Why Spray and Pray Marketing Fails in the AI Era

The Gist

Strategy beats volume. Generative AI should sharpen focus and strengthen campaign foundations rather than accelerate unchecked content production.
Buyers are overloaded. High-volume messaging gets ignored, while relevance and clarity earn attention in saturated markets.
Intelligence drives impact. Using AI for research, segmentation and planning produces campaigns that resonate, convert and support real business outcomes.

Generative AI is exacerbating a growing problem in the world of marketing – too much volume.

Spray and pray. Throw spaghetti at the wall. Scattershot. Without exception, that's what the phrase describes when marketing teams focus on their activities rather than on a strategic plan.

While generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude were introduced with the potential to change that situation by allowing companies to automate repetitive tasks and provide additional time for the development of the strategic plan, that isn't what's happened in practice.

Instead, many companies have layered AI on top of already-chaotic processes, increasing the confusion that rapid technological change has already created.

Statistics from Statista indicate that, through 2025, approximately 376 billion messages will be either sent or received each day, and this number will increase to more than 392 billion messages per day by 2026. According to The CMO, nearly half of the B2B buyer population reports an increase in their reliance on content during the research phase of their purchase cycle, but at the same time, they report being overwhelmed by the amount of content available to them. Information overload and content saturation are now recognized as core challenges in marketing, with experts at BIMA describing audiences as "flooded with content but starved for clarity."

The volume is up. The effectiveness is not.

The Noise Is Being Tuned Out
Returning to Marketing Fundamentals
The Practical Shift for AI in Marketing
Making the Transition to Intelligence-Based Marketing
The Path Forward for Marketing, Martech and AI

The Noise Is Being Tuned Out

The influx of buyers has resulted in many of them becoming disinterested.

According to research, 61% of B2B buyers unsubscribe from marketing communications due to overwhelming or disconnected messaging. In addition, 41% of B2B buyers will cease engaging with vendors altogether as a result of the unorganized and complex nature of their buying process. Most telling is that according to a McKinsey report, more than 95% of B2B buyers do not engage with the majority of marketing content, indicating how ineffective brand-centric messaging is at reaching target audiences.

This is the paradox of AI-powered marketing as it is currently practiced. Organizations now have tools capable of producing more content, faster, at lower cost. Many have interpreted this capability as license to flood every channel with messaging. The result is not more engagement but less.

Returning to Marketing Fundamentals

At its most foundational level, marketing is a systematic process used by businesses to create value for their target customers and to provide them with the means to exchange that value through the purchase of the company's products/services. The goal of marketing is to enable companies to create products/services and marketing messages that resonate with customers to the point where it becomes an almost automatic response for customers to make a purchase after considering the offerings from the company.

Notice what is absent from that definition: volume metrics, content calendars filled for the sake of filling them, or the assumption that more touchpoints automatically translate to more revenue.

Generative AI is not a technology designed to help marketers do more. It is a technology that can help them do better. The distinction matters.

From Activity-Driven to Intelligence-Driven

How generative AI helps marketing teams reverse the traditional campaign-planning sequence — moving from tactics-first execution to insight-led strategy.

Strategic Area	How AI Supports the Shift
Campaign Planning Mindset	The shift from spray and pray to surgical strike requires reversing the typical campaign development sequence. Most marketing teams start with activities: What content should we create? How many emails should we send? What channels should we use? To know more about your customer's needs, you need to have data. Before a strategic marketer starts to plan a marketing campaign, they know who their target market is, and they understand the different types of customer segments that exist for each type of product that they are selling and what drives their decision-making.
Target Market Definition	Generative AI excels at this foundational work when prompted correctly. AI can act like an always-on research partner, helping marketers sharpen their understanding of who they're truly trying to reach. It can surface priority segments by industry and company size, illuminate buying-committee dynamics and reveal the real problems and triggers that shape decisions. The value isn't in producing more information. It's in helping teams ask better, more strategic questions.
Buyer Persona Development	AI’s implementation in developing buyer personas goes beyond the creation of a generic persona based upon assumptions. Marketers can utilize demographic information, firmographics, psychographics and objections to create accurate profiles as they relate to specific market segments.
Go-to-Market Planning	Using AI in conjunction with a company’s go-to-market strategy allows marketers to convert knowledge learned from customer and competition insights into actionable, implementable go-to-market execution plans using phased campaigns and budget allocations by channels. The outputs provide customer intelligence-based, rather than guesswork-based, roadmaps.

The Practical Shift for AI in Marketing

What does this look like in practice? Consider a marketing team preparing to launch a campaign for a new service offering.

The activity-driven approach might begin with: "We need 10 blog posts, a six-email nurture sequence and daily social posts for a month."

The intelligence-driven approach begins differently: "Who exactly are we trying to reach? What problems keep them up at night? What would make them pay attention to us instead of the dozens of other vendors in their inbox?"

The first approach produces content. The second approach produces relevance.

AI can support both approaches, but only one is likely to generate meaningful business results. When 95% of marketing content is being ignored, the answer is not to produce 10 times as much content. The answer is to produce content that earns attention because it demonstrates genuine understanding of the buyer's situation.

Making the Transition to Intelligence-Based Marketing

For marketing leaders looking to shift from volume-based to intelligence-based approaches, three principles can guide the transition:

Start With Research, Not Production

Use AI to deepen customer understanding before creating any campaign assets. The effort put into defining target audiences and buyer motivations will result in improved results for your campaigns.

Measure Outcomes, Not Outputs

Instead of measuring the number of emails sent, Facebook posts created, etc., focus on the impact of your marketing efforts on your business by measuring the metrics that matter to your business (qualified leads, conversion ratios, customer acquisition costs, etc.) AI gives marketers an opportunity to create measurement frameworks that relate their marketing effort to their company's revenue.

Treat AI as a Thinking Partner, Not a Content Factory

The greatest benefits of generative AI to marketing aren't faster creation of material but rather providing marketers with more clarity in determining the target audience's needs and the reasons why an audience should care.

The Path Forward for Marketing, Martech and AI

The marketing technology landscape will continue evolving. New AI capabilities will emerge. But the fundamental principles of effective marketing remain constant: understand your customer deeply, communicate value clearly, and earn attention rather than demanding it.

Generative AI gives marketers powerful new tools. The question is whether those tools will be used to amplify strategic thinking or simply to accelerate the noise.

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