Essay
Marketers: Stop Personalizing and Get Personal.
Your personalized outbound is bumming me out.
If you’re anything like me, your inbox got more depressing this year: piles of personalized outreach built to look like a human noticed you, when it is painfully clear that none did. Operationalized deception is a bummer.
Doctors, generals, executives, and anyone with the power to write a big check are all being buried under the same shallow AI-written comms mentioning a surface-level detail.
It sucks. It’s everywhere. It’s not slowing down.
I think it’s also an opportunity.
While the world invests in what is shallow, easy, and cheap, winning communicators will dig deep and get personal.
The good news: AI can help.
The difference
 Personalized |
 Personal |
|
|---|---|---|
| Humanity | A machine filled in a variable | A person spent real time on you |
| Cost | Free, infinite, to thousands | Costly, finite, to one |
| Effort | Anyone can fake it | Harder to fake |
| Feeling | Feels mildly insulting at worst, ignored at best | It feels genuinely validating and exciting |
| Value | Falling | Rising |
Marketers know this instinctively. They also know the hard part: explaining it to a C-suite that, rightly, wants measurable outcomes like P&L, funnel conversion, and customer acquisition cost, not unmeasurable emotions.
Really, that emotional read is a tool for the marketer. Its greatest use right now is confidence: it tells you the bet will pay off before the numbers can.
You feel the difference before you can measure it. The replies, the meetings booked, the pipeline, all come downstream.
A borrowed lens
It is fair to be skeptical of operationalizing something as human as emotion into a business process. Fortunately, there is precedent. Game designers have spent decades doing exactly that, and they have a framework for it: MDA, for mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics.
Mechanics are the rules and the pieces, the part the designer builds. Dynamics are the patterns of behavior that emerge once people actually play. Camping in a shooter is a dynamic: no one designed it, it just appears. Aesthetics are what the player feels.
The designer works from the mechanics up. The player learns the mechanics, plays them out, and feels the aesthetic. The two sides start at opposite ends and meet in the middle, at the dynamics.
Mechanics
↔
Dynamics
↔
Aesthetics
Communication is the same game. The mechanics are the words and formats you can send, and AI just made those nearly free and nearly infinite. But the dynamics, how people behave, and the aesthetics, what they feel, are still human.
The mechanics changed. The game did not. It is still one person trying to make another feel something.
The easiest way to tell if you have a shot at that is time. Personal, human time. That is the tell, and the economist Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize for the idea underneath it:
The tell
“A signal will not effectively distinguish one applicant from another, unless the costs of signaling are negatively correlated with productive capability.”
What stays human
There is a whole field devoted to this: semiotics, the study of signs. It is what explains why an expensive watch, or a black belt, works as a signal: a piece of shorthand that tells other people something true about you without a word.
They work because they are hard to earn. Human time is the same. The people who do not care will not spend it.
There is a second lens I like for understanding what will and will not resonate. The writing teacher and novelist Janet Burroway has a line in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft: “In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death.”
Trouble is uniquely human. A landscape can be beautiful, but it will never be tragic, and it will never be funny. Sales and marketing are narrative based, and nothing carries dramatic or narrative energy without human involvement. Meaning does not live in the scenery. It lives in the connection between people.
AI has made it easier than ever to feed the machines that harvest human attention in vast quantities. The result is a flood of cheap content and a reader who has learned to discount all of it.
So work from a safe assumption: no one is fooled by your digital communication. If that is not true yet, it will be soon.
What to do instead
The opportunity, as usual, asks for the courage to break from the herd. Seek out the communication where the human time investment is self-evident: effort, attention, reflection, a decision about this specific person.
There are companies that will fake that for you. One sells machine-written notes in imitation handwriting. It is mind-boggling, a little hilarious, and a time bomb that will backfire on you: the whole conceit is predicated on deception. The value was that a person showed up. Outsource that, and the only thing left to discover is the lie.
So spend the time. Block an hour a week for human communication, the way you block a board meeting, and protect it.
Try it now
Skill: Run 1:1 connection workshop
Google Calendar required
CRM connection required
Web access optional
A skill that runs you through a focused hour of one-to-one, personal communication. It helps you find the people who will benefit most, then walks you through the execution.
# Skill: Run the 1:1 Connection Workshop You are my facilitator for a focused, one-hour session. Move me through sending as many genuine, one-to-one messages as we can fit in the hour, each one specific to the person receiving it. Quality first: if a message could go to anyone, it does not go out. ## Objective By the end of the hour I have personally reached several real people (customers I have not spoken to lately) with messages that are specific, warm, and free of any ask. Keep me moving so I finish several, not one. ## Context to gather first 1. My voice. Load my Splendid voice profile and write everything in it. If I do not have one, tell me to build one at https://splendidengines.com/tools/voice-profile/ and, until I do, keep the voice warm, plain, and free of corporate filler. 2. My hour. Confirm a free 60-minute block on my calendar this week and title it "1:1 connection." 3. My people. From my CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce), pull 8 to 12 contacts with a lifecycle stage of Customer and a reachable address (email, phone, or mailing), favoring those with no logged activity in 60+ days. Show me the shortlist and let me triage who is in. 4. A reason for each. For every person I keep, find one true, specific thing to acknowledge: a promotion, a work anniversary, a launch, an award, a personal milestone. Pull it from web research or their CRM notes. If nothing turns up on the person, use their company's latest news. A simple, honest check-in is always a valid reason. ## Instructions: run these phases - Phase 1, Setup (~5 min): confirm my voice profile and the time block. - Phase 2, Shortlist (~10 min): present the candidates and let me pick who is in. - Phase 3, The loop (rest of the hour), one person at a time: a. Offer me two or three topics drawn from the research or CRM notes. b. Recommend the format that fits how I can reach them and the effort I want to spend: a handwritten note, a voice memo, a live call, or a short personal message. c. Draft the message in my voice. d. Give me the exact next step to send it, then log the touch back to the CRM record. - Phase 4, Wrap (~5 min): tally who I reached, queue who is next, and book the next session. ## Rules - One person at a time. Never batch, template, or merge-field. - Every message names a specific, true detail about the recipient. No generic praise. - No pitch, no ask, no call to action. This is appreciation, not outreach. - Match my voice profile exactly. Never invent facts; if you are unsure of a detail, ask me or leave it out. - Protect the clock. Timebox each person so I finish several. ## Output, each round The person, the chosen format, the topic you used, the full draft in my voice, the exact send step, and a one-line CRM log entry. At the end of the hour, return a tally of messages drafted and a short queue for next time.
Want every draft to sound like you, not a template?
Build your voice profile →
The fakeability matrix
If you’re not sure where to start, plot every format on two axes: how much human effort a message takes, and how evident it is that a real person, not an AI, actually made it. They spread out. The cheap corner, low on both, is where AI floods and where value is sliding. The far corner is the part it cannot fake, and the part worth more by the day.
AI comment
Generic DM
Mass email
Personal email
Voice memo
Newsletter
Gift
Podcast
Real letter
Live call
Handwritten note
In-person meeting
A few of these are not one-to-one at all. A newsletter, a podcast, a real conversation: they reach many people at once, but they still run on visible human effort, and you can feel it. Real people sharing real insight, in a way AI cannot convincingly fake. That is why they sit high on evidence even when they scale. The market agrees: Riverside, a platform built for recording real human podcasts and video, raised $30 million in 2024 to grow exactly that kind of content. The tools for clearly human media are scaling up, not winding down.
AI can flood the cheap end. It cannot counterfeit the expensive end, because the expense is the point.
The honest objection
The strongest case against me is simple. If the reader cannot tell, who cares how it was made? Output is output.
But flood a channel with free words and the words stop working. The one who still spends real time is the one who gets through. You do not win by generating more. You win by being the rare signal that costs something and shows consideration.
I say all this as the co-founder of an AI-native company. Like everyone else, we have the tools for economies of scale, and we use them when it makes sense. We also build humanity into the same engine: real voice profiles, human-level cultural signals, leveraged humanity.
We are not betting on AI instead of people, or people instead of AI. We are betting the winner is the combination, because people follow people.
One move we like: let AI find the people who would get the most from your human time, then spend it there. Keep your efficiency plays. Just stop treating efficiency as the whole game when it comes time for human interaction.
Proof of work
This article is the result of no less than three hours of human time, effort, and attention, with AI tools augmenting it.
It is better than what I would have made alone. It is still me. I went in and backspaced individual words and swapped them by hand.
My hand is in the work. Make sure yours is in yours.