I mostly agree, most of the companies try to personalize marketing on bad data, but I think the main power for personalization is not acquisition but retention. In retention, you already have a lot of data bout the customer you collected yourself.
One of the most interesting usecases of my company (videobolt.net) is personalized videos at scale (via API or one time video creation on a bunch of data). We powered some very interesting campaigns this way.
Since this comment seems popular, this is an example of a campaign we powered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ufTiBRMnxo (we built ~750k personalized videos for this one, all the data in the video is user specific). If you want to discuss something like this, drop an email at [email protected] (or just chat here).
Rendering some stats you have about your users in a "video" (could just as-well be a PowerPoint presentation turned into a GIF) is a pretty weak form of "personalisation".
This perfectly demonstrates the point of this article - it's a canned and mass-produced product.
As far as I understand the article, two main points are that data on which you think you're doing personalization is often inaccurate, and that even if it is accurate you cannot hit the person well enough because that data is not enough.
As said, I pretty much agree on acquisition level, but don't on retention level.
On retention level, data should be good, since you are the one that is collection the data through your app / service usage. You should collect important data and trust your data.
If you are sure you have that data, you may very much provide your customer with interesting personalized marketing experience.
For given example, people use that platform every day, enjoy it, and are proud of their achievements there. They very much liked and shared these videos, as they are telling story of their journey on a platform that is important for them.
PS. I agree this is not for everyone. You should have immersive platform users are spending a lot of time at, with a bunch of interesting data. These would maybe even work on remarketing level, if you collected enough data in your system for given customer.
PPS. And difference between good quality video and PPT / GIF is... just huge.
