Category: Essays

It probably happens to you every business day.

In your inbox – or hopefully sorted out of your inbox – will be an email from someone you’ve never heard of. Maybe you’ve heard of the company they work for, but you’ve never met them.

But somehow, they write as if they’re a long-lost friend. They know where you went to school, what interests you have, who your favorite football team is, or that the weather in your neck of the woods has been rainy this spring.

AI has written that email to create familiarity where no shared history exists.

The problem isn’t the personal details. A lot of them are out there in your LinkedIn bio or on public social media posts.

The problem is that the AI-generated, faux personal email speaks from a level of familiarity it hasn’t earned.

You immediately sense that something is a little off.

The Uncanny Valley

Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori introduced the concept in 1970. As robots got more and more humanlike, he observed that they would eventually reach the stage at which their almost perfect resemblance to humans would change our affinity to them to revulsion.

He illustrated this with a graph: as something becomes more humanlike, our affinity rises – until it suddenly drops when it feels almost, but not quite, human.

Mori’s term for this in Japanese was bukimi no tani which was translated into “uncanny valley” a few years later.

The Example That Made the Term Famous

The 2004 animated movie The Polar Express became the example for this phenomenon. The motion-capture CGI that was used was technically advanced for that era. The characters were nearly human – but not quite.

Eyes lacked depth. Emotional cues felt missing. Movements seemed subtly robotic.

Realism without life feels unsettling. The closer something signals “human,” the more sensitive we become to what’s missing.

This was the uncanny valley on the big screen in theaters nationwide.

My Encounter with the Uncanny Valley via Email

I described this in detail in this website’s anchor essay. (If you haven’t read it, it’s the place to start on this site.)

I received an email from a financial tech company from a sales development representative mentioning my alma mater and asking if I participated in an annual event there.

I wrote back telling him it was after my time there that the event started, and didn’t think much of it. I figured that he had looked at my LinkedIn and decided to ask.

But then I got a second email with the exact wording as the first. Then a third and ultimately a fourth.

By the second email, I knew it wasn’t human.

How the Uncanny Valley Appears in Communication

AI allows us to create uncomfortable communication at scale. We can use names, schools, roles, trivia, and other personal information to fake familiarity.

People are recognizing the patterns.

It’s plausible if someone is genuinely referring to a shared experience. “I also went there,” or “my spouse did.”

However, a bare reference to something without a reason to include it is performative.

The issue isn’t the information. It’s the familiarity.

Familiarity is being performed instead of earned.

Accuracy Isn’t the Problem

The details about you and your work, school, or interests may well be factually correct. The failure is that there is no meaning to that information.

It’s like having a private detective follow you around and write down things about you. The investigator is observing you without your consent and seemingly without purpose. It feels invasive.

Knowing personal facts does not create trust.

A shared purpose creates trust.

Trust, Asymmetry, and Boundaries

This unearned familiarity with someone is a great way to erode their trust.

Trust is asymmetric: earned slowly, lost instantly.

Using personal data in an appropriate way requires careful judgment.

Let’s use a sports example. If I ask someone I’ve recently met who their favorite baseball team is, that’s building a relationship. If I declare to that new acquaintance that I know they are a Mets fan and ask if they’ve ever been to Citi Field, then it becomes intrusive.

This is what the message is really saying:

I can know things about you without caring how that feels to you.

The availability of data does not grant permission to use it. That’s letting efficiency replace care and judgment, and people feel it immediately.

Repetition Reveals the Machine

If someone were to receive a single email with some personal information or trivia, it might seem odd, but also not unreasonable. That was my thought in the example above.

But we’re beyond the point at which people receive that single email. Email personalization is now built into email and CRM platforms.

The repetition of emails with irrelevant personal information has exposed the pattern. The sheer volume has lifted the mask.

People receive dozens of “personalized” messages using the same popular tools, the same templates, and following the same structure.

The personalized marketing message has become its own genre. People react with, “Oh, it’s another one of these.”

And the irony is that personalization only works when it’s rare and human.

Using automation to “personalize” has made it common and synthetic.

Once Detected, Trust Collapses Quickly

Trust drops sharply once artificiality is detected.

At scale, that loss may not be recoverable.

These gains in efficiency are dwarfed the trust they destroy. The low response rates may be self-inflicted by marketing and sales communication that feels fake.

It’s not that people are harder to reach. People are actively protecting themselves.

The Quiet Reversal

Less personalization can feel more human.

Familiarity should follow contact, not precede it.

Referencing shared experience is appropriate. Pulling personal details out of thin air is intrusive.

Automation imitates care. It does not create it.

Most growth efforts fail because organizations optimize parts of the system — leads, clicks, activity, or pipeline — while degrading the whole. This creates motion that looks like progress but actively obscures reality.

If you work in sales, you’ve probably used a CRM. It tracks contacts, interactions, and forecasts, giving managers visibility into activity.

But it can also be deceiving.

Busy dashboards feel reassuring. Motion feels like momentum. Visibility gets mistaken for effectiveness.

For managers, that data provides comfort. But dashboards invite constant checking, creating the illusion of control.

The Illusion of Improvement

With a CRM, lead tools, and AI-generated lists, activity increases. More leads. More outreach. More reports.

But those numbers don’t answer the right question: Are we contacting the right people, or just measuring motion instead of signal?

One media sales CRM platform measures “asks made” — how much business a salesperson asks for in a week. One owner told me that $10,000 in asks typically produces $1,500 in revenue.

That 15 percent close rate reveals the problem.

If you’re being measured on asking, you’ll ask, regardless of customer fit.

The metric becomes a substitute for effectiveness.

Trying harder gets rewarded even when it fails.

The Trap of Part Optimization

This is part optimization: improving one step of a system without reference to the constraint.

A bigger hose won’t get you more water if the nozzle is too small. A larger truck won’t haul heavier loads if the engine doesn’t have enough power.

More sales calls won’t help if they’re made to the wrong people.

More leads won’t help if they overwhelm the system’s capacity.

Optimizing a non-constraint makes the system worse.

The part improves. But the whole degrades.

Funnels as Part Optimization Machines

This shows up clearly in sales funnels.

Funnels are designed to move people through stages efficiently. But when they optimize flow instead of fit, they fill with noise.

Without strong filtering, unqualified prospects enter the system and must be removed later.

Sales teams become janitors, cleaning up preventable errors.

Human judgment gets used to repair what the system should have prevented.

Filtering After Entry Is Not Filtering

Filtering after entry isn’t filtering. It’s rework.

Once a human touches a bad lead, the cost is already incurred: time, attention, energy, opportunity.

If a human has to disqualify it, the system has already failed.

Blaming People for System Failures

W. Edwards Deming demonstrated this decades ago.

I was fortunate to see him run the Red Bead Experiment in person. Workers were praised or blamed for outcomes they couldn’t control. The system determined the result, not the individual.

Sales organizations repeat this mistake. They blame people for outcomes created by the system.

A funnel full of noise produces low close rates, and salespeople get blamed for failing.

People are punished for structural defects.

(If you haven’t seen it, the Deming Institute has a short video of Deming demonstrating the experiment.)

How Metrics Distort Behavior

There’s a common belief: you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

But metrics don’t just measure behavior — they shape it.

When an activity is rewarded, it increases. Calls get made. Meetings get booked. “Asks” get logged.

Whether they matter or not.

Compliance replaces judgment because people optimize for what is measured.

When metrics are misaligned, they stop revealing reality and start manufacturing it.

We’ve all seen versions of this before.

Early in my career, a colleague said something in a meeting that stuck with me. It ruffled some upper management feathers at the time.

We’re measuring with a micrometer what we’re marking with a grease pencil and cutting with a hacksaw.

The measurements looked precise. The system wasn’t.

Why Leaders Accept This

Dashboards create the feeling of control. Activity provides something to react to. Questioning the system is harder than tracking the numbers.

So leaders accept the outputs as reality.

Dashboards don’t just report the system. They protect it.

You Cannot Optimize Parts Independently

Optimizing non-constraints introduces noise.

To reduce noise, filtering must happen early — before bad inputs enter the system.

Sorting later is institutionalized waste.

Any system that cannot say no early will confuse activity for growth.

And when metrics can be satisfied without judgment, judgment disappears.

If you’ve driven on an interstate highway on a holiday weekend, you’ve likely encountered this: standstill traffic seemingly for no reason.

On a lightly-traveled road, a driver tapping the brakes barely affects anyone else.

But when traffic is dense and every lane is full, that little tap can ripple backward for miles, creating a traffic jam with no visible cause.

When there is no slack left, small inputs create outsized effects.

The Disappearance of Margin

In bumper-to-bumper traffic, there is no buffer between vehicles, and the interstate grinds to a halt.

Something similar happens with humans. When our attention is saturated, there is no buffer. Only collision.

We face a constant sequence of inputs competing for our attention. It’s not just about screens. Earbuds deliver a constant stream of audio. Display advertising on roads and in airport terminals demands to be noticed. We watch on our phones and consume content on any device, all while marketing messages try to squeeze into our lane.

Every new demand crowds something out.

Our attention never gets a chance to pause or breathe.

Defensive Responses

We respond defensively to saturation.

We switch tasks or multitask just to keep up. That’s not a strategy for success. It’s a survival response.

What is the result? Deep work becomes impossible. Fatigue sets in. We become distracted or irritable.

There’s a persistent feeling of being behind.

The devastating part is that it isn’t particular to you. Look at self-help books on how to get things done or how to concentrate. It’s widespread.

But it’s probably not your fault. This feeling of being always behind is because of the saturated system we’re immersed in. It’s not your motivation.

Why This Feels Personal (But Isn’t)

When systems overwhelm us, we blame ourselves. We internalize the stress of the system as personal inadequacy.

It feels personal because the system has no visible boundary.

We might say to ourselves, “I just can’t concentrate,” or “Something’s wrong with me.”

But it’s not like something about human wiring suddenly changed.

Our biology isn’t meaningfully different from that of our ancestors. Yet our hunter-gatherer predecessors or our agrarian forebearers never had the stimulus overload of our saturated senses.

Attention Buffers

We need buffers.

I was reminded of my time as an engineer at a General Motors plant in the 1980s and 1990s. During a building renovation, our department moved to a different part of the building. We needed new office partitions and discovered older ones in storage that could be reused by replacing the original 1970s colors with new fabric.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the old and now refurbished partitions were five feet high instead of four.

The difference became noticeable immediately. The higher panels blocked visual interruption from co-workers in adjoining cubicles or from others walking by. There was better sound buffering. Staggered entrances to each engineer’s space cut distractions even more.

Our ability to concentrate improved. These small buffers dramatically reduced cognitive load.

The trend has been in the opposite direction. Open floor plans are promoted as increasing collaboration while often serving mainly to reduce real estate costs.

Worse, though, are modern digital environments. Constant email notifications and always-on chat services ironically reduce slack and eliminate buffers while preventing us from concentrating.

The floor space may be cheaper, but the cognitive cost has risen.

Buffers protect human attention. When they disappear, every message competes at once.

Why Trust Is What Really Matters

How does all of this overload affect trust?

Overloaded systems reject marginal messages simply to survive. Messages that don’t fit don’t just fail. They degrade trust.

If you are reaching the wrong audience, you’re damaging trust. Marketing diapers to young bachelors won’t make them admire your absorbency.

People trying to unwind or relax aren’t going to react positively to your B2B pitch at 11 p.m. on the couch. You’ll squander their trust.

When everything competes at once, people stop trusting anything.

Saturated attention doesn’t just reduce effectiveness. It erodes trust.

Trust has become the most valuable commodity in messaging.

How many times have you heard the myth about people having attention spans shorter than goldfish?

We keep saying people can’t pay attention anymore.

What’s actually happened is that their attention is already taken.

The Wrong Diagnosis

We are blaming human behavior instead of confronting this binding constraint: there is no more attention left to give.

Attention didn’t disappear. It got filled to overflowing.

Calling this a behavior problem lets us off the hook. It allows us to blame people for failing to focus instead of questioning the system.

What has happened is that attention has gotten saturated. What’s left is more and more media and messages slicing off tinier pieces of the attention pie.

Attention Has a Fixed Upper Bound

Attention has a hard ceiling, and we’ve reached it. Subtract sleep, work, driving, and other obligations, and what’s left of our 24-hour day is already fully allocated.

Labor can scale. Capital and output can scale. AI can scale seemingly infinitely.

There is no amount of tooling to create a 25th hour in the day.

Attention cannot scale.

Fully Allocated Attention Changes the Rules

In a fully-allocated system, every new message displaces something else. Every interruption replaces a prior commitment.

Modern advertising doesn’t pause our experience; it interrupts it.

For example, pre-roll ads stop a video while you wait for the countdown to let you click through. People then pay premiums to escape those ads.

We no longer have the luxury of quiet discovery.

Every medium demands our attention.

And annoyance as a reaction to those messages is a rational response.

Why More Effort Stops Working

The response to marketing messages being clicked past or ignored is often to ramp up the level of effort with more messages, more media, more socials, and more targets.

However, more effort without using judgment threatens to worsen the outcome.

Effort without judgment doesn’t break through saturation; it compounds noise. Amplifying the wrong message is likely worse than staying quiet.

Trust is fragile, and noise degrades it faster than silence.

The wrong audience, or the wrong moment, or the wrong framing can destroy the message.

That actively works to erode trust.

The Reframe

Nothing is wrong with people. It’s that our environment has changed.

People didn’t get dimmer. Their attention got divided.

Instead of blaming people for failing to pay attention, we have to use judgment in our message. Message, medium, and marketing cadence either reinforce trust or erode it.

When attention is fully allocated, attention itself is no longer the lever that makes our message heard.

Signal quality and judgment become the constraint.

Marketing didn’t break.

Attention ran out.

The tools are better than ever, the execution is sharper than ever, and yet results are flatter, slower, or declining.

It’s not that marketers don’t have the talent, or the tools, or the data. We can create, measure, and attribute faster and with higher production value than we ever could before.

Photo shoots and cinematic films are done for nearly nothing with AI tools, but the effectiveness has disappeared.

The problem isn’t our capabilities. It’s not a competence failure.

The problem is that people have run out of attention to give.

Attention has always been finite

Attention has always been finite. We just didn’t operate at its limits before.

When advertising was found just in newspapers and magazines, maybe handbills and billboards, the message did not absorb all of peoples’ attention.

But then more channels arrived. Radio, movie theaters, television.

We added cable TV, streaming video, web advertising, and eventually social media, bringing us a torrent of marketing messages.

Human attention cannot scale like microchips or software or bandwidth.

Doomed by the doom scroll

The advent of the iPhone didn’t initially create an attention problem. But once the app store allowed people to install social media apps and infinite scroll was invented, we were hooked.

Even digital advertising seemed innocuous at first.

I remember at the start of Google Text Ads how excited we were at our college hockey website to be able to monetize our content. At the start, everyone noticed the ads because they were new and novel.

Sometimes they were downright funny, like the time an article about the Minnesota Golden Gophers hockey team resulted in a “contextual” ad for getting moles out of your lawn.

Eventually those were replaced by display ads, video ads, popups, and interstitials. The drive for more advertising revenue against declining rates caused publishers to saturate their sites with ads.

And now people don’t even notice ads except to get them out of the way.

We went from novelty to clutter to invisibility.

Once Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok came along, there came an endless scroll of advertising messages using up any spare supply of our time.

Every new channel promised more reach, more precision, and more efficiency — and delivered all three, right up until attention became saturated.

It has become a battle for an ever-decreasing share of our ability to pay attention.

Attention didn’t scale. Message volume did.

That mismatch now defines the system.

Entertainment, information, and marketing compete simultaneously to steal our attention.

No wonder it feels overwhelming.

When attention is scarce, misalignment gets punished

This bombardment of irrelevant communication doesn’t just fail. It harms.

What once passed unnoticed now creates irritation, rejection, or negative association.

Life Magazine and other large format weeklies of the 20th century had large, full-page ads.

As someone would slowly flip through an issue, they’d turn the page to some striking artwork and riveting copy. Maybe it would be an appliance ad with a Hollywood celebrity in a fancy kitchen. Or a crooner advertising his favorite cigarette brand.

Or automobile advertising with beautiful photos or paintings of the latest model with emotionally stirring ad copy.

Maybe you weren’t going to be in the market for a Cadillac that year. Or ever. But there was aspiration and reputation-building and entertainment in that quiet ad that grabbed a couple of minutes of your attention.

And if you weren’t interested in Kelvinator refrigerators or Chesterfield cigarettes, you could just turn the page. You weren’t offended by the ad; you just moved on.

Today, what once passed unnoticed when you turned the page or waited for the commercial to end, instead creates irritation, rejection, or a negative association.

A well-known marketing consultant and writer constantly pushes the need for more social media output from brands so that they can reach people “consuming content.”

But do you really want multiple reels from a B2B brand in your Instagram feed at 10:30 p.m. as you doom scroll on the couch? Even worse, do you want to be bombarded?

That wrong message at the wrong time becomes an annoyance. Trust in your brand is tarnished, if not destroyed.

Marketing and sales are both breaking for the same reason

What’s breaking marketing is also breaking sales: both depend on scarce attention and must preserve fragile trust.

The inability to reach people on the phone has created an onslaught of cold email, leading people to use automation to filter and categorize email to wade through their saturated inboxes.

Often the cold emails lack creativity. “We can save your company money and improve your operating efficiency. Worth a chat?”

Then there’s almost-human automation and shallow personalization to convince you that there’s a real person on the other end. But that can backfire, too.

I remember a few years ago when a business financial technology company reached out to me early in the days of personalization.

The email started like this, with a mention of my alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology:

“Hi Ed – Noticed you went to RIT – did you ever get to compete in the Mud Tug? Looks like a blast. I’d probably end up throwing away most of my clothes after though.”

I wrote back and noted that the Mud Tug started as a tradition well after my era.

The same company had sales development reps contact me by email three more times in the next year-and-a-half and each began with, “Hi Ed – Noticed you went to RIT – did you ever get to compete in the Mud Tug?”

When the fourth one wrote, I did reply: “You’re actually the fifth person to reach out to me from [company name] and the fourth to start the email sequence with the same paragraph about the RIT Mud Tug.”

I suppose if a fellow alum reached out, it might be helpful. But random information like that doesn’t make it seem personal; it makes it cringey.

Automated and irrelevant personalization just feels wrong, and people sense it immediately.

That slightly uncomfortable feeling has been called the “uncanny valley.” Things get so close to real, but just enough shy that it feels a little off.

And it destroys the valuable asset of trust.

More is not the answer

Because attention is the constraint, a volume-first messaging strategy accelerates failure. More channels, more frequency, and more content increase noise faster than they increase impact.

I mentioned the channel-context mismatch with B2B ads showing up in leisure feeds. Some channels are not the right ones for your brand.

There’s also the danger of “frequency fatigue.” Increasing the number of times I get a message about a brand I’m not interested in just decreases my interest and the brand’s reputation.

More personalization is not the answer, either, especially the shallow kind. Personalization without judgment feels intrusive.

What are the implications of all this?

How a message is delivered must be optimized and not maximized.

Diagnosing the customer and business goals prevents us from amplifying the wrong message.

Trust is a precious and limited resource.

Relevance is more important than reach.

A steady, planned cadence is more important than campaigns.

Where we’re headed

The question is no longer how to get more attention. The question is how not to waste the attention you’re given.

In a saturated world, restraint can actually become a competitive advantage.

Marketing redesigned around the constraints of saturation reshapes the logic of growth.

These essays will emphasize timeless principles that last instead of the latest tools and trends.

Above all we’ll treasure that most valuable and fragile quality: trust.