As someone who works in that industry my overwhelming feeling after reading that article is that it’s largely junk for a couple of reasons.

Without going super deep into the specifics they do make one good point that I agree with which is using 3rd party data brokers and sources to drive a personalisation strategy is going to give you terrible results precisely because that data is junk to begin with and is probably only going to get worse over time.

That is however probably where the good points in that article end.

In short, they take this ultra narrow view of what personalisation actually is and just straw man it to death.

There is an underlying principle in the world of sales / marketing etc that basically boils down to show the right people the right message at the right time. The idea that this approach doesn’t work is not in anyway backed up by any evidence whatsoever and the second half of the article that just says “make something great for everyone because… movies” is just incredibly stupid advice.

Like yes that is a great baseline to start from and is a goal in and of itself but what about when I start to know a bit more about what you’re actually looking for? Why would I not intentionally try to tweak my approach? A human salesperson who couldn’t adapt their approach would be out of a job within a short amount of time.

The problem ultimately comes down to how can I understand

1. Who is the RIGHT audience

2. What is the RIGHT message for that audience

3. What is the RIGHT time to show that message?

So it might come as no surprise to anyone that if you just outsourced that question to some 3rd party data source and had some incredibly broad and useless audience group like “women 18-24” then your results are going to suck for a multitude of reasons.

Just for the sake of contrast let me demonstrate a simple but otherwise realistic example about how you may want to think about personalisation using a topic you’re all familiar with.

Let’s say you’re working for GoDaddy and you’re trying to improve the revenue of users who land on your homepage for example.

You are going to run a lot of A/B tests to figure out that first part I mentioned before regarding what’s the best possible version of this page I can show to people in general and tweak all kinds of things like the kinds of products / offers I push (domains vs hosting for example), the order I show them in, the way I talk about them etc.

Cool? Concurrently to that I’m also going to start thinking about what are the kinds of customers we have.

For example, GoDaddy have a pretty wide variety of customers when it comes to technical sophistication to just pick a random audience attribute that is actually relevant.

There are a lot of HN crowd types who just want a cheap domain but want absolutely nothing to do with GoDaddy’s otherwise not great hosting plans. There are people who want very specific kinds of hosting like Wordpress, there are lots of non technical small business owners who are just trying to get setup with something basic and aren’t sure where to start among many other groups.

So I’m going to start thinking about where could I find those specific groups of people both at a targeting level (ads, sponsorships etc) and also from an identification level (I.e. maybe the referrer string on the HTTP header shows HN for example, maybe I see they are coming in via one of the ad campaigns I set up earlier specifically targeting Wordpress hosting, maybe the user agent shows a windows vista user running IE which says maybe they aren’t likely to be technically savvy etc)

Now I have some additional contextual information that I can use when I need to make a decision about what offers do I want to show in the hero section of the homepage for example. Do I push domains? Do I push how we specialise in working with non technical users etc.

That kind of thing works, consistently. That’s the right message to the right audience and at the right time (to be fair I’ve not really done anything with the time angle in this example and am just assuming this is the first time they are interacting with our brand) concept in action. You can make things way more sophisticated obviously but that idea alone at GoDaddy scale would make meaningful amounts in additional revenue, no question. That is something very different to what the narrow example they used in the article however.