Is Broad Spectrum Antibiotic The “Spray And Pray” Of Medicine?

Some 45 years ago, whenever I had a cold, I’d visit my friendly neighborhood doctor in Bombay. He’d prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic drug. For the uninitiated, a broad-spectrum antibiotic is designed to target a wide range of bacteria, both gram-positive and gram-negative, without requiring precise knowledge of which specific pathogen is causing the infection.

He told me his logic for prescribing such an aggressive treatment on the very first visit: “If I were to systematically analyze all the symptoms and try to tie them back to the exact root cause and prescribe the exact medicine for the exact root cause, the entire process will take 7-10 days. Life is very fast paced in Bombay. Nobody can afford to be indisposed for such a long time in this city. Therefore, I prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic, which will attack 3-4 major likely causes. Hopefully, one of them will the real cause, and cure the illness.”

This reminds me of the “Spray And Pray” in Marketing. In this lead generation playbook that’s also known as “Throw Pasta On The Wall, Hope Something Sticks“, a B2B technology vendor blasts a generic message at a large target audience in the hope that the message will resonate with at least some companies in the audience, who will then become “handraisers” i.e. show interest and reach out to the vendor to find out more about its offering.

Spray and Pray is panned by everyone and their dog for being a very lazy way to practise marketing. In an ideal world, a marketer should understand the pain areas of every company in the target audience and craft personalized messages that will resonate with that company. “1-on-1 marketing“, as this practice is also known as, is way more effective than spray and pray. However, in the real world, 1-on-1 marketing aka targeted marketing faces several constraints around privacy, data protection regulations, etc. More in Why Does Spray–And–Pray Marketing Still Work?. While genAI is expected to change this in the future, spray and pray is still in vogue at present.

Likewise, AI-powered precision medicine is expected to help doctors to personalize treatments for individual patients based on their specific situation. However, until it goes mainstream, clinicians themselves admit privately that their present treatments are a form of “Throw Pasta On The Wall, Hope Something Sticks“.