At the threshold of 1:1 marketing
Until now?
Marketers have been chasing true 1:1 personalization for over two decades. Like the offense of an NFL team we have been steadily moving the ball down the field of personalization but cannot seem to reach the end zone. Marketers have built sophisticated tech stacks, deployed cross-site cookies, constructed rich user profiles, and mastered psychographic segmentation. Yet the goal has remained frustratingly out of reach, constantly halving the distance to the goal line without ever crossing it.
Marketers marching towards 1:1 marketing… always halving the distance to the goal
The numbers tell the story. A 2022 comprehensive review in Psychology & Marketing examined 383 academic publications on personalization and found a field still grappling with fundamental tensions: the privacy paradox, the limits of recommendation engines, and the gap between personalization aspirations and execution reality.
Traditional approaches hit a ceiling because they required marketers to anticipate every customer need, then build systems to match messages to moments. Even the most sophisticated Account Based Marketing (ABM) platforms and dynamic content engines could only approximate personalization—segmenting audiences into ever-smaller buckets without truly reaching the individual.
The LLM inflection point
Large language models shatter this ceiling, but not in the way marketers expected.
McKinsey's January 2025 analysis frames it clearly:
Communicate clearly with a vast array of consumers who speak thousands of languages, hail from countless different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds, and make purchasing decisions based on highly personal preferences.
The report positions AI as the mechanism to finally achieve this scale—projecting that generative AI could increase marketing productivity by 5-15% of total marketing spend, representing approximately $463 billion annually.
But here's the twist: The personalization doesn't happen in the marketer's systems. It happens in the conversation between each consumer and their AI assistant.
When someone asks ChatGPT "What's the best project management tool for a creative agency with remote teams?"— that's 1:1 marketing actualized. The LLM synthesizes information about dozens of tools and delivers a recommendation tailored to that specific query, that specific use case, at that specific moment.
A new marketing discipline emerges
This shift demands a fundamental reorientation. Marketers can no longer rely solely on clever funnels and targeted ads. They must ensure their brands, products, and services are comprehensively understood by the AI systems now mediating consumer decisions.
The goal becomes: Clarity over persuasion. Completeness over cleverness. Truth over spin. Every product nuance, every use case, every differentiation point must be published in formats that LLMs can consume, comprehend, and accurately convey to users seeking answers.
The irony is almost poetic: After twenty years of building systems to personalize at scale, marketers now must focus on being *known* and “understood” at scale and let the AI handle the personalization they could never quite achieve themselves.
Will he make it?
The distance to the goal line? It's finally just… within… reach. Just not the way anyone predicted.
