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Marketoonist - Tom Fishburne
Just Circling Back tomfishburne
Former ad copywriter and Gaping Void cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once wrote, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” It’s not just advertising that can be off-putting. The way businesses talk in lead generation is generally worse, partly because there’s the illusion of personalization. AI and personalization tech have made it easy for just about anyone to mention a prospect’s local coffee shop, reference a detail scraped from their website,
11 May 2026 at 11:30

Just Circling Back

11 May 2026 at 11:30

Just Circling Back Marketoonist cartoon

Former ad copywriter and Gaping Void cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once wrote, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.”

It’s not just advertising that can be off-putting. The way businesses talk in lead generation is generally worse, partly because there’s the illusion of personalization.

AI and personalization tech have made it easy for just about anyone to mention a prospect’s local coffee shop, reference a detail scraped from their website, or kinda sorta get an aspect of someone’s business model. (I receive a ton of outreach calling me “Mark” because of “Marketoonist.”)

But it’s often pretty shallow and generic, and still packed with the cliché phrases that have plagued cold outreach since the dawn of marketing time. AI-generated lead generation after all is trained on all the lead generation that came before it.

Paradoxically the tech for personalization has made a lot of personalized outreach feel pretty robotic. The tools designed to sound human can signal the opposite.

In 1970, a Japanese roboticist introduced the concept of the “uncanny valley.” In designing robots to be more human-like, he observed that people respond positively only up to a point.

Then there’s an “uncanny valley” where the “almost-human” design seems creepy and people experience “revulsion.”

We’re in an age of the “uncanny valley” in personalization.

Marketers have always chased the holy grail of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. But much of today’s personalization falls flat. Bad personalization can be worse than no personalization.

It will take more than technology to bridge the uncanny valley of personalization. Applying the newest tools with an outdated mindset won’t give people what they want. At worst, marketers will just be able to annoy people more efficiently.

Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years: