Setting measurable targets

I hate the mass-market objective as it is understood by your regular marketing manager nowadays. Mass market means selling anything to anyone irrespective of the context, of whether that person is open or not to the need for the product or if there is a premise of sale in the life of that target.
I understand and accept the need to create desire for a product where there is none (so we do advertising, so we have no real ethics) but I fail to understand lack of market data when doing it. Too often we have been asked to sell to 18-88, urban rural and elsewhere, all incomes, all social grades "because we need to go mass market with it". And do it all with a TVC.
What follows is a scramble for the universal truth that will convince my grandma and my kid, thousands of pre-launch meetings where everyone has an opinion because, right?, the product is for everyone so everyone SHOULD be asked, production within days because getting everyone's approval is hard, the scramble for crisis management when results are not to par with expectations, firing the agency and moving to the next suckers who cannot say NO.
NO, give me market data and objectives set according to that, before you try to make me sell ice to polar bears.