Why More Data Hasn’t Made Marketing Feel More Personal
By Brandy Church, Founder & CEO, ImageBloom
Somewhere along the way, we (us marketers) convinced ourselves that knowing a lot about someone was the same thing as being relevant to them.
I’ve spent my whole career in healthcare marketing, a corner of the industry where that mistake is expensive. Before founding ImageBloom, I ran national ad campaigns for large plastic surgery centers and healthcare brands, then moved into leading patient recruitment at one of the largest standalone research sites in the country. Different audiences, different regulations, same lesson every time: people can tell the difference between being targeted and being understood.
Targeting is not relevance
Most of what gets called personalization is really just precision targeting. We can find the right person more accurately than ever. What we haven’t gotten better at is saying something that matters to them once we do.
I learned this early, running campaigns for plastic surgery. On paper, the targeting was easy. Women in a certain age range, a certain zip code, a certain income. But the people responding to those ads weren’t a demographic. They were someone who had been thinking about a procedure for two years and was still afraid to walk into a consultation. The campaigns that worked didn’t lead with the surgeon’s credentials. They led with that fear, and made it feel normal to have it.
Years later, recruiting for clinical trials, I saw the same thing. A woman living with endometriosis has already been told her pain is normal, seen multiple doctors, and tried a pile of treatments that didn’t work. An ad that says “Do you have endometriosis? Join a clinical trial” is targeted. It’s not personal. It doesn’t acknowledge anything she’s lived.
The version that works sounds like it was written by someone who has sat in a room with her. Because it was.
Why healthcare figured this out first
In healthcare, you can’t spray and pray. Consent is real, not a cookie banner. Every claim has to be defensible. Every message gets reviewed, sometimes by a lawyer, sometimes by an IRB. Those constraints are annoying, and they also force you to do the thing most marketers skip: actually understand the audience before you talk to them.
It’s also a space where the stakes of getting it wrong are obvious. A wasted impression in retail is a rounding error. A missed patient is a person who didn’t find care they needed, or a trial that fell further behind on enrollment. That kind of feedback loop teaches you fast.
It’s why we built ImageBloom around opted-in patients and condition-specific communities instead of buying reach. People who raised their hand and told us what they’re dealing with. When you start from that, you’re not guessing what matters. They told you.
What the rest of marketing can take from this
You don’t need to be in healthcare to close the gap. You need to change what you’re optimizing for.
Stop measuring only how precisely you reached someone, and start measuring whether they felt understood. Those are different numbers, and only one of them predicts whether they’ll come back.
Talk to your customers before you write to them. Not a survey. A conversation. Ten of them will teach you more than ten thousand rows of behavioral data.
And treat consent as a relationship, not a checkbox. The people who opt in on purpose are worth more than the ones who forgot to opt out.
More data was never going to fix this on its own. It just made it easier to be irrelevant at scale. The fix is the same thing it’s always been: know who you’re talking to, and prove it in what you say.