That's not always true - traditional marketing included things like direct mail, direct calling, door to door sales, etc.
Also, unless you manage your own lead database, targeting to the individual level doesn't really happen in modern marketing systems. You build cohorts like "everyone who downloaded this app and put food as an interest". While it's certainly possible to de-anonymize people occasionally with the advertising data you work with, a) ad platforms never want to give it to you and b) there's an unbelievable amount of noise in the system so you just build programs with the assumption that ~50% of the data is going to be flat out wrong.
Current online adverting targets the individual - irrespective of where they are (what site or app) or what they are looking at.