Optimizely’s report The Marketer’s Survival Guide comes out of a two-sided survey — 1,000 UK consumers and 100 UK marketers — and it gets interesting when you put the two sides next to each other. The consumer half delivers the expected picture: 75% regularly find the marketing they receive irrelevant, 69% say the messages are generic and that they get duplicate emails from the same brands, 61% feel overwhelmed by the volume, and 56% say it has become harder to find brands that communicate usefully; 42% disengage when content feels irrelevant and 35% are more likely to unsubscribe after a poor experience. Two AI figures sharpen the picture: 62% trust marketing content less since brands started using AI, and 67% find AI-generated images of people in ads creepy. The marketer half reads like a confession: 60% say they launch campaigns without the time or data to optimise them, and 66% say juggling multiple tools and platforms creates unnecessary work. Tara Corey, Optimizely’s SVP of marketing, offers a diagnosis that cuts into her own product category: “The irony is that AI was supposed to help fix this, but so far, it’s mostly just helped marketers make more of the same.”
It’s worth keeping in mind that the research is published by a company selling personalisation software; even so, its value sits in the second question most surveys of this kind never ask. Irrelevance is usually framed as a targeting problem: we reached the wrong person, let’s fix the data. These numbers point somewhere else — that 60% isn’t saying it reached the wrong person, it’s saying it shipped before it was ready. Relevance, in other words, is an output of tempo, not of targeting. If the calendar demands four campaigns a week, four go out whether or not there is thinking or data to feed them; what consumers call junk is often not badly targeted but prematurely born. This is the marketing-side mirror of the code abundance picture elsewhere on this board: as production gets cheap, the scarce thing isn’t production, it’s verification. AI moves that equation in one direction only — it raises the volume, not the readiness threshold. The question to ask inside a marketing team is no longer “how do we ship more,” but “who stops the thing that shouldn’t ship.”