketing nirvana of an audience of one is now tantalisingly obtainable.
And consumers seem to like it, up to a point. Some 71% welcome ads tailored to their interests, and 87% believe personalised advertising means genuinely unique content.* But while 44% of people would provide name, address, email or product preferences, only 29% would engage with ads actually showing such personal information. There’s a subtlety expected of this Faustian pact.
So far, all good. But do we risk missing the communal experiences great advertising can deliver, where a campaign takes on a life far beyond its creators’ intentions?
History is rich with advertising like “Have a break, have a KitKat”, that live long after the ad campaigns end. Budweiser’s 1999 “Wassup” became a monster trope that swept the world. And “Should have gone to Specsavers” retains popular currency in the UK for whenever anyone experiences a vision-related pratfall.
Take the recent Super Bowl XLVII advertising. 51 new executions, featuring everyone from Alicia Silverstone’s re-animated Cher from Clueless to Sylvester Stallone rock-climbing his own nose, at a cost of $7m per 30 seconds, excluding hefty production costs. The LVII numbers are still being tallied but 2022’s event raked in over $578m# in just one evening.
Clearly these brands believe such shared cultural moments build bonds with consumers, but also between them, assuming the brand shepherds its property into common usage with a light touch. And that light touch is important. Try too hard to hit that sweet spot of mass fondness and you can stumble, perhaps a reason why John Lewis, doyenne of the Christmas ad, just changed its agency?
Yet virality remains the goal of many marketers, amplifying awareness, extending reach, deepening engagement and building affection with mass audiences simultaneously. And it can be done.
First, the campaign creative needs to be big enough to accommodate the scope of personalisation. You can’t run 65 million different campaigns: any personalisation needs to be a variation on the theme. Next, personalisation means a 1 to 65 million dialogue map. Much of our focus is on the 65 million side, defining and delineating them, fine-tuning data to drive precise media and messaging.
But on the other side is the brand. Whatever personalisation your brand deploys needs to be authentic: your tone of voice, your values, your purpose. You can tweak it for individual preferences up to a point, but lose yourself in the quest to curry favour with your target consumer and you’ll fail before you start.
What you want those 65 million individuals to feel and do should be the unifying goal, and personalisation merely the method of achieving it. So, one consumer receives a message about price, another efficacy, another a brand purpose story and so on. As long as the creative idea can embrace these mechanics, and your tonality remains consistent, you can craft a campaign with mass appeal that delivers personalised efficacy, whilst remaining distinctly you.
Which brings me to two final observations.
First, the buzz great campaigns enjoy is actually more, not less, possible today thanks to social media and our hyper-connected society. The very thing that threatens those communal experiences also, ironically, enables them: watch a new meme catch fire and spread at the speed of Twitter
Second, the complexity and sophistication of crafting such campaigns, whilst keeping them strategically authentic, requires real depth of skill and expertise. Luckily, today’s best agencies have the capabilities to harness, manipulate and utilise data in real time, to drive an almost infinite matrix of media and messaging, whilst simultaneously optimising for what’s working and what’s not. We recently acquired global data science and digital analytics consultancy Mezzo Labs for precisely this reason, and launched new Growth Media agency Turbine to supercharge our capabilities in this space.
Consequently, agencies are enjoying deeper, longer relationships with clients: more valued strategic partners than mere suppliers.
In summary, you can achieve the scale and impact of great campaigns of the past, even in a hyper-personalised world. But you need to pay as much attention to your side of the conversation, staying true to who and what you are, as you do to the millions in the target audience.
That way, they should ideally all receive a positive impression of your brand, in their own personalised way. Then share it with their 500 best friends.
*Adlucent, Survey of 1000 consumers, 2016
