75% of UK consumers regularly receive marketing they consider irrelevant. At first glance, it looks like yet another statistic about poor personalisation. But Optimizely surveyed not only consumers, but marketers themselves. That is where things get much more interesting.
Marketing has been living with a strange contradiction for the past few years. We have never had this much customer data, nor this many tools for analytics, automation, personalisation and content production. AI can now do in minutes what used to take an entire working day. In theory, marketing should be getting more precise. Yet consumers seem to be experiencing the opposite.
According to Optimizely’s research, 75% of UK consumers regularly receive marketing messages they consider irrelevant. 69% encounter repetitive messaging, another 69% say brand communications are too generic and insufficiently personalised, while 61% feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of marketing they receive. The consequences are fairly predictable: when communication becomes irrelevant, 42% of consumers stop engaging with the brand, while 35% are more likely to unsubscribe.
We could stop here with the standard conclusion: brands need to understand their customers better and invest more in personalisation. But Optimizely also asked marketers what their work actually looks like from the inside, and that is where the picture becomes much more interesting.
MARKETERS KNOW THERE IS A PROBLEM. THEY JUST DON’T HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO FIX IT
60% of marketers admitted that they launch campaigns without enough time or data to properly optimise them. 54% move from one campaign to the next so quickly that they do not have enough time to properly evaluate the previous one, while 66% say that working across multiple tools creates additional pressure.
This creates a rather strange system: the marketing team launches a campaign, but there is barely enough time to understand how it performed before the next one needs to go live. The data exists, but it sits across multiple systems. The number of channels, content assets and tools keeps growing, while the time available to ask, “Does our customer actually need any of this?” keeps shrinking.
This is where the problem of irrelevant marketing starts to look very different. Perhaps it is not only a personalisation problem. Perhaps we have built marketing systems that have become extremely good at producing marketing, while becoming increasingly bad at understanding why they are producing it in the first place.
MORE CONTENT ≠ MORE MARKETING
Over the past few years, the industry has consistently reduced the cost of producing content. First came accessible design tools and automation platforms, then generative AI. Today, creating ten banner variations, twenty headlines, adapting copy for several channels and building another email sequence is technically easier than ever.
That is an enormous opportunity, but it comes with an uncomfortable side effect: when production becomes cheap, it becomes very easy to solve problems with volume. One post is not working? Make five. The email campaign is underperforming? Increase the frequency. Reach is down? Add another channel. Need more personalisation? Generate ten more versions of the message.
As a result, the volume of marketing output grows faster than a team’s ability to analyse its effectiveness. The customer becomes the final link in this production chain, receiving another email, push notification, retargeting ad or post with roughly the same offer. From the brand’s perspective, this looks like omnichannel communication. From the customer’s perspective, it looks like noise.
THE PROBLEM MAY NOT BE THE CONTENT. IT MAY BE THE ARCHITECTURE
At 1Door, this is often how we look at marketing problems. When a business says its content is not working, the problem is not necessarily the content. When performance drops, the problem is not necessarily the advertising. When CRM fails to bring customers back, the problem is not necessarily the email copy. When social media does not convert, the problem is not necessarily SMM.
Customers do not exist inside individual marketing departments. They see an ad, visit the website, read reviews, ask AI, follow the brand on social media, receive an email, leave, return through search, make a purchase and contact customer support. To them, all of this is one brand. Inside the business, however, it might be seven teams, nine agencies, fifteen tools and twenty different KPIs.
Without a shared logic connecting them, every part of the system starts optimising its own small section of the customer journey. SMM increases engagement, performance marketing optimises conversion, CRM focuses on open rates, SEO drives traffic, and the content team increases publishing volume. Every metric can look perfectly healthy while the customer continues to receive irrelevant marketing.
PERSONALISATION DOES NOT START WITH A NAME IN AN EMAIL
We often talk about personalisation as a technology problem: segmentation, CDPs, AI, recommendation engines and predictive analytics. All of these are important, but it is entirely possible to build an extremely sophisticated system that delivers something a person does not need with remarkable efficiency. It is just personalised now.
True relevance starts earlier. It starts with understanding who this person is, what context they are currently in, what problem they are trying to solve, what they already know about the brand, what experience they had at the previous stage and what next action actually makes sense to offer them. Technology can help scale this approach, but it cannot create the logic on behalf of the business.
PERHAPS WE SHOULD STOP MEASURING ONLY OUTPUT
There is another uncomfortable part of this story. Marketing teams are very easy to measure by the volume of work they produce: how many campaigns were launched, posts published, emails sent, creatives produced and channels activated.
It is much harder to measure the time a team spent analysing, researching, testing hypotheses or deciding not to do something unnecessary. In a report, “we decided not to launch the campaign because the data showed we didn’t need it” looks much less impressive than another polished launch, even though the first decision may create far more value for the business.
If the marketers in Optimizely’s research genuinely do not have enough time to analyse one campaign before launching the next, this is no longer just a question of individual performance. It is a question of how the marketing function itself is designed. We have given teams incredibly powerful production tools. Perhaps it is time to give them enough space to think.
INSTEAD OF ANOTHER CAMPAIGN, ASK ONE QUESTION
75% of irrelevant marketing is not simply a problem for British brands. It is a useful symptom of where the entire industry may be heading. The volume of content, automation and customer touchpoints continues to grow, while AI keeps making production faster. This means the biggest marketing shortage of the next few years may have nothing to do with production capacity.
The scarce resource may become the ability to stop and understand what actually needs to be done.
Before launching the next post, email, advertising campaign or new tool, it may be worth asking one simple question: what specific customer or business problem is this solving right now?
If there is no clear answer, perhaps your marketing does not need one more thing added to it.
Perhaps something needs to be removed.
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Source: Optimizely, UK market research, published 3 August 2026.
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