I lived most of my adult life outside of the US and only moved here 10 years ago, not exactly the stereotypical FOB, but I’d still call myself an outsider.
For many of us outsiders, the level of personalization and customization that’s available to you as a customer in the US is just bonkers. No matter the product or the category there’s always the notion of “How do you want it?” A great question when it’s about your latte at a hipster coffee shop or customized sneakers… but it becomes haunting when it’s about our reality!
Personalization in marketing started as a small, thoughtful nudge that makes us feel seen. But as personalization evolved—moving from coffee orders to our social feeds and algorithmically tailored realities—the charm wore off. What once felt special now feels isolating, invasive, and, at times, outright creepy.
Here’s the problem, personalization went from being a feature to becoming a systemic bug in our digital lives. In a hyper-individualistic culture obsessed with “the self”, the millennial mantra of “You do you” found itself in algorithms shaped by our smallest gestures. Spotify mastered crafting accurate playlists, Netflix recommended movies tailored to our tastes, and Amazon suggested products before we even realized we wanted them. It was delightful until it wasn’t.
Instead of connecting us to what we love, today we’re boxed into tiny bubbles. Social feeds that were once chronological became nonlinear mazes, completely destroying our sense of time in our digital lives - mixing yesterday’s news with moments from five years ago - or events that never happened at all. I saw a TikTok in late December quoting a New Yorker article about Denmark responding to Donald Trump’s offer to buy Greenland. It was so crazy and funny that I had to fact-check it myself… of course, it was a satirical piece from 2019. This isn’t an isolated experience. Algorithms have not only warped our sense of time but also eroded our trust in the information we consume.
We need to wake up and realize our little bubbles have become our comfort zones and they’re shrinking every day, they confuse us; they isolate us and the fragmentation of reality has created micro-divisions everywhere. Today we can live in the same neighborhood or even the same building yet inhabit entirely different worlds, shaped by the content that’s pushed on us by robots who prioritize reaction over connections. Shared cultural references—the universal touchstones that once brought us together—are not only disappearing between generations but between people who we see closest to us. It’s no longer possible to assume everyone is watching the same TV show, reading the same news, or even agreeing on basic facts. This loss of common ground makes it difficult to connect, not only between humans but between businesses and their customers.
At the same time, personalization has crept into another critical consumer priority: privacy. What once felt like a friendly nod to individuality now feels so invasive. Yeah, we took the nice feeling of our local bodega cashier greeting us by our names when we enter the store and turned it into them following us home, going through our personal life, and predicting our next move. That’s the vibe hyper-targeted ads give. Instead of building trust, they leave consumers feeling surveilled.
Oh Ad-tech! You sold us the promise of precision targeting and perfect metrics but forgot to tell us if it really works for growing a business (you guessed it right, it doesn’t). What we got instead was a closed feedback loop, that only reinforced our skewed understanding of humans. We gather as much data as possible, use it to narrowly target people, and then reflect that data back to them. “We noticed you’re in market for sneakers! Here’s another ad for sneakers!” No shit! There’s enough credible literature about how the role of marketing is to bring and keep brands to the forefront of people’s minds so when they’re in market they choose one over the other. People don’t want to see what brands know about them—they want to know how brands can solve their problems or add real value to their lives.
In the quest for hyper-personalization, brands have lost sight of the universal truths that bring people together. These common denominators—shared emotions, values, and experiences—are what allow brands to tell stories that resonate on a large scale. During his acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Richard Gadd, Baby Reindeer’s creator said it best, “Any story when done right, it’s universal”. However, as personalization fragments people and puts them into smaller and smaller boxes, finding the unifying truths and stories has become more and more difficult. Without them, it’s nearly impossible to create mass appeal, and without mass appeal, brands can’t grow. (Wink wink Mr. Sharp!)
Our obsession with creating isolation and micro-realities goes against this principle. Instead of focusing on narrow preferences, we need to tap into broader, universal insights that resonate across fragmented realities.
At the same time, Hollywood offers a striking parallel. Recent hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once and others reflect our growing comfort with fragmented realities. I was fascinated when I learned the main inspiration behind The Daniels’s amazing multiverse film was our browser taps… every tab represents a universe, and as we click on it, we separate from one reality and dive into a different one. While this makes for compelling cinema, it’s a nightmare for brands trying to navigate a fragmented digital landscape. How can you craft a single message that resonates across countless “realities,” each shaped by personalized algorithms?
We’re at this moment that our audiences are so primed to believe ‘personalization is good’ that asking them will only reinforce the problem… it’s like asking a fish do you want more water? Hell, No! It’s more connection we need, not between people and what they like but between people themselves. The most successful brands will be the ones that find ways to bring people together. Instead of fetishizing click-through rates and hyper-targeted ads, we should ask: What problem are we solving? What value are we bringing? People don’t care how much you know about them—they care how much you can help them. Even when the value is pure entertainment… Hi TikTok!
The way forward is to focus on shared truths… even if the truth is not all glorious and rosy, at least it’s true! We should tap more into universal emotions like hope, fear, and joy, even in a fragmented world. Campaigns that tap into these feelings can cut through the bullshit and create moments of connection that burst individual bubbles. When we tell stories rooted in these universal human truths, they not only rebuild trust but also reclaim the mass appeal that personalization has killed.
The future of marketing is what it has always been, making things more human and creating relevance for most people, not putting people in boxes and disconnecting them from each other. Brands that understand this will not only survive but thrive, even in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms.
Let’s stop talking about how we should embrace “fragmentation” as a thing that just happened to us out of nowhere and push for a world where we can come together and connect as humans.