What you need to know:

• Personalisation at scale powered by templated marketing automation platforms risks going too narrow, per Archibald Williams white paper.
• Similarly, streaming and social platforms are limiting content and experience discovery, fuelling confirmation bias.
• Agency recommends brands and platforms take a leaf out of TikTok's book and better blend automation and personalisation with "humanised experiences at scale".

Marketing automation and machine-driven personalisation is falling flat and risks turning off audiences and crimping growth, according to Archibald Williams. The creative agency suggests “humanised experiences at scale” would drive better results and broader discovery than personalised experiences at scale.

The firm commissioned Nielsen to ask people for views on social media and email marketing. The findings appear to support the creative agency’s view.

Some 13 per cent of the 1000-strong sample said social media ads were inspiring and 29 per cent said they were boring. Email marketing drew similar results: 13 per cent said EDMs were uninspiring, 48 per cent are completely dismissing them and 53 per cent said they want more inspiring content from brand emails.

Part of the problem, per the firm, is that most marketers are making use of the same data and taking a similar targeting approach, and most are using the same big marketing cloud and CRM platforms.

The whitepaper suggests recommendation engines – citing Spotify and Netflix – are also limiting content discovery, as are social platforms, though cites TikTok as the outlier because the platform is also committed to serving up content outside user interests.

The firm urges brands to take a similar approach – by mixing up automated and templated comms with “human-led and human-centred creative”.

MD Kiran Kaur underlined that marketing automation “is working … where people have signed up to receive brand communications, and it is offering efficiency and effectiveness – grocery lists of things I regularly buy, for example, I will probably click on a few of them.

“But over the last couple of years that is the only thing [automation] has been doing for us. Humans need new experiences to grow and that is what we are losing. We need to move beyond rational offers and identify the moments where people are willing to slow down and discover something new.”

Different triggers

Kaur said few brands and platforms are doing discovery well. She suggested intensifying streaming competition locally and globally could turn on which platforms can adjust how they serve their recommendations, taking a leaf from TikTok’s playbook.

Kaur thinks marketers could better harness existing CRM and algorithmic recommendations by “taking a different approach to segmentation and adding different triggers. One of the biggest flaws in how we use CRM systems is that we often only minimally capture a few pieces of data – last purchase, how long they have been a customer etc. If we can add more interest points and make the system work better for us, we can improve that experience”.

“There is no one set formula – and the opportunity is different for each industry. But the opportunity exists to look outside the way we are doing things now,” said Kaur. “Don’t throw out the system, make it work better for us, because we have lost that part of the conversation. We need to create humanised experiences at scale.”