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Episode 159
The Science of Ad Personalization
Personalized ads outperform generic ones, but only slightly. A meta-analysis of 53 studies found that customization drives more positive attitudes and behavioral intent, but the effect size was small.
This episode, Elena Jasper, Angela Voss, and Rob DeMars are joined by Matt Hultgren, Chief Analytics Officer at Marketing Architects, and Josh Wilson, Director of AI Audio at Misfits and Machines. Together, they unpack when personalization helps and when it hurts. Plus, the team reveals a new tool that brings customization to TV without sacrificing brand consistency or bankrupting budgets.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] What the meta-analysis reveals about personalization's modest impact
• [03:00] The reach trap and why narrowing audiences shrinks mental availability
• [06:00] Why marketers overestimate audience differences
• [09:00] How to test personalization cleanly using geography and control groups
• [14:00] Traditional roadblocks in TV production when scaling creative versions
• [18:00] How the Mass Customizer uses AI to swap voiceover and graphics at scale
• [21:00] Why CTV breaks the false choice between mass reach and customization
Resources:
Journal of Advertising Research Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Matt Hultgren
Chief Analytics Officer
Josh Wilson
Director of AI Audio
Transcript
Josh: Honestly, the biggest pain point for us in post-production is just the time that it takes to put these things together. You really have to sacrifice quality and creativity just to kind of wrap your head around how many spots we're actually trying to put out. Putting them out accurately, matching up ISCI codes — it's just a massive endeavor to try and put out something at scale, even just a couple hundred spots.
Elena: I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect at Misfits and Machines.
Rob: Hello.
Elena: Hello. And we're joined by two guests today: Matt Hultgren, our Chief Analytics Officer at Marketing Architects, and Josh Wilson, the Director of AI Audio at Misfits and Machines.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
Josh: Hey, y'all. Happy to be here.
Angela: Welcome, Matt and Josh.
Elena: We are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. Before we jump in today, I wanted to mention that we are going to be at Digiday's Modern Retail Marketing Summit at the end of the month. We'll be speaking and we'll have a fully stocked popcorn booth. So if you're going to that event, we would love to meet you. But today we're talking about ad customization. What does the research say about ad personalization? When does it work? When does it not? And how might you approach personalization when you're in a mass reach channel like television? I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do, with some research. And for this episode, I chose a meta-analysis. This was published in the Journal of Advertising Research, and it's titled "How Persuasive is Personalized Advertising? A Meta-Analytic Review of Personalized Advertising." With all the data available today, marketers can tailor ads to individuals based on their behaviors, their interests, their demographics. If an ad feels more relevant to us, we would think it should be more persuasive. But how much does personalization actually help? This study analyzed 53 experimental studies with nearly 12,000 participants comparing personalized ads to generic ones. And what they found was that personalized ads do outperform non-personalized ads, leading to slightly more positive attitudes towards the ad and stronger behavioral intentions. But the effect size was relatively small. What really drove the impact was perceived relevance — so when consumers felt like the ad related to them personally, they were more likely to engage with it. And what's interesting is the study found that personalization didn't significantly increase feelings of intrusiveness, suggesting people often appreciate relevance more than they worry about being targeted. So personalization can make advertising more persuasive, but it appears to be a modest effect, which raises a larger question for marketers. How far should we go in customizing our advertising? First, I'm curious how we would answer that question ourselves, because in the past on this show, we have been wary of certain kinds of targeting — and personalization generally has to come with some layer of targeting when you're looking for a more specific person or audience group. Ange, what are some of the marketing effectiveness watch-outs that come with ad personalization?
Angela: Yeah, I'd say the biggest one is just the reach trap, right? So when you personalize, you're almost always narrowing in terms of audience, and shrinking that audience has real cost. You lose that mental availability that comes from reaching people who aren't actively in market yet. We know brands grow by recruiting new buyers, and they can't do that if they're only talking to existing customers or typed behavioral segments, things like that. I think there's also a measurement trap. Personalized campaigns also often look great from an efficiency standpoint — better CTR, better conversion rate. But when you're reaching a pre-filtered audience who was possibly gonna convert anyway, that's not the same as being persuasive. And it could be a flattering lie that the data tells you. And then I think the third to watch out for would just be brand consistency, which we can get into more later. But when you start versioning creative for dozens of segments, you can quietly erode what makes your brand distinctive. Every version is a decision about what to say and what to cut out, and those decisions can just compound over time.
Elena: Yeah, you definitely have to be intentional about distinctive assets and making sure it's consistent. One thing I was wondering is: sometimes when we talk about personalization, I think it comes from maybe a misunderstanding or an overestimation of my audience and how different I think those audience groups really need different messaging — like they're very different from each other. Ange, do you think sometimes marketers overestimate that? Like how much different slices of their audience might need different messaging?
Angela: Absolutely. I think it's one of the most common and costly mistakes that we see. The assumption is that different people have different needs and therefore they need a different message. But to your point, the research keeps showing that the things that make advertising work — emotion, memory, distinctiveness, salience — work on humans very broadly. So a funny ad is funny to most people. A brand story that builds mental shortcuts does that for almost everyone who sees it. Where marketers get tripped up, I think, is confusing cultural relevance with audience segmentation. So making sure your creative doesn't feel tone deaf to a particular audience is different from building 30 versions of an ad targeting behavioral micro-segments. The first is just good creative. The second is expensive and often unnecessary. And I think there are real cases where message differentiation matters — say, different messages for people in different phases of the purchase funnel. People who've never heard of you versus people who are very familiar. But for brand advertising at the top of the funnel, most of the audience wants roughly the same thing: just to understand what the brand stands for and why it matters to their life.
Elena: I was gonna say, definitely matters what stage of the funnel you're in. And we saw on LinkedIn the other day — I think both of us were tagged in this post — an example of a B2B billboard that was so niche in an out-of-home setting it was almost so complex that only one decision maker could understand it. And would they even understand it at first glance? So I think some of that too is the broadness of the channel you're using, and just also, people are not paying a ton of attention to your ads. So if you can be more simple sometimes and more broad, that can be better as well in an upper-funnel channel. Matt, we've talked in the past, as I mentioned earlier, a lot about targeting on this show and that we should be wary of targeting that comes with a high cost. So I'm curious: what kind of targeting methods have you seen struggle? That you would say to a brand or a marketer, you should avoid these kinds of targeting when you're personalizing an advertisement.
Matt: I think Ange started to steal the words outta my mouth, but the first place my head goes is hyper-targeting those small segments. And it really has less to do with the personalization and more about the fact that that approach kills your reach. And reach is still doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to channels like linear and CTV. Now, it's really easy to sell fancy third-party lists, and they sound better than, unfortunately, what they actually are. You have to realize the channel you're working with — like CTV — is still predominantly targeted off of IP matching, and that's genuinely hard. I live and breathe it every single day. So that precise behavioral audience you're really paying that premium for just isn't nearly as targeted as it looks and sounds on paper. I think the research backs that up too: what drives persuasion isn't whether you've targeted someone correctly behind the scenes. It's whether the person actually feels that it's relevant. So if you're burning budget on expensive lists that just shrink your reach, you're paying more for less.
Elena: That was one interesting part of the study — they did find positives, but it was tough to get there, it seemed. I would think as a brand, if you're testing personalization, you'd want to make sure it's working. So as a measurement expert, how — if you were looking at campaign results — how would you separate the impact from personalization versus everything else that's happening in a campaign to determine if the sometimes-added cost is worth it?
Matt: These are lessons you can take beyond personalization, and you should think of every test this way. Because I always put it this way: I hate tests that land in the gray zone. You need to set up your test in a way that you're gonna know either it worked or it didn't work. And that really comes from being strategic upfront. Use things like geography to your advantage. When you're running the customized version, have your A versus your B. Obviously, your test markets get exposed — half get exposed to the control, half get exposed to the test — and from there you can get a cleaner read. If you don't do that and you just blast things out nationally, or think about other variables — the number of times where clients test three things at once and they're like, "Oh, my thing won. No, my thing won," and teams are now fighting over what actually caused it. It's mind-numbing. So you really need to do the due diligence upfront, plan it clean, and make sure you've set it up right. The other thing too is defining what's worth it, or what you're measuring, upfront. I think sometimes people are so giddy just to test that they think of that as an afterthought, and they're like, "Oh wait, I didn't even set this test up in a way to achieve the thing I was trying to achieve." My basketball coach in college always said, "Slow is fast." Do the planning, make sure you got it right so that you can actually get the outcome you want.
Elena: Yeah, that's advice I should apply to my personal life as well. I think that's just general good life advice too.
Rob: Did you ever tell him he was wrong though?
Matt: That was not a good idea.
Elena: I saw a funny video yesterday that said there'll be nothing harder in life than your college sport. I did not play a college sport, but I'm like, man, you hear that sentiment a lot from people that were college athletes. I know Matt and Ange were both college athletes. But Rob, question for you. Ange mentioned in the beginning one of the struggles or watch-outs when you're personalizing advertising is: how do we keep our distinctive assets consistent? And that can be hard when you're creating a lot of different versions. Do you think that's a risk of personalization — that you're gonna weaken your brand consistency over time?
Rob: Ange mentioned a lot earlier — she's so thorough and thoughtful, I'm not even sure why I show up. Another way to put it, she sort of stole all the thunder, right?
Angela: I did not. You've always got good stuff to say, Rob.
Rob: I'm kidding. She hit on all the right points. And I do think, just to continue down that road, it really only weakens the brand — customization and personalization — when you confuse personalization with changing your identity. And I think that's what it really comes down to. Customization should only change, potentially, the arguments that we're making to the customer based on their needs. Maybe a CFO sees a message about ROI. The end user of the product might see ease of use. But the colors, the typography, the sonic logo, the core visual architecture — perhaps the overall campaign idea — that should have the legs to transcend all of those potential personalizations. Those things just need to be locked in the vault. The moment a creative director is like, "I'm gonna tweak the brand color just to make this version pop a little more" for whatever personalization reason — that's when you're not personalizing the ad anymore. You're actively destroying the mental availability of the ad.
Elena: So that's definitely a challenge with personalization: how do we maintain distinctiveness? But there are other issues too on the creative side of personalizing — there's the cost of it, and the danger if you get it wrong. I'll say from my point of view, we got a direct mail piece the other day that was really cool. It was about, I think, some sort of grass product, but it had a picture of our house on the mail piece, which is really cool. But then it got our name wrong. And I was like, dang — that was almost such a good marketing piece. But it said my last name was James, not Jasper. And that can happen, and I think we've all experienced this at a worse level on a channel like digital. So what do you think is the biggest creative roadblock to personalization?
Rob: Yeah, I mean, all the things that you listed are really important. But to me, TV is near and dear to my heart, so I'm gonna think about it for a minute through that lens. Personalization in TV is difficult because of the supply chain nature of production. Historically, if you wanted 5,000 versions of a broadcast spot, first of all, you probably would've never even gone there, because that seems impossible. But if you want a lot of versions, it really comes down to unit economics. You could completely bankrupt your budget trying to create that kind of volume. And not only is it too expensive, but it's just slow. And part of the benefit you can sometimes get from personalization is timeliness, right? And you really lose that traction when you have to spend weeks creating all those versions. But we're at a super interesting crossroads, I think, for television and technology — where we're able to really reimagine what's possible in production because of tools like AI. And being able to do personalization in TV is no longer becoming that expensive and time-consuming. You just really need to reimagine the process and build a better machine.
Elena: Yep. Which — spoiler alert — as a TV agency, we believe we've done this. So instead of just avoiding personalization altogether, we've been thinking about how could we do it well in TV. Part of the inspiration for this episode and diving into customization in general is that we've built something that we believe can bring customization to a mass reach channel like TV, while maintaining the marketing effectiveness principles we all care about. It's called the Mass Customizer, and we have the person who built it on the show today. Josh, thanks again for joining us. I know Rob just outlined some of the challenges with creative production and personalization, but what in your mind, in your opinion, are some of the traditional roadblocks or challenges with customizing something like a TV commercial at scale?
Josh: Yeah. So honestly, the biggest pain point for us in post-production is just the time that it takes to put these things together. You really have to sacrifice quality and creativity just to kind of wrap your head around how many spots we're actually trying to put out. Putting them out accurately, matching up ISCI codes and all of that — there are just so many different moving parts. Multiple people need to check these before they go out. So it's just a massive endeavor to try and put out something at scale, even just a couple hundred spots. I'm actually kind of reminded of a job that I had before coming to Misfits and Machines, where it was a national brand with a bunch of different franchisees. And they wanted to have a different promotion for every day of the week. We had to customize them for each franchise because they had different offers — the offer tag was in two different spots, and again, a different spot for a different day and a different location. So it ended up being — I wanna say it was like 600 spots. We called it "spot apocalypse." Yeah, we just sat in a room for an entire week, just cutting everything, recording voiceover. It was a radio spot, and just the amount of organization required to do that — and it was just mind-numbing to have everybody sit there and spot-check everything. So this kind of solves that, where it's less of a jigsaw puzzle. And the Mass Customizer allows us to have more creative input into what we're doing, as opposed to just trying to prepare for this massive job to come through.
Elena: What is possible with the Mass Customizer? What variables can actually be changed? Walk us through how it works.
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. It's tied right into Marketing Architects' pipeline for post-production. So we can swap out any voiceover line, any kind of graphic that we want — supers, different things like that. Pulling a whole different shot for a specific spot, or part of the spot, if you'd like. And it's really easy — it's just a simple CSV upload. You basically just say the lines that you wanna replace and put in the new lines, and it'll read that CSV file and kick out all the different variations. And it happens in almost real time. So it's much faster than that weeks-long process. You can kick out hundreds of spots relatively quickly. And the nice thing about it is it's not just taking a line and replacing it without any care — it's really surgical the way it works. We're doing voice cloning just to maintain the actual way that the voiceover delivered the lines, not just the words that were said. And we're only replacing the parts where it's actually changed. So the entirety of the spot that stays the same throughout all the customizations does stay exactly the same. And we do it with a lot of math and a ton of AI tools, just to keep that original creative intent. That way we don't need to go get everything re-approved and go through that whole process of checking everything — it just works. It maintains all the same integrity of the original spot. So yeah, that weeks-long process can just be a couple of hours.
Elena: What else is on the roadmap for this product? What kind of personalization at scale do you think will eventually be possible in television?
Josh: So we're working on just tighter integration with Marketing Architects' post-production pipeline — just tightening up a few things. And then we're entering into pilot phases with clients where there's a natural fit. So that's the next step: see what we learn from those pilot tests. In terms of what's possible, the Mass Customizer really opens up a ton of possibilities that we weren't able to do before. We may be able to do some scaling for addressable TV where we're looking at household-level targeting with a broader reach, because the creative side can now kind of keep up with that. The Mass Customizer does one thing really well too — it's just swapping out phone numbers and URLs, like the really boring kind of stuff. But that's maybe not as personalized as we would want something to be. So I think we can start getting really creative with weaving in new levels of personalization that weren't really possible before. That could uniquely tie in something about a person's demographic or their location, their life stage. And we can really personalize that in a way that's much more unique and interesting.
Elena: Eventually you could almost — could there be a world where a brand could look at what sort of personalization has worked for them in digital, and then at a household level, start to apply some of that to TV — you think?
Josh: Yeah, of course. I mean, that's the goal. There may be some roadblocks in terms of how quickly we can deliver a spot once it's created to the network, but that's for them to figure out. So —
Elena: Matt, how are you imagining brands are gonna use this tool? What sort of signals is your team gonna be watching to measure success?
Matt: In terms of using it, the ideas are truly endless. Anytime a brand's message could resonate more strongly with a specific audience, if even just one element changed — that's a use case. Think different products, different regions, different storefronts, different offers that are customized across the country. There are honestly endless use cases, and that's just where the fun begins, brainstorming all those different concepts of what it could look like. In terms of measurement, I think measurement always comes down to two things: A, is it performing? And B, is it having a brand impact? Are you hitting consumers in the right way? I think the worst-case scenario — and something you wouldn't wanna do — there have been cases, Elena, you said it earlier, where personalization goes wrong. And that's definitely something we are very thoughtful about. You can try to do some stuff in CTV, but how far you push it — like, we wouldn't be calling out names of individuals on a television. You don't know who's actually on the other side of that screen.
Angela: Hey there, Elena James.
Matt: Yeah. Or even sometimes you can land in your neighbor's house instead of the exact one. So there are just different things to consider. But in terms of measurement, there are obviously two sides of it, right? At the end of the day, is it driving revenue? And how are consumers feeling about it? And measuring through brand studies — how is consumer feedback coming through from that personalization?
Elena: So this kind of personalization on television is something that wouldn't have been possible on linear. It's, I think, an example of more opportunities that are gonna be available to marketers due to CTV, which is kind of exciting — like the ability to use TV for mass reach, but also incorporate some of the capabilities we really like from digital. Ange, where do you think all this is going? What do you think is the future of personalization in TV, and what other changes might be coming that marketers might be underestimating right now?
Angela: CTV is just so exciting in terms of the development of the space, because it breaks the false choice between mass reach and customization. You still get the attention and impact of the living room screen, but now you have a digital-style environment behind it that creates a lot of opportunity. What I think marketers are underestimating is how fast this is moving. CTV already accounts for nearly half of total TV usage in the US, overtaking cable and broadcast combined for the first time. Ad-supported streaming is growing fast as viewers choose to tap into lower-cost tiers, and that's a massive addressable audience in a high-attention environment. The other underestimated piece isn't just targeting — it's dynamic creative at scale. What we're talking about: being able to swap variables in a TV spot based on geography, time of day, audience signals, even weather. It was just not possible on the linear side. You could do it, but you'd put yourself out of business trying to do it. So tools like the Mass Customizer are gonna make it possible to do it from one core asset. And that's the unlock — personalization that doesn't sacrifice the reach of mass media, done in a cost-effective way. I think the brands that win will be the ones who figure out how to do that both at once: maintain a consistent, distinctive brand identity while using CTV's data layer to make the creative feel contextually relevant. It's not an either/or. It'll just require some discipline to execute.
Elena: Yeah, I think that's important to say — this isn't about just slapping digital capabilities onto TV. It needs to be approached differently because of all the reasons why TV is different as a channel. Alright, to wrap us up here — and Matt, we'll start with you — what is the best example of personalization you've experienced as a consumer?
Matt: Okay. I don't know if this is the best or just the most recent, but I'm gonna let you all in on a little guilty pleasure. I love big chain food, and Chili's is at the top of that list. They just started using the last thing I ordered in their text messages. So every single week I am currently getting, "Hey, don't you want some more fajitas? Come on in." And I immediately start salivating. And it's definitely making me want more Chili's. I'll be honest.
Elena: —
Angela: — I didn't know that about you.
Rob: He's been talking about Chili's since I've known him.
Matt: It's so good.
Elena: Ange, Rob?
Angela: Yeah, I'll go next. Spotify Wrapped. It's the most shared, talked-about piece of personalization marketing that I can remember recently. It makes me feel seen versus tracked, so I loved that about the Spotify Wrapped functionality.
Rob: Well, you're gonna laugh, Elena, because — direct mail's an amazing thing, and it's so old now. We think of, "Oh, direct mail's just this archaic art form." But I still, to this day — and whenever anyone asks me about personalization — it was opening the mailbox, pulling out a really nice piece of direct mail with a picture of my house on it and how much it cost. And I'm like, that is incredible. Do they have the FBI as their agency? Like, it's a little creepy. But it was powerful, and I still remember it. And obviously it made an impression on you as well, except they screwed up for you, so that's not so good.
Elena: No, but when they get it right, it's cool. My example was also direct mail — I got a direct mail piece sent to our office a couple weeks ago, and it was this new type of business card called a TAPT card — TAPT — and they're very cool. You just have one of them and you can tap it on anybody's phone and it'll automatically put in your contact information: Android, iPhone, you can add your LinkedIn, you can add a photo, so you're not having to just hand out physical business cards. And they sent me one that works — it's like fully functional, has my name on it. It's even in our brand color and has our logo. And I actually ended up having the marketing and sales teams order it. I'm like, oh, what a great way to share their product.
Josh: I'm always drawn to — it's really simple — just that I live in Austin, Texas, and anytime there's an ad on a podcast or on TV where it's like, "Hey, Austin," it almost feels like they're talking to me. I don't know why. But one of the more unique ones — I actually got this last week. It was a card that I got in the mail from the company that delivers our dog food. We've got three large dogs. And it was a happy birthday card for one of our dogs with a little discount. And I was like, oh, that's nice. That's not like creepy and invasive — it's just a nice little personalization.
Elena: So that's one that recently kind of hit me as a good idea. I love that. Our dog turned two this last weekend and she has this app — I don't know if you've heard of it — it's called Fi. It's like Strava for dogs. It tracks her steps and there are leaderboards. You should get it for your dogs — honestly, it's so fun. But they had a happy two-year birthday message, and they actually — it said "powered by ChatGPT" — they made her a little song about her breed and how active she is. I'm not gonna lie, it delighted me. I loved it. Anything to do with personalization for pets, I think, is like extra fun.
Josh: Yeah, pets are forgiven from all the weird targeting, I guess.
Elena: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Alright, that's gonna wrap us up here. Thank you, Matt and Josh, for joining us today.
Episode 159
The Science of Ad Personalization
Personalized ads outperform generic ones, but only slightly. A meta-analysis of 53 studies found that customization drives more positive attitudes and behavioral intent, but the effect size was small.
This episode, Elena Jasper, Angela Voss, and Rob DeMars are joined by Matt Hultgren, Chief Analytics Officer at Marketing Architects, and Josh Wilson, Director of AI Audio at Misfits and Machines. Together, they unpack when personalization helps and when it hurts. Plus, the team reveals a new tool that brings customization to TV without sacrificing brand consistency or bankrupting budgets.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] What the meta-analysis reveals about personalization's modest impact
• [03:00] The reach trap and why narrowing audiences shrinks mental availability
• [06:00] Why marketers overestimate audience differences
• [09:00] How to test personalization cleanly using geography and control groups
• [14:00] Traditional roadblocks in TV production when scaling creative versions
• [18:00] How the Mass Customizer uses AI to swap voiceover and graphics at scale
• [21:00] Why CTV breaks the false choice between mass reach and customization
Resources:
Journal of Advertising Research Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Matt Hultgren
Chief Analytics Officer
Josh Wilson
Director of AI Audio
Subscribe on
Enjoy this episode? Leave us a review.
Transcript
Josh: Honestly, the biggest pain point for us in post-production is just the time that it takes to put these things together. You really have to sacrifice quality and creativity just to kind of wrap your head around how many spots we're actually trying to put out. Putting them out accurately, matching up ISCI codes — it's just a massive endeavor to try and put out something at scale, even just a couple hundred spots.
Elena: I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect at Misfits and Machines.
Rob: Hello.
Elena: Hello. And we're joined by two guests today: Matt Hultgren, our Chief Analytics Officer at Marketing Architects, and Josh Wilson, the Director of AI Audio at Misfits and Machines.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
Josh: Hey, y'all. Happy to be here.
Angela: Welcome, Matt and Josh.
Elena: We are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. Before we jump in today, I wanted to mention that we are going to be at Digiday's Modern Retail Marketing Summit at the end of the month. We'll be speaking and we'll have a fully stocked popcorn booth. So if you're going to that event, we would love to meet you. But today we're talking about ad customization. What does the research say about ad personalization? When does it work? When does it not? And how might you approach personalization when you're in a mass reach channel like television? I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do, with some research. And for this episode, I chose a meta-analysis. This was published in the Journal of Advertising Research, and it's titled "How Persuasive is Personalized Advertising? A Meta-Analytic Review of Personalized Advertising." With all the data available today, marketers can tailor ads to individuals based on their behaviors, their interests, their demographics. If an ad feels more relevant to us, we would think it should be more persuasive. But how much does personalization actually help? This study analyzed 53 experimental studies with nearly 12,000 participants comparing personalized ads to generic ones. And what they found was that personalized ads do outperform non-personalized ads, leading to slightly more positive attitudes towards the ad and stronger behavioral intentions. But the effect size was relatively small. What really drove the impact was perceived relevance — so when consumers felt like the ad related to them personally, they were more likely to engage with it. And what's interesting is the study found that personalization didn't significantly increase feelings of intrusiveness, suggesting people often appreciate relevance more than they worry about being targeted. So personalization can make advertising more persuasive, but it appears to be a modest effect, which raises a larger question for marketers. How far should we go in customizing our advertising? First, I'm curious how we would answer that question ourselves, because in the past on this show, we have been wary of certain kinds of targeting — and personalization generally has to come with some layer of targeting when you're looking for a more specific person or audience group. Ange, what are some of the marketing effectiveness watch-outs that come with ad personalization?
Angela: Yeah, I'd say the biggest one is just the reach trap, right? So when you personalize, you're almost always narrowing in terms of audience, and shrinking that audience has real cost. You lose that mental availability that comes from reaching people who aren't actively in market yet. We know brands grow by recruiting new buyers, and they can't do that if they're only talking to existing customers or typed behavioral segments, things like that. I think there's also a measurement trap. Personalized campaigns also often look great from an efficiency standpoint — better CTR, better conversion rate. But when you're reaching a pre-filtered audience who was possibly gonna convert anyway, that's not the same as being persuasive. And it could be a flattering lie that the data tells you. And then I think the third to watch out for would just be brand consistency, which we can get into more later. But when you start versioning creative for dozens of segments, you can quietly erode what makes your brand distinctive. Every version is a decision about what to say and what to cut out, and those decisions can just compound over time.
Elena: Yeah, you definitely have to be intentional about distinctive assets and making sure it's consistent. One thing I was wondering is: sometimes when we talk about personalization, I think it comes from maybe a misunderstanding or an overestimation of my audience and how different I think those audience groups really need different messaging — like they're very different from each other. Ange, do you think sometimes marketers overestimate that? Like how much different slices of their audience might need different messaging?
Angela: Absolutely. I think it's one of the most common and costly mistakes that we see. The assumption is that different people have different needs and therefore they need a different message. But to your point, the research keeps showing that the things that make advertising work — emotion, memory, distinctiveness, salience — work on humans very broadly. So a funny ad is funny to most people. A brand story that builds mental shortcuts does that for almost everyone who sees it. Where marketers get tripped up, I think, is confusing cultural relevance with audience segmentation. So making sure your creative doesn't feel tone deaf to a particular audience is different from building 30 versions of an ad targeting behavioral micro-segments. The first is just good creative. The second is expensive and often unnecessary. And I think there are real cases where message differentiation matters — say, different messages for people in different phases of the purchase funnel. People who've never heard of you versus people who are very familiar. But for brand advertising at the top of the funnel, most of the audience wants roughly the same thing: just to understand what the brand stands for and why it matters to their life.
Elena: I was gonna say, definitely matters what stage of the funnel you're in. And we saw on LinkedIn the other day — I think both of us were tagged in this post — an example of a B2B billboard that was so niche in an out-of-home setting it was almost so complex that only one decision maker could understand it. And would they even understand it at first glance? So I think some of that too is the broadness of the channel you're using, and just also, people are not paying a ton of attention to your ads. So if you can be more simple sometimes and more broad, that can be better as well in an upper-funnel channel. Matt, we've talked in the past, as I mentioned earlier, a lot about targeting on this show and that we should be wary of targeting that comes with a high cost. So I'm curious: what kind of targeting methods have you seen struggle? That you would say to a brand or a marketer, you should avoid these kinds of targeting when you're personalizing an advertisement.
Matt: I think Ange started to steal the words outta my mouth, but the first place my head goes is hyper-targeting those small segments. And it really has less to do with the personalization and more about the fact that that approach kills your reach. And reach is still doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to channels like linear and CTV. Now, it's really easy to sell fancy third-party lists, and they sound better than, unfortunately, what they actually are. You have to realize the channel you're working with — like CTV — is still predominantly targeted off of IP matching, and that's genuinely hard. I live and breathe it every single day. So that precise behavioral audience you're really paying that premium for just isn't nearly as targeted as it looks and sounds on paper. I think the research backs that up too: what drives persuasion isn't whether you've targeted someone correctly behind the scenes. It's whether the person actually feels that it's relevant. So if you're burning budget on expensive lists that just shrink your reach, you're paying more for less.
Elena: That was one interesting part of the study — they did find positives, but it was tough to get there, it seemed. I would think as a brand, if you're testing personalization, you'd want to make sure it's working. So as a measurement expert, how — if you were looking at campaign results — how would you separate the impact from personalization versus everything else that's happening in a campaign to determine if the sometimes-added cost is worth it?
Matt: These are lessons you can take beyond personalization, and you should think of every test this way. Because I always put it this way: I hate tests that land in the gray zone. You need to set up your test in a way that you're gonna know either it worked or it didn't work. And that really comes from being strategic upfront. Use things like geography to your advantage. When you're running the customized version, have your A versus your B. Obviously, your test markets get exposed — half get exposed to the control, half get exposed to the test — and from there you can get a cleaner read. If you don't do that and you just blast things out nationally, or think about other variables — the number of times where clients test three things at once and they're like, "Oh, my thing won. No, my thing won," and teams are now fighting over what actually caused it. It's mind-numbing. So you really need to do the due diligence upfront, plan it clean, and make sure you've set it up right. The other thing too is defining what's worth it, or what you're measuring, upfront. I think sometimes people are so giddy just to test that they think of that as an afterthought, and they're like, "Oh wait, I didn't even set this test up in a way to achieve the thing I was trying to achieve." My basketball coach in college always said, "Slow is fast." Do the planning, make sure you got it right so that you can actually get the outcome you want.
Elena: Yeah, that's advice I should apply to my personal life as well. I think that's just general good life advice too.
Rob: Did you ever tell him he was wrong though?
Matt: That was not a good idea.
Elena: I saw a funny video yesterday that said there'll be nothing harder in life than your college sport. I did not play a college sport, but I'm like, man, you hear that sentiment a lot from people that were college athletes. I know Matt and Ange were both college athletes. But Rob, question for you. Ange mentioned in the beginning one of the struggles or watch-outs when you're personalizing advertising is: how do we keep our distinctive assets consistent? And that can be hard when you're creating a lot of different versions. Do you think that's a risk of personalization — that you're gonna weaken your brand consistency over time?
Rob: Ange mentioned a lot earlier — she's so thorough and thoughtful, I'm not even sure why I show up. Another way to put it, she sort of stole all the thunder, right?
Angela: I did not. You've always got good stuff to say, Rob.
Rob: I'm kidding. She hit on all the right points. And I do think, just to continue down that road, it really only weakens the brand — customization and personalization — when you confuse personalization with changing your identity. And I think that's what it really comes down to. Customization should only change, potentially, the arguments that we're making to the customer based on their needs. Maybe a CFO sees a message about ROI. The end user of the product might see ease of use. But the colors, the typography, the sonic logo, the core visual architecture — perhaps the overall campaign idea — that should have the legs to transcend all of those potential personalizations. Those things just need to be locked in the vault. The moment a creative director is like, "I'm gonna tweak the brand color just to make this version pop a little more" for whatever personalization reason — that's when you're not personalizing the ad anymore. You're actively destroying the mental availability of the ad.
Elena: So that's definitely a challenge with personalization: how do we maintain distinctiveness? But there are other issues too on the creative side of personalizing — there's the cost of it, and the danger if you get it wrong. I'll say from my point of view, we got a direct mail piece the other day that was really cool. It was about, I think, some sort of grass product, but it had a picture of our house on the mail piece, which is really cool. But then it got our name wrong. And I was like, dang — that was almost such a good marketing piece. But it said my last name was James, not Jasper. And that can happen, and I think we've all experienced this at a worse level on a channel like digital. So what do you think is the biggest creative roadblock to personalization?
Rob: Yeah, I mean, all the things that you listed are really important. But to me, TV is near and dear to my heart, so I'm gonna think about it for a minute through that lens. Personalization in TV is difficult because of the supply chain nature of production. Historically, if you wanted 5,000 versions of a broadcast spot, first of all, you probably would've never even gone there, because that seems impossible. But if you want a lot of versions, it really comes down to unit economics. You could completely bankrupt your budget trying to create that kind of volume. And not only is it too expensive, but it's just slow. And part of the benefit you can sometimes get from personalization is timeliness, right? And you really lose that traction when you have to spend weeks creating all those versions. But we're at a super interesting crossroads, I think, for television and technology — where we're able to really reimagine what's possible in production because of tools like AI. And being able to do personalization in TV is no longer becoming that expensive and time-consuming. You just really need to reimagine the process and build a better machine.
Elena: Yep. Which — spoiler alert — as a TV agency, we believe we've done this. So instead of just avoiding personalization altogether, we've been thinking about how could we do it well in TV. Part of the inspiration for this episode and diving into customization in general is that we've built something that we believe can bring customization to a mass reach channel like TV, while maintaining the marketing effectiveness principles we all care about. It's called the Mass Customizer, and we have the person who built it on the show today. Josh, thanks again for joining us. I know Rob just outlined some of the challenges with creative production and personalization, but what in your mind, in your opinion, are some of the traditional roadblocks or challenges with customizing something like a TV commercial at scale?
Josh: Yeah. So honestly, the biggest pain point for us in post-production is just the time that it takes to put these things together. You really have to sacrifice quality and creativity just to kind of wrap your head around how many spots we're actually trying to put out. Putting them out accurately, matching up ISCI codes and all of that — there are just so many different moving parts. Multiple people need to check these before they go out. So it's just a massive endeavor to try and put out something at scale, even just a couple hundred spots. I'm actually kind of reminded of a job that I had before coming to Misfits and Machines, where it was a national brand with a bunch of different franchisees. And they wanted to have a different promotion for every day of the week. We had to customize them for each franchise because they had different offers — the offer tag was in two different spots, and again, a different spot for a different day and a different location. So it ended up being — I wanna say it was like 600 spots. We called it "spot apocalypse." Yeah, we just sat in a room for an entire week, just cutting everything, recording voiceover. It was a radio spot, and just the amount of organization required to do that — and it was just mind-numbing to have everybody sit there and spot-check everything. So this kind of solves that, where it's less of a jigsaw puzzle. And the Mass Customizer allows us to have more creative input into what we're doing, as opposed to just trying to prepare for this massive job to come through.
Elena: What is possible with the Mass Customizer? What variables can actually be changed? Walk us through how it works.
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. It's tied right into Marketing Architects' pipeline for post-production. So we can swap out any voiceover line, any kind of graphic that we want — supers, different things like that. Pulling a whole different shot for a specific spot, or part of the spot, if you'd like. And it's really easy — it's just a simple CSV upload. You basically just say the lines that you wanna replace and put in the new lines, and it'll read that CSV file and kick out all the different variations. And it happens in almost real time. So it's much faster than that weeks-long process. You can kick out hundreds of spots relatively quickly. And the nice thing about it is it's not just taking a line and replacing it without any care — it's really surgical the way it works. We're doing voice cloning just to maintain the actual way that the voiceover delivered the lines, not just the words that were said. And we're only replacing the parts where it's actually changed. So the entirety of the spot that stays the same throughout all the customizations does stay exactly the same. And we do it with a lot of math and a ton of AI tools, just to keep that original creative intent. That way we don't need to go get everything re-approved and go through that whole process of checking everything — it just works. It maintains all the same integrity of the original spot. So yeah, that weeks-long process can just be a couple of hours.
Elena: What else is on the roadmap for this product? What kind of personalization at scale do you think will eventually be possible in television?
Josh: So we're working on just tighter integration with Marketing Architects' post-production pipeline — just tightening up a few things. And then we're entering into pilot phases with clients where there's a natural fit. So that's the next step: see what we learn from those pilot tests. In terms of what's possible, the Mass Customizer really opens up a ton of possibilities that we weren't able to do before. We may be able to do some scaling for addressable TV where we're looking at household-level targeting with a broader reach, because the creative side can now kind of keep up with that. The Mass Customizer does one thing really well too — it's just swapping out phone numbers and URLs, like the really boring kind of stuff. But that's maybe not as personalized as we would want something to be. So I think we can start getting really creative with weaving in new levels of personalization that weren't really possible before. That could uniquely tie in something about a person's demographic or their location, their life stage. And we can really personalize that in a way that's much more unique and interesting.
Elena: Eventually you could almost — could there be a world where a brand could look at what sort of personalization has worked for them in digital, and then at a household level, start to apply some of that to TV — you think?
Josh: Yeah, of course. I mean, that's the goal. There may be some roadblocks in terms of how quickly we can deliver a spot once it's created to the network, but that's for them to figure out. So —
Elena: Matt, how are you imagining brands are gonna use this tool? What sort of signals is your team gonna be watching to measure success?
Matt: In terms of using it, the ideas are truly endless. Anytime a brand's message could resonate more strongly with a specific audience, if even just one element changed — that's a use case. Think different products, different regions, different storefronts, different offers that are customized across the country. There are honestly endless use cases, and that's just where the fun begins, brainstorming all those different concepts of what it could look like. In terms of measurement, I think measurement always comes down to two things: A, is it performing? And B, is it having a brand impact? Are you hitting consumers in the right way? I think the worst-case scenario — and something you wouldn't wanna do — there have been cases, Elena, you said it earlier, where personalization goes wrong. And that's definitely something we are very thoughtful about. You can try to do some stuff in CTV, but how far you push it — like, we wouldn't be calling out names of individuals on a television. You don't know who's actually on the other side of that screen.
Angela: Hey there, Elena James.
Matt: Yeah. Or even sometimes you can land in your neighbor's house instead of the exact one. So there are just different things to consider. But in terms of measurement, there are obviously two sides of it, right? At the end of the day, is it driving revenue? And how are consumers feeling about it? And measuring through brand studies — how is consumer feedback coming through from that personalization?
Elena: So this kind of personalization on television is something that wouldn't have been possible on linear. It's, I think, an example of more opportunities that are gonna be available to marketers due to CTV, which is kind of exciting — like the ability to use TV for mass reach, but also incorporate some of the capabilities we really like from digital. Ange, where do you think all this is going? What do you think is the future of personalization in TV, and what other changes might be coming that marketers might be underestimating right now?
Angela: CTV is just so exciting in terms of the development of the space, because it breaks the false choice between mass reach and customization. You still get the attention and impact of the living room screen, but now you have a digital-style environment behind it that creates a lot of opportunity. What I think marketers are underestimating is how fast this is moving. CTV already accounts for nearly half of total TV usage in the US, overtaking cable and broadcast combined for the first time. Ad-supported streaming is growing fast as viewers choose to tap into lower-cost tiers, and that's a massive addressable audience in a high-attention environment. The other underestimated piece isn't just targeting — it's dynamic creative at scale. What we're talking about: being able to swap variables in a TV spot based on geography, time of day, audience signals, even weather. It was just not possible on the linear side. You could do it, but you'd put yourself out of business trying to do it. So tools like the Mass Customizer are gonna make it possible to do it from one core asset. And that's the unlock — personalization that doesn't sacrifice the reach of mass media, done in a cost-effective way. I think the brands that win will be the ones who figure out how to do that both at once: maintain a consistent, distinctive brand identity while using CTV's data layer to make the creative feel contextually relevant. It's not an either/or. It'll just require some discipline to execute.
Elena: Yeah, I think that's important to say — this isn't about just slapping digital capabilities onto TV. It needs to be approached differently because of all the reasons why TV is different as a channel. Alright, to wrap us up here — and Matt, we'll start with you — what is the best example of personalization you've experienced as a consumer?
Matt: Okay. I don't know if this is the best or just the most recent, but I'm gonna let you all in on a little guilty pleasure. I love big chain food, and Chili's is at the top of that list. They just started using the last thing I ordered in their text messages. So every single week I am currently getting, "Hey, don't you want some more fajitas? Come on in." And I immediately start salivating. And it's definitely making me want more Chili's. I'll be honest.
Elena: —
Angela: — I didn't know that about you.
Rob: He's been talking about Chili's since I've known him.
Matt: It's so good.
Elena: Ange, Rob?
Angela: Yeah, I'll go next. Spotify Wrapped. It's the most shared, talked-about piece of personalization marketing that I can remember recently. It makes me feel seen versus tracked, so I loved that about the Spotify Wrapped functionality.
Rob: Well, you're gonna laugh, Elena, because — direct mail's an amazing thing, and it's so old now. We think of, "Oh, direct mail's just this archaic art form." But I still, to this day — and whenever anyone asks me about personalization — it was opening the mailbox, pulling out a really nice piece of direct mail with a picture of my house on it and how much it cost. And I'm like, that is incredible. Do they have the FBI as their agency? Like, it's a little creepy. But it was powerful, and I still remember it. And obviously it made an impression on you as well, except they screwed up for you, so that's not so good.
Elena: No, but when they get it right, it's cool. My example was also direct mail — I got a direct mail piece sent to our office a couple weeks ago, and it was this new type of business card called a TAPT card — TAPT — and they're very cool. You just have one of them and you can tap it on anybody's phone and it'll automatically put in your contact information: Android, iPhone, you can add your LinkedIn, you can add a photo, so you're not having to just hand out physical business cards. And they sent me one that works — it's like fully functional, has my name on it. It's even in our brand color and has our logo. And I actually ended up having the marketing and sales teams order it. I'm like, oh, what a great way to share their product.
Josh: I'm always drawn to — it's really simple — just that I live in Austin, Texas, and anytime there's an ad on a podcast or on TV where it's like, "Hey, Austin," it almost feels like they're talking to me. I don't know why. But one of the more unique ones — I actually got this last week. It was a card that I got in the mail from the company that delivers our dog food. We've got three large dogs. And it was a happy birthday card for one of our dogs with a little discount. And I was like, oh, that's nice. That's not like creepy and invasive — it's just a nice little personalization.
Elena: So that's one that recently kind of hit me as a good idea. I love that. Our dog turned two this last weekend and she has this app — I don't know if you've heard of it — it's called Fi. It's like Strava for dogs. It tracks her steps and there are leaderboards. You should get it for your dogs — honestly, it's so fun. But they had a happy two-year birthday message, and they actually — it said "powered by ChatGPT" — they made her a little song about her breed and how active she is. I'm not gonna lie, it delighted me. I loved it. Anything to do with personalization for pets, I think, is like extra fun.
Josh: Yeah, pets are forgiven from all the weird targeting, I guess.
Elena: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Alright, that's gonna wrap us up here. Thank you, Matt and Josh, for joining us today.