This article is a combination of a straw-man argument and a bad analogy. The authors say [personalization] = [3rd-party data categories] * [appeals to non-universal emotional associations]. They show that 3rd-party data categories are crap. Anyone who has worked with those sources knows about the bad quality, so the criticism is an easy sell. Then they use an analogy of Disney/Pixar movies to argue that messages should have universal appeal. Most everyone feels all the feels when they watch a Disney/Pixar movie, so this is also an easy sell.

Pull the straw-man apart a little bit: 3rd-party data isn't the only data out there. There's at least one solutions (full-disclosure: I'm building it) that uses high-frequency communication channels like push notifications as a factory to originate 1st-party data that's tailored to your business needs and exists at the individual level. In other words, saying personalization based on 3rd-party data doesn't work is like saying a car that with water in the gas tank doesn't work. Of course it doesn't. Stop putting water in the gas tank.

Now look closer at the analogy: like a good movie, a good marketing strategy will expose customers to a wide variety of reasons to engage, so they can take what is personally meaningful to them and leave the rest. You can't fit the whole strategy into a single message. Of course you can't, just as Disney/Pixar can't fit every emotional association into a single scene scene. The authors point out the obvious fact that personalization can't fully happen at any single point in time, and miss the point that personalization necessarily happens progressively over multiple points in time.

I don't mean to come down hard on the authors of this post. They're reacting to what most marketing platforms call personalization. The problem isn't that personalization is impossible and doesn't work. The problem is that so many platforms have implemented something that doesn't work and have called it personalization.

For anyone interested, my co-founders and I have written several blog posts covering both what real personalization should look like, and many of the technical aspects of how it can be both possible and effective: www.aampe.com/blog