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Just Circling Back

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Former ad copywriter and Gaping Void cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once wrote, "If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face."

It's not just advertising that can be off-putting. The way businesses talk in lead generation is generally worse, partly because there's the illusion of personalization.

AI and personalization tech have made it easy for just about anyone to mention a prospect's local coffee shop, reference a detail scraped from their website, or kinda sorta get an aspect of someone's business model. (I receive a ton of outreach calling me "Mark" because of "Marketoonist.")

But it's often pretty shallow and generic, and still packed with the cliché phrases that have plagued cold outreach since the dawn of marketing time. AI-generated lead generation after all is trained on all the lead generation that came before it.

Paradoxically the tech for personalization has made a lot of personalized outreach feel pretty robotic. The tools designed to sound human can signal the opposite.

In 1970, a Japanese roboticist introduced the concept of the “uncanny valley.” In designing robots to be more human-like, he observed that people respond positively only up to a point.

Then there’s an “uncanny valley” where the “almost-human” design seems creepy and people experience “revulsion.”

We’re in an age of the “uncanny valley” in personalization.

Marketers have always chased the holy grail of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. But much of today’s personalization falls flat. Bad personalization can be worse than no personalization.

It will take more than technology to bridge the uncanny valley of personalization. Applying the newest tools with an outdated mindset won’t give people what they want. At worst, marketers will just be able to annoy people more efficiently.

Here are a few related cartoons I've drawn over the years:

Keynote Update

I’m speaking in Mexico City next week (5/21) at IAB Conecta (and also leading a workshop). I look forward to seeing some of you there.

(This was from my last trip to Mexico City a few years ago, hanging out with cartoonists from the La Sociedad Mexicana de Caricaturistas at the Museo de la Caricatura).

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit for some cartoon levity and insight.

For an idea of my approach to keynotes, here’s a sneak peak at a 5-minute speaker’s reel I’m working on (not finished yet):

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2014. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.