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In an age of precision targeting, why is creativity and effectiveness often best served by the challenge of appealing to people who are never going to buy your product anyway.

For every silver lining, a cloud.

For every ending of world hunger, an obesity crisis. For every labour-saving technology that does away with a world built on gruelling, soul-destroying manual labour, a nation of sedentary slackers. And don’t even get me started on the wonders of AI. But today I want to talk about why targeting our audiences is becoming so much better and easier, and why that isn’t always a good thing.

Today, we live in an age of data capture and social media analytics, in which it’s becoming increasingly possible to speak only to the people you want to speak to, without anyone else being any the wiser. So, for example, every time you go to Netflix, the company’s algorithm-based Recommendation Engine serves up trailers and teasers based on your specific interests and viewing habits. As technology progresses, the content of those recommendations will become increasingly personalised.

There exist whole multimillion-dollar campaigns you are unlikely ever to see, for various reasons. In at least one of those cases, the reason is that you simply aren’t rich enough.

Earlier this year, Campaign Middle East reported on a new digital-screen campaign for Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea project, which is only ever seen by the highest of ultra-high-net-worth travellers. You might travel business class with work. You might even get bumped up to first, if you’re lucky. But you still won’t see it because the work only ever appears in private jet terminals.

It means you’re missing out on headlines like One of Saudi Arabia’s Best-Kept Treasures. This is precision-targeted at the very rich, remember. They like treasures.

So, what’s the problem?

At this point it’s instructive to take a step back, and to look at the way things used to be when media was mass, and when targeting was a blunter instrument.

A good starting point is any of the various Greatest Ads of All Time lists compiled over the past quarter-century. When I do that, what strikes me is both how many of those ads I remember, and, at the same time, how few of them I was actually in the target audience for at the time.

As a teenager, I wasn’t going to be doing the Shake’n’Vac any time soon. Nor was I motivated to experience the happiness that was a cigar called Hamlet. All these years later I’ve still never bought or smoked a single cigar. Or a cigarette, even after all those Silk Cut ads, which I also loved, and still do. And despite the fact that Carlsberg’s Old Lions advert (2006) is way up there on my list of all-time favourites, I’ve never been much of a Carlsberg drinker, or a football fan.

Paying for ads to be seen by people who’ll never buy your product used to be almost inescapable. Today, not so much so. And in many ways that’s a good thing.

And yet. And yet.

There’s something in broad-audience advertising that tightly-targeted work often fails to match.

The novelist Lee Child sees a parallel in the world of books. Stung by criticism that popular writers’ multimillion-selling thrillers are less good than the kind of books that win literary prizes, he says:

“Why do people think it’s easier to do something that has to satisfy a large amount of people as opposed to something that has to satisfy a very small amount of people? We are catering for a large market. We have got to have a product in the market that works, that is accessible, and that is enjoyable for the greatest number of people. It’s like the rings of Saturn. There are habitual, skilled readers at the centre. Then, as you move out from the centre, there are the people who quite like reading from time to time, until you reach the very edge of the universe, where there are those who read just one book a year. To satisfy that span of readers is a lot harder than to satisfy a tiny elite.”

The rings of Saturn analogy is an interesting one, both in the sense of the layers of target audience from the most committed to the most distant, and also in the sense of the gravitational relationship between them. Because people talk to each other. We share a culture. People who would never buy your product talk to people who might do.

In creating work capable of appealing across the spectrum, we create the conditions for an interconnected society of shared values in which our product has a place.

You may never drink Guinness. You may think it too dark and heavy. But if you’ve seen AMV’s iconic Surfer ad (1999), you’ll have a set of emotions about the brand, and they will come into play when one of your friends orders a Guinness at the bar. It puts what you might call social scaffolding in place. It supports the brand’s drinkers and confirms them in their choice.

This is the value of reaching out, creatively, beyond your core audience. It makes for advertising capable of motivating buyers, while also reaching out into the further corners of the consumer universe to become part of the culture.

I’m not for a moment saying that we ever should or could go back to the way things were. I’m not saying we should even consider giving up on the effectiveness and efficiencies of modern targeting. But by casting our vision wider and ensuring that our creative is capable of reaching not just the people we want it to reach, but others as well, we will make work that is both more creative and more effective.

And if that isn’t a silver lining, I don’t know what is!

First published in WARC  September 2025