Over 87% of SG marketers admit to running generic campaigns

Marketers around the globe are struggling to move beyond generic campaigns, but Singapore is feeling the strain more acutely, with sharper gaps in responsiveness, data access and personalisation readiness.

That is according to the latest "State of marketing" report from Salesforce, which surveyed 4,450 marketing professionals across 26 countries

Across markets, the shift towards AI-driven marketing has not yet translated into consistently personalised execution. Nearly half of global marketers admit their campaigns can still feel generic, while many also report inconsistent messaging across channels.

Although three-quarters of marketers globally now use some form of AI, most organisations are still early in full integration, with fragmented data systems and disconnected customer views continuing to limit scale and impact.

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The gap between ambition and execution is already shaping performance. Globally, marketers with unified customer data are significantly more likely to deliver real-time engagement, respond to customers consistently and deploy AI tools such as agents to scale marketing operations. In other words, data maturity, and not just AI adoption, is increasingly defining marketing effectiveness.

Against this backdrop, Singapore stands out as both more advanced in recognising customer expectations and more constrained in meeting them. The report shows that 80% of Singapore marketers say customers now expect two-way conversations with brands, slightly above the global trend. However, execution is lagging, with 86% saying they struggle to respond promptly to customer enquiries, compared to 69% globally. This points to a wider responsiveness gap, where demand for real-time interaction is outpacing operational capability.

The personalisation challenge is also more pronounced locally. While fragmentation is a global issue, Singapore marketers report near-total barriers in execution, with 100% saying they face obstacles to personalisation. These challenges are largely structural rather than strategic, driven by siloed systems, poor data quality and high volumes of unstructured data that limit the ability to build a unified customer view.

Data access remains a key constraint. Only 61% of Singapore marketers have full access to service data, while 58% can access sales data and 57% have visibility into commerce data. These gaps make it difficult to connect customer signals across the funnel, which in turn limits the ability to deliver consistent, contextual experiences.

As a result, 87% of Singapore marketers admit to running generic campaigns, even as most acknowledge rising pressure to deliver more personalised content than they are currently able to produce. At the same time, optimism around AI remains high, with 82% saying they would trust AI to help respond to customers at scale and 81% already using it to support personalisation efforts.

However, the report makes clear that AI alone cannot resolve the issue without stronger foundations. Globally, marketers with unified data are 42% more likely to respond to customers regularly and 60% more likely to deploy AI agents effectively, reinforcing the idea that data unification is now central to marketing performance.

The pressure to deliver relevant, real-time experiences is not just a marketer challenge. It is increasingly a consumer expectation. New research from Omnicom Media found that 78% of consumers in Asia Pacific say a bad advertising experience is worse than seeing no ad at all, while 32% believe poor ads reflect more negatively on the brand than the platform they appear on.

Conversely, 52% say a better advertising experience improves their perception of a brand, and 40% say it makes them more likely to purchase.

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