We’ve got to aim for relevance rather than personalisation: Ajay Dang

“The time to be worried the most is the time when everything is going well,” said Ajay Dang, President and Head of Marketing, UltraTech Cement, as he delivered a thought-provoking session on “The Future of Programmatic Advertising” at the e4m Real-Time Programmatic Advertising Conference 2025. 

Dang stressed that marketers must not lose sight of the fundamentals while chasing new-age digital and programmatic tools.

Read more on Ajay Dang and Real-Time Conference 

He highlighted the industry’s overemphasis on personalisation, calling it a misplaced obsession. “My postulation would be that it’s not personalisation but relevance that we are looking for. And all the digital technologies, all the media, all the programmatic stuff, I think we’ve got to aim for relevance rather than personalisation from a media point of view if we want the good times to continue.”

Drawing from history, Dang used the example of the Ford Model T to illustrate how scaling back personalisation brought affordability, quality, and access to mass markets. “Cars used to cost close to $4,000… then somebody got into removing personalisation from the entire game… it also made cars available for different kinds of segments which necessarily wasn’t such a bad deal for either the market or for the consumer.”

He cautioned against the current programmatic reliance on past data and shallow targeting. “Some of the challenges with the databases which programmatic is being done today are the following, right. It’s data about the past, it lacks context, and it is largely about the transaction rather than the why.”

Dang urged marketers to focus on building brands that stand for something consistent, distinctive, and memorable. Quoting Rory Sutherland, he added: “Propositions need to be consistent, distinctive and you need to be famous for that. Because guess what, being famous and consistent and distinctive does for 95% of the people who are out of market… being famous gives you a huge optionality and it increases your surface area of good things happening to you.”

He pointed out that while technology and data have grown, the true missing link is contextual understanding of the consumer’s life. “It’s not the product that creates value for the customer. It’s the customer’s life context which creates the value and if you see most of the databases which programmatic is built, that context is missing.”

Using Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter as an example, he praised how programmatic and data could be harnessed to solve real consumer problems. “They gathered the context of the customer… gave the customer something useful which was not possible through other mass media and therefore built that entire context.”

In closing, Dang left the audience with a clear call-to-action: “We’ve got to reimagine new use cases for this technology which enables more stuff to create value, not necessarily for the marketer, but for the customer. Are there unsolved jobs that it can do? Can it open new category entry points? If we do that… it can remain good and it can create tremendous value for the customers.”