At Transmission, we’ve talked a lot about how the B2B buyer journey is changing. But today, I want to look at how the search landscape and the transformational period we’re seeing across both organic and paid.

We work with a variety of B2B clients, all in various stages of their paid search maturity journey. But despite their differences, there’s one key pain point that’s shared across every brief that comes our way:

“How can we safeguard lead quality as budgets tighten?”

The premise

B2B marketers have known how to do this for years, meaning it should be pretty simple… right?

• Primary conversions actions aligned to MQL/SQL… ✅
• Values assigned to show weighted value… ✅
• Smart bidding set to optimize towards pipeline impact… ✅

You follow your process, sit back, and watch that pipeline fill up. It won’t, mind you, because it isn’t that straightforward.

Sure, having an account strategy optimized for lower down the funnel will do what it says on the tin. But value-based bidding strategies rely on consistent, scalable signal volume. Without volume, your smart bidding won’t have enough data to prioritize bids for the users who are most likely to be of market qualified caliber (let alone Sales qualified).

That’s why we help clients integrate their systems into ad platforms directly – allowing them to see the true impact of search to pipeline and revenue. This shift enables optimization beyond surface-level metrics like form fills, moving toward MQLs, SQLs, and ultimately revenue.

In several cases, we’re seeing more promising results generating qualified leads by (funnily enough) not directly optimizing towards MQLs. Remember, the user journey from form to qualified isn’t that linear.

The stages in-between

Think about…

Account creation

Lower down funnel that forms submission, alongside volume. It gives Smart Bidding enough data density to start learning early, before intent has surfaced. Low predictive power per event, but it stabilizes the algorithm while stronger signals accumulate.

Trial activation

Separates those who are only considering from your actual buyers. Someone who creates an account and never activates has told you almost nothing. Activation means invested intent.

Trial completion

The strongest pre-MQL signal, as it mirrors your best existing customers. Build a lookback cohort of trial-complete-to-SQL rates and you’ve got a proxy for pipeline value – without waiting on SQL volume to build.

Content downloads & subscribers

Weaker signals individually but valuable for breadth – keeping signal volume high across the full funnel, not just at the bottom.

All of these points are rich behavioural signals, perfect for feeding into Smart bidding algorithms (don’t forget to assign weighted values).

The fine print

Google’s own guidance recommends roughly 30+ conversions in the trailing 30 days at the campaign level before the algorithm has enough signal to bid confidently. Establishing your MQL rate % will give direction on how many conversions are needed to reach MQL targets – making it easier to strategize across the funnel.

Two such clients (a cybersecurity solutions provider and a data movement provider) took this approach after MQLs plateaued following a strategic shift toward pipeline value. Once we allowed time to calibrate – including removing bid caps so Smart Bidding could fully adjust – we began seeing incremental month-over-month improvements.

So, instead of relying solely on downstream conversions, explore expanding mid-funnel/high intent conversion actions for the purpose of feeding improved performance signals to achieve your goal.

Don’t weight by how low down the funnel a signal is. Weight by predictive likelihood to become MQL, validated against your own data.

Be sure to keep your eye out for the latest announcements from Google on Attribution model & enhanced conversions tracking. And most importantly – get expanding on your conversion capture opportunities across the funnel!

But this isn’t just a badge for the trophy cabinet (although, yes, there is an actual trophy). It’s recognition of the relationship our teams have built with Reddit across our global offices, the investment we’ve made in the platform. The work we’re doing in collaboration with Reddit’s teams to get better at identifying signals, communities, and audiences helps us build advertising strategies that respect the balance between brands and the community environments they show up in.

Media partnerships have always been central to how Transmission works. We don’t treat platforms as line items on a media plan – we treat them as gateways to our customers’ customers. That means investing proper time into every relationship.

From helping platform teams understand our clients’ worlds, sharing honest feedback, shaping better solutions, and working toward a joint vision of what B2B marketing can be, it’s how we’ve built our relationships with LinkedIn, Google, Meta, and a range of other media partners. It’s something we’re proud of, and a big part of what makes us unique. And now, it’s how we’re working with Reddit.

Communities, LLMs & the new buyer journey

The B2B buyer journey doesn’t look like it did even two years ago. Buyers are self-serving more of their research than ever, asking peers for recommendations, discussing options in communities, and increasingly, asking LLMs to summarize categories and shortlist vendors before a brand ever knows they’re in-market.

And here’s the thing: Reddit sits at the center of both shifts.

With more than 26 billion posts and comments on nearly every topic imaginable, Reddit has become one of the most trusted sources of real human perspectives on the internet. Where buyers go when they want the unvarnished truth, not the brochure. For B2B brands, that makes Reddit two things at once: a community platform where buyers and buying groups actively research and interact.

For B2B brands, that makes Reddit two things at once: a community platform where buyers and buying groups actively research and interact.

Why this partnership & why now

At Transmission, we’ve always believed media strategy starts with understanding where your audiences actually are. Increasingly, that’s in communities. B2B communities on Reddit around the exact categories our clients play in: cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, AI, developer tools, and beyond. They’re exploring problems, comparing options, and pressure-testing claims, long before they fill in a form.

Becoming a Gold Agency Partner means we can support clients across that full picture: paid media that reaches the right communities with relevance and respect, and organic strategies that help brands earn credibility in conversations they can’t control.

What it means for our clients

Gold partner status isn’t symbolic. It unlocks tangible value that flows directly to the brands we work with:

Deeper access to data & insights

Richer community, audience, and conversation-level intelligence to sharpen planning and prove where Reddit fits in the media mix.

Enhanced training & enablement

Partner-exclusive learning paths and bespoke sessions with Reddit’s teams, keeping our global specialists ahead of the platform’s fast-moving product suite.

Unrivaled access to alphas & betas

Priority access to new tools, formats, and measurement capabilities as they emerge – so our clients can test what’s next before the market catches up.

Strengthening our proprietary AI-driven solutions

We’re continuing to build MCP and API connection points into our own audience planning and measurement platforms – bringing Reddit signals alongside our existing data partnerships to power smarter, faster, more accountable media decisions.

Where we go from here

Ultimately, this partnership is about our clients. The media landscape will keep shifting – toward communities, toward enhanced discovery, and toward the places where trust is built among people. Our job is to make sure the brands we work with aren’t just present for that shift, but positioned to win from it.

Reddit is where B2B buyers are increasingly doing the work of buying. Now, we’re better equipped than ever to help our clients meet them there.

💡 The short of it

Attribution feels like safety – every pound traced, every lead sourced, and your budget defended for another quarter. But that tidy number ignores the dark research, the Teams links, the coffee shop recommendations. Chris Bagnall argues our addiction to clean measurement is quietly capping growth, pulling budget towards this week’s buyers while brand and demand creation get the scraps. The braver question is that’s actually contributing to growth.

“You’re in a QBR, presenting results. You bring up the attribution dashboard. Every pound accounted for, every lead traced back to a source. Heads nod, the budget survives another quarter, you breathe a sigh of relief. You understand that it’s mostly fiction built to appease those in charge of the purse strings. But it’s the only way you know to defend your budget. ‘Another one down,’ you think to yourself.”

as told by a burnt-out B2B CMO, probably.

I feel like the more senior among you can imagine the scene. But common as it is, it touches on a very important aspect of the modern B2B marketing blueprint I feel we all need to address. Attribution has become the comfort blanket we, as B2B marketers, need to step away from.

We cling to it because it hands us a number we can defend. A meeting we can get through. What it doesn’t shed light on, however, is the more than 80% of the buyer journey that dashboards fail to account for. And that’s the rub – the things that move the business aren’t usually the things you can cleanly measure. That feeling of certainty a dashboard gives you is what stands between you and growth.

What the blanket is hiding from you

Doing just enough to please the C-suite may be enough to earn you another quarter, but it certainly won’t win you any more budget. If you want that, zoom out from what needs to be delivered day-to-day and think more about how your buyers weigh up a decision.

The true extent of the buyer journey: a single considered purchase now runs through a 6-10 person buying group, with Forrester finding there could be up to 13 decision-influencers at the minimum to address.

Most of the B2B buying journey happens in the dark: the months of self-directed research, the link dropped into a Teams channel, the recommendation traded over a coffee. They all happen well out of the reach of your tracking.

You’re fighting for an even slimmer fraction of your audience’s attention: buyers increasingly start a purchase inside an AI Overview rather than on your site, meaning you and your competitors are fighting for a measly 17% of your buyers’ time.

They’re all areas that influence the final decision. And they’re all areas that are hard – or impossible – to track. With last-click (or an opaque ‘data-driven’ model no one can crack) becoming the only attribution models left on Google Analytics, B2B marketers are making decisions based on a very narrow piece of the whole picture.

Safety blanket, yes. Growth engine? Not so much.

The cost of measuring the wrong thing

The challenge isn’t that the dashboard is inaccurate, it’s that it’s persuasive. A tidy number pulls budget towards the handful of people ready to buy this week, while brand, community, and creator work (the things that generate future demand) get whatever’s left over. That’s not a reporting problem – it’s one to do with growth.

What can’t be tracked also greatly contributes to a business’ performance: strong B2B brands outperform weak ones by around 20%, carrying a roughly 65% premium on forward earnings multiples. You can’t put a number on gut feeling, but you can on ensuring your audience has the best impression possible.

Gong is a great example within our industry. In 2019, they coined ‘revenue intelligence’ as a category, and then owned it. They have a loud, founder-led presence on LinkedIn, a proper community built around it, and most importantly, a point of view. They’re all channels a last-click model would have filed under ‘direct’ and that’d be it. No further budget for those activities. And no chance they become the startup-to-hundreds-of-millions-in-ARR-business they are today.

The honest bit

I’ve touched on this throughout the piece, but it’s worth reiterating: Measurement and attribution aren’t useless, but they are only a pinhole view into how a decision comes to be.

The problem with the current approach lies in single-source, last-click certainty – not measurement itself. Better B2B attribution platforms (such as Dreamdata) model the whole account journey far more honestly than Google Analytics or last click ever could.

Now, nothing captures everything. But you can triangulate. Pair better equipped platforms with incrementality and holdout tests, marketing mix modelling, brand tracking, and self-reported attribution. Each is flawed alone, but they beat one tidy number together. That way you build benchmarks from your own data, rather than relying on general, industry-wide trends.

The braver KPI

The real question is simpler, and a good deal more uncomfortable than that slide in a QBR. Is the business growing? Are the right accounts turning up already warm?

Certainty is a report where every pound is accounted for. Growth is backing the work you can’t trace.

This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s Digital Director, David Gyertson.

💡 The short of it

Our field guide rounds up three days across B2B’s biggest pillars: Media, Sales and Creativity. The headline truth? Buyers decide early, from a shortlist of three, mostly before they’re in market. Inside: the shifts reshaping the discipline, the channels worth knowing, and why creativity, trust and customer intelligence now read less like trends and more like the modern B2B job description.

Cannes has always been where businesses of all shapes and sizes strut their stuff. But this year, things felt different.

American brands turned up in full force, bringing athletes, DJs, and A-listers with them to the Palais. There was greater focus on creative merit amongst the awards – and less of them as a result (20,000 in 2026 vs. 27,000 in 2025). And Creators enjoyed as much representation as the Advertisers.

For B2B, though, buyers – and the fact they decide early, from a shortlist of three, mostly before they’re in market – were on the mind.

“Marketing is moving from an attention economy to an intelligence economy – the old game was grabbing attention; the new one is being genuinely useful at the right moment.”

Colin Flemming, CMO, Business at OpenAI

There’s a lot of change happening in our industry. And taken together, they read less like trends and more like a job description for what the modern B2B marketing function should be. So, what’s shifting in B2B?

Creativity

Businesses are finally catching onto the fact that enterprise buyers are still humans making decisions, and that distinctive brands command pricing power.

Trust

From a nice to have to a strategic objective, businesses gain a competitive advantage through credible expertise, authentic customer stories, and consistent brand behaviour.

Content & storytelling

Focus on joining things up across thought leadership, product, advocacy, events, and owned media as buying journeys get longer and messier.

Customer intelligence

Otherwise known as your moat. First-party data still matters, but the edge is where CRM, buying signals, behavioural analytics, and AI inference are combined into one view.

Influence

As AI makes content abundant, expert Creators are key to unlocking authenticity in B2B marketing. People trust people, making Creators a demand engine.

Measurement & alignment

Work with Sales, Product, and Customer Success teams for alignment between marketing metrics and commercial outcomes.

AI

The question has moved from “should we?” to “how do we scale it responsibly, and where’s the P&L impact?”. The consistent answer was to pair it with human judgement to accelerate, not replace, the work.

New channels to know

Our first day dived into all things media, with key themes like: the increasing domination of platforms, data, and tech; streaming and CTV; B2B Creators; and Reddit and TikTok.

The pattern? B2B brands are already executing, whereas platforms are still launching – changing the ask from “which channel?” to “who helps us join it all up, and how?”

Reddit – the channel nobody owns

The Croisette: Recently brought out new ad tools, and Reddit’s own research found half of buyers check AI recommendations there before making a decision. Also brought out ABM measurement.

Our room: A key platform for research and one of the most-cited sources feeding LLMs. The challenge? No single person owns, and any kind of marketing speak is immediately flamed.

The gap? It’s an organizational design problem before it’s a media one. Who owns Community, and how does a brand earn trust there without the polished line?

Streaming & CTV – are you brave enough for the living room?

The Croisette: Agentic CTV and ‘brand inside the show’ – with the living room pitched as the next B2B channel.

Our room: Real appetite, grounded by hard questions on TAM math, and whether the brand belongs there. Essentially, ‘relevance beats raw reach’.

The gap? Easy to say yes in the room. But once everyone leaves, would any B2B brands really do it?

B2B Creators – the necessary discipline to let go

The Croisette: LinkedIn launched a Creator Marketplace built around credible experts and practitioners, not the cheapest reach.

Our room: Real appetite, grounded by hard questions on TAM maths, and whether the brand belongs there. Essentially, ‘relevance beats raw reach’.

The gap? Use metrics that matter: One attendee found referral traffic jumped from 7% to 30% across a three week period – enough to convince a skeptical CEO.

TikTok – the wild west, and a quiet success story

The Croisette: Hard to predict what breaks through. The same content can flop three times and land the fourth, making it tough to defend the ROI.

Our room: Audiences like Developers already live there and use it to learn. That turns TikTok into a credible route to technical audiences.

The gap? Narrow the audience, speak its native language, and treat it as a long game – not a single bet.

The future of measurement

We’ve covered which channels to trust. Now, the question becomes: who’s neutral when every platform has its own agenda? The answers had less to do with data, and more to do with people.

Short-term proof for long-term bets

How do you defend a channel whose payoff is 12-18 months out, within a business that runs quarter to quarter? Find the small metrics that matters to the person signing the cheque, use it to buy another quarter, and keep the long-term work running quietly underneath.

The buying group blind spot

Events are easy – you know the accounts and personas in the room. Everywhere else, B2B marketers admit they can’t measure how much of the buying committee they’ve actually reached, calling it a data unification problem, not a data availability one.

Trust, not data, is the tallest hurdle

Data quality isn’t the hard part when it comes to attribution. It’s whether Sales and Marketing decide to trust each other. In B2B, there’s a temptation to over-complicate the story with MQLs and models that lose internal Sales stakeholders in the first two minutes.

The counter-intuitive winner? Saying ‘we got this wrong, let’s pivot’ builds more credibility with the C-suite than any polished dashboard.

The realities of Marketing-Sales alignment

For the conversation we keep having, some familiar goals: alignment, a seat at the table, and Marketing as a value driver. But also three moves that can truly move it forward.

Sell the budget to the CRO, not CFO

Don’t defend budget in isolation. Let the person who sells for a living advocate the investment that protects their number and builds next year’s pipeline

Don’t defend the budget in isolation

Agree on one to two metrics the Marketing, Sales, and Finance teams sign up to. Go beyond ‘alignment’ as a word on a slide and get everyone following the same north star. ‘Marketing up, P&L down’ is the scenario every CFO fears.

Make data unification the unsexy priority

Unglamorous but essential: tie marketing data to sales data so everyone sees through to pipeline and closed deals. Terminology also matters: agree on what key metrics and terms really mean.

Finding a story only your brand can tell

Few B2B marketers can, and that gap is the point. That unique narrative becomes your north-star ‘big idea’, earning its keep as something you run campaigns under for a couple of years – allowing you to experiment elsewhere.

The rise of community influencers

‘Community building’ was everywhere on the Croisette. But not every business has a large marketing team. For smaller operations, try advisory boards. They aren’t necessarily easy to manage, but they also don’t need the scale necessary to build a community.

Leveraging your C-suite is a good start. They tend to be leaders in their own field, giving your business access to their network of decision-makers.

Is the ‘big idea’ still a strategy?

The ‘big idea’ is great in theory. But does it still hold up today? AI makes it easier to do more in less time. However, exceptional ideas take longer to produce – and only exceptional ideas have the legs to last more than 12 months.

💡 The short of it

B2B content investment keeps climbing, yet only one in eight teams rate theirs highly effective. Chris Bagnall argues the culprit is the format we can’t quit (the gated eBook) and the lead-gen machinery built around it: scoring models that mistake downloads for intent, KPIs that reward hollow metrics over real connection. His fix? Build content that earns attention on its own merits — web-first, citable, useful — rather than feeding a funnel that keeps you in the noise.

Here’s a fact that should keep more B2B CMOs up at night: The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found that while more than a third of B2B teams consider content a top three area for investment, only one in eight rate theirs as ‘highly effective’. Most of us settle for the tepid middle ground of ‘somewhat effective’.

So, we recognise the value of content. We spend the money. Yet, by our own admission, we aren’t exactly confident it will work. Our instinct tells us the message was wrong, that the targeting needs to be honed. That once we get them right, things will fall into place.

Unfortunately, the instinct is wrong.

That certainty – about format, gating strategy, and scoring model – stops us from questioning whether any of it really connects. It’s a very B2B problem to have. But because certainty, as ever, is the enemy of growth, it’s one we must dissect.

The format we just can’t quit

Let’s start with the emblem of B2B content certainty: the trusty eBook.

It’s a format that’s survived every trend cycle and every “is this dead?” think-piece thrown its way. Supply-side, it makes sense – the CMI once found that almost two-thirds of B2B marketers produce thought-leadership eBooks, and almost half rate it among their best-forming formats. It’s the same distribution-side too: a single eBook pulls around 859 registrations on NetLine’s syndication network vs. just 63.5 for a whitepaper. All is well then, surely?

Not quite. The same NetLine data also shows that syndication-network registrations aren’t market demand: eBooks are absent from every list of formats that correlate to near-term purchase, and they’re also the format with the slowest request-to-open time. They’re the most dominant signal but also the emptiest one – and people aren’t even reading what they download.

eBooks have become the face of a self-reinforcing ecosystem that rewards larger, often meaningless metrics for the sake of satisfying internal KPIs. And it all links back to how the marketing function has been reduced to a lead generation machine (we’ll get there later). Marketers look for ways to hit their lead quota, and lead-gen vendors are more than happy to oblige.

To be clear, it’s not long-form content I’m arguing against. It’s the format. A locked PDF can only tell you if it was downloaded and opened – not how it was read or where buyers lost interest. Worse, they make you functionally invisible to the LLMs crawling every corner of the internet to decide whether you should be recommended to a buyer.

Depth doesn’t have to live in a PDF. If those downloading eBooks aren’t ready to buy, why gate? And if you aren’t gating, why use a PDF at all? The format only survives because of the system around it. So, let’s dismantle that next.

The system built around it

The eBook persists because of the machinery bolted to it: lead scoring, MQL targets, the sales handoff. It’s all based on the shaky assumption that content consumption signals purchase intent. The trouble is, it doesn’t.

B2B often ranks eBooks among its best-performing formats. But dig a little deeper and we find that we’ve quietly defined “best performing” by the one metric the format reliably drives: the download. It’s neat, circular, but completely hollow – an attribution illusion rooted in how things work in our industry.

Marketing has become a volume machine, measured on form fills and optimised to the last click. We can’t pin a sale to one asset because buying involves many people, many touches, over many months. The download, on the other hand, gives us a discrete, attributable data point, and we’ve been trained to read that as proof of contributing to pipeline. When that’s the KPI you’re held to, the rational move is to keep the machine running.

It’s the long-game challenge scaled down. Because the business focus is forcing demand now, you don’t have the luxury of patiently creating organic demand. So, you create content that feeds a funnel rewarding the cleanest numbers.

The signal has degraded and the scoring model hasn’t kept up, hence the bad lead paradox: a motivated prospect fills in a form purely to keep researching, a seller pounces, gets no reply, and writes them off as a dud, when in fact they were a future buyer contacted far too early.

The point isn’t necessarily that gating is dead (though Forrester has bluntly stated that gated content and MQL obsession are among the practices AI is making untenable) but rather, what we should gate and how we should score the downloads. Someone using your ROI calculator, a migration-readiness assessment, or benchmark comparison tells you something. A 9am PDF download does not.

Build things that earn their place

Here’s a filter to run everything through before a single word gets written: does this idea earn attention on its own merits? Not “will the gate force an exchange?” or “will media spend prop it up?” That one question rules out an uncomfortable amount of what B2B currently produces.

What does survive that scrutiny has earned its place. Web-first long-form gets found, read, shared, and crucially, cited by both humans and the AI engines doing research for them. Social-first content earns attention in the feed. Interactive tools get used because they’re useful, surfacing real intent in the process.

It’s all about focusing on what you want out of it. If you’re serious about being cited in AI answers, you need to invest in GEO and structure your content in ways that get surfaced by those platforms. At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re looking at really engaging your audience, invest in different ways to entertain them. Use brand storytelling, build a game, try anything that you think will stop a scroll better than another eBook on the timeline.

McKinsey does this well. Its flagship thinking sits ungated on the web – built to earn authority and get cited, not to harvest email addresses. And yet no one would accuse McKinsey of giving its expertise away cheaply. That’s the model: audience first, distribution second. Good content should have to earn its place, the way it did before B2B started gating and scoring everything in sight.

The uncomfortable bit

I want to be clear that the system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as designed. It produces eBooks, MQLs, and downloads with beautiful reliability. But what it doesn’t produce is content anyone wants, or leads Sales want to talk to.

To borrow McKinsey’s ‘survival threshold’ framing: the things that used to set you apart are now simply the cost of staying in the game. The same is now true of B2B content. The standard formats no longer differentiate you. They just keep you in the noise, alongside everyone else running the same machine.

So the ask is a simple one. Before your next brief goes out, picture what you’d make if there were no gate, no PDF template, and no media plan to feed. Whatever that thing is, it’s probably the only content worth making. The machine will keep humming along quite happily without it. And that’s the point.

Remember: certainty is the enemy of growth.

This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s Content Director, Stuart Roberts

💡 The short of it

Omnichannel has a definition problem. More channels don’t necessarily create better buyer experiences, meaning the future of B2B omnichannel isn’t about reach – it’s about context. Buyer journeys are becoming increasingly self-serve, and B2B marketers aren’t getting the clean signals they prefer. Using push and pull together, recognizing the pitfalls of the MQL, and ensuring the conversation doesn’t start from zero when a buyer does get in touch are the ways around it.

Omnichannel has become one of those words that sounds strategic until someone tries to understand what it really means. For some teams, it involves being present across more channels. For others, it’s better journey orchestration, cleaner handoffs, smarter personalization, or simply getting their MarTech stack to stop fighting itself.

All useful definitions. None quite sufficient. That was the underlying tension shaping our panel at the recent B2B Marketing Leaders Forum APAC – the idea that more channels do not automatically create better buying experiences.

Today, everyone is using AI to augment their daily dealings. B2B buyers are using it as part of an accelerated approach to shortlisting prospective partners, away from the prying eyes of their analytics platforms. And brands are using it to help fill in and bring context to the visibility gaps that new approach has left in its wake.

So, it isn’t a question of whether B2B brands need more automation. The best-run businesses already have enough of that. Instead, it should be automation in service of what? Our panel agreed that the future of B2B omnichannel doesn’t lie in more touchpoints, but rather more context – which is exactly why it’s worth being more precise about what we mean.

Augmentation isn’t just automation with AI sprinkled on top

For me, ‘AI-augmented buying experiences’ have two sides.

From the customer perspective, buyers are already augmenting their own journeys. They won’t always attend your event, download your whitepaper, or click through five pages of your website to form a view. But they are using AI, search, analysts, peer communities, review sites, and internal stakeholders to discover, compare, summarize, and validate options before they formally engage with a brand.

Increasingly, parts of the buying journey are happening without the clean, visible signals marketers have historically relied on.

From the brand perspective, augmentation should mean marketing, sales, and customer teams are better equipped by signals and AI – not replaced by them. A salesperson shouldn’t enter a conversation cold when the buyer has already left a trail. They should arrive with a clearer view of what the buyer has explored, what they may care about, who else might be involved, and what kind of confidence-building moment is needed next.

Automation moves the system. Augmentation improves the decision. The job of omnichannel is not to be everywhere, but to carry context everywhere.

Start with the buying job, not the channel plan

The first mistake is starting with the channel plan. Buyers don’t think in channels. They think in jobs.

Some are trying to understand whether a problem is worth solving, compare options, build requirements, justify investment, align stakeholders, and reduce risk. And others simply want to avoid making a decision they cannot defend later.

Those moments require different experiences, not just different channels. That’s why the most useful framing from the session was context orchestration.

Buyers move through moments of context: discovery, evaluation, validation, consensus, stalling, re-engagement, and decision. A better omnichannel brief starts with sharper questions. What is the buyer trying to do right now? Who else is shaping the decision? What uncertainty is slowing them down? Should the next useful interaction be self-serve, automated, AI-augmented, or human-led?

Channels matter, but they’re only the delivery layer. They aren’t the strategy. Context is.

Signals are clues, not commands

B2B marketers have become very good at collecting signals and worse at knowing what they mean. A click is not intent. A download is not readiness. A repeat visit is not a commercial conversation.

But that doesn’t mean signals are meaningless either. A digital signal can be a ‘nibble on the bait.’ It may not be a hand raise, but it is still telling you something… the content is useful, the account is warming up, someone is building an internal case, or they’re just curious.

The point is that signals should create better interpretation before they create more activity.

Too often, marketing systems treat signals as instructions. Someone engages, so the machine responds. Send the email. Trigger the ad. Notify the SDR. Increase the score. Move the person closer to a label that makes the dashboard happier.
That is not intelligence. That is plumbing.

A useful omnichannel system asks what the signal suggests about context. Is it curiosity, comparison, urgency, confusion, risk reduction, consensus building, or readiness? Is it an individual behavior or part of an account-level pattern?

Only then should we decide what happens next.

Personalization needs the same reality check. Just because you can tailor something does not mean the buyer experiences it as valuable. Personalization builds trust when it helps the buyer complete a job. It undermines trust when it merely proves you have data.

Push and pull need to work together

Most B2B demand systems are still biased toward push: nurture, retargeting, SDR follow-up, sales alerts, lead scoring, and the hope that Sales agrees it was worth receiving. Push isn’t necessarily wrong – some buyers do need prompting. But it becomes a problem when it’s the only motion the system understands.

Modern buyers self-steer. They search quietly, ask peers, read comparison content, and use AI to summarize categories and vendors before they become visible in the ways marketers like to measure. That makes pull more important, not less.
A strong pull motion makes your brand findable, credible, and useful when the buyer is doing the work themselves. Your thought leadership has to carry a point of view. Your proof has to be accessible. Your comparison content has to be useful, not a brochure wearing glasses.

Pull helps buyers progress when they want autonomy. Push helps when a meaningful signal suggests a worthwhile next step. Human intervention only helps when the issue is trust, risk, ambiguity, or consensus.

The MQL is too small for the job

Our industry loves arguing about whether the funnel is dead. Fine. B2B marketers love a diagram. But the bigger issue isn’t the shape; it’s the unit of measurement.

If your organization is still optimized around MQL volume, it’s probably under-reading modern B2B buying. The visible engager isn’t always the buyer. The person who can stall the deal may never fill out a form. And the AI interface summarizing your market narrative definitely won’t become an MQL.

Individual engagement alone isn’t worthless, but it is insufficient. The better question is “what is happening across the account and decision-making unit that suggests commercial progress?”

Marketing brings the quant: reach, engagement, intent, influence, and account activity. Sales brings the qual: hesitation, internal politics, urgency, objections, stakeholder power, and procurement drag. The business needs both, connected to metrics that matter.

Think pipeline generated, pipeline influenced, win rate, deal velocity, ACV uplift, sales acceptance quality, stakeholder engagement, and opportunity progression. If none of it connects to commercial progress, you aren’t measuring marketing impact – you’re measuring marketing activity.

The human moment should not start from zero

One of the strongest themes from the panel was the role of the human in an increasingly automated system. There’s a lazy version of the AI conversation that assumes the objective is to remove people from the buying experience. That misses the point, particularly in B2B.

As deals get bigger, more complex, and more politically sensitive, the human role doesn’t disappear. Instead, it becomes the most valuable where interpretation, confidence, and judgment are required. Situations where the buyer needs help making sense of complexity. Where the buying group needs alignment. Where a commercial conversation requires nuance. Where the next step is not obvious from the clickstream.

That’s why sales enablement isn’t just a content problem. It’s a context problem.

If the buyer has already left a trail of digital signals, why do so many sales conversations still start from zero?

A properly augmented experience should make the human moment better informed, better timed, and more useful. Sales should understand what the buyer has explored, which problems appear to matter, what content has been consumed, where the account may be in its buying process, and what kind of conversation would actually help.

A practical model: the context engine

If omnichannel is going to mean anything useful, it needs an operating model. Not another funnel replacement. Not another shape. No, it needs a way to turn context into action.

At Transmission, we advise our clients to think about it as a context engine.

1. The context layer: what is the buyer trying to do?

Start with buying jobs. Discovery, evaluation, validation, consensus, de-risking, decision, expansion. Understand the situation before choosing the channel.

2. The signal layer: what do we know?

Bring together first-party engagement, third-party intent, CRM activity, sales notes, events, content interaction, search visibility, customer data, and account-level behavior. But classify the signal by likely meaning, not just source.

3. The judgment layer: what does it mean?

Use AI to summarize, pattern-match, and recommend. Use humans to apply commercial judgment. This is where strategy, sales insight, and customer understanding must meet.

4. The activation layer: what should happen next?

Does the buyer need something they can pull themselves? A guide, proof point, comparison tool, case study, or calculator? Do they need a useful push? A relevant follow-up, account message, stakeholder asset, or sales alert? Or do they need a human conversation?

5. The measurement layer: did it create progress?

Measure whether the experience moved the account forward. Pipeline, influence, velocity, win rate, ACV, stakeholder engagement, sales usefulness, and context carried into the next conversation.

The point

B2B marketing doesn’t need another abstract debate about whether the funnel is dead. The shape isn’t the problem – the operating principle is.
If you’re still working under the ‘capture the lead, score the lead, route the lead, nurture the lead’-mindset, then it doesn’t matter how modern the diagram looks, the thinking is still too small.

The future of B2B omnichannel is about understanding the buyer’s context, interpreting the signals around that context, and choosing the next most useful action. Sometimes that action should be automated. Sometimes it should be AI-augmented. And sometimes it should be deeply human.

The skill is knowing the difference. That’s where omnichannel becomes more than channel orchestration, and where B2B marketing starts to get interesting again.

💡 The short of it

B2B brands have long used category norms and conservatism as an excuse to avoid developing their brand creatively. Strategy was treated as an aside to creative, when in reality, the two should work hand-in-hand to create differentiation. Be it through simply having a unique point of view, an expected visual motif, or a campaign that avoids the buzzwords in lieu of treating audiences like the adults they are, brand differentiation comes when creative bravery is a part of the strategy.

I want to start by saying something that might ruffle a few sensibly structured presentation decks. The safest thing a B2B brand can do right now is take a risk.

Bear with me. I know, “be brave” sounds like exactly the kind of advice you’d get from an agency high on their own creative process. But there’s a genuine, commercially grounded argument here that starts with a simple premise: if you look, sound, and feel the same as every brand in your category, you aren’t playing it safe; you’re blending in. That’s the worst position to be in when buyers are as attention-poor as they currently are.

Barbara Noakes’ now infamous tagline for Levi’s, ‘When the world zigs, zag,’ has been quoted ad nauseam by creative thought leaders, influencers, and gurus for good reason. It’s sound advice. But it often falls on deaf ears in B2B because we must stick to ‘category norms’. We wouldn’t want audiences to mistake what vertical you belong to, would we?

Now, I’m not arguing we blow these norms out of the water. But the B2B creative function has, for so long, been treated as a second-class citizen. One beholden to the perceptions of what businesses are expected to look and feel like. Fast forward to today, and many brands have found themselves in a landscape more competitive than ever, with less differentiation to show for it.

For years, there was certainty surrounding conservatism, and the need to be business-like and professional. But it’s become an enemy of growth, and today’s reality requires brands to look to creativity as the growth multiplier it always has been.

How ‘safe’ became the riskiest strategy in the room

B2B marketing has spent the better part of a decade perfecting the art of looking nearly identical. Teal gradients. Stock photography of people pointing at laptops. Headlines built from the same five power verbs. Accelerate, transform, empower, unlock, drive. The intent was understandable… reduce risk, demonstrate professionalism, appease the committee.

The result? Predictable. A category-wide visual and messaging blur that makes differentiation functionally impossible. Your buyers aren’t being reassured by the familiar – they’re being exhausted by it. Attention is a finite resource, and right now, ‘professional and polished’ is burning through it faster than a three-day offsite.

Your CEO may believe your brand is differentiated – eight in ten executives do vs. just one in ten customers – but if most of your audience isn’t in market at any given moment, and 50% of them will confuse an ad from your business with a competitor’s, safe isn’t conserving your budget, it’s leaking it.

Remember: if you’re not building the mental availability that converts the moment to buy finally arrives, you’re behind. Being truly distinctive isn’t a style choice, it’s a revenue strategy.

What we actually mean when we talk about ‘risk’

Here’s where creative bravery gets misunderstood. Bravery doesn’t mean shock tactics, gratuitous weirdness, or chasing a viral moment that makes your legal team’s eyes water. It means having a clear, ownable point of view, a visual identity that couldn’t belong to anyone else, and the creative confidence to say something that isn’t just a variation of what everyone else is already saying.

The brands that are winning right now, the ones that people in your category really talk about, aren’t the ones with the most polished campaign sequences. They’re the ones who made someone laugh on LinkedIn at 9am on a Tuesday, or who published a position paper that took an actual position. They showed up as something other than furniture.

What bravery looks like in practice

There’s good news for the businesses that are willing. The bar to standing out is as low as it’s always been, and it doesn’t take much to float to the top of the sea of sameness. A considered opinion, an unexpected visual language, or a campaign that treats your audience as intelligent adults rather than procurement processes with legs would be bravery enough to differentiate yourself.

Start by asking: if we removed our logo, would anyone know this came from us? If the honest answer is no, you’ve got your brief. Not “make it edgier” but make it yours. Build the creative codes that only your brand owns. Then defend them like they’re worth something. Because they are – the strongest-branded B2B businesses enjoy a 65% premium on forward price-to-earnings ratios.

The committee will push back as they always do. Someone will ask if you’ve seen what competitors are doing. Someone else will suggest “toning it down a touch.” But stand firm and fight your case. This is the moment that separates the brands that grow from the brands that quietly melt into the background, wondering where the pipeline went.

Bravery is the strategy

A big part of the challenge lies in the briefing process itself. It’s both parts amazing and worrying that, in 2026, briefs still exist that let a predetermined tactic shape the approach, while creative is left to fill in the gaps. Given the context, it makes sense. It’s a line of thinking born from safety. One that believes, “the numbers say it worked before, so let’s just do it again.” This is why certainty is the enemy of growth.

However, as many businesses are finding out, this only limits the opportunity to be different enough to be memorable. Half the brief has been answered before it even gets to a creative’s desk. We can’t just leave a crack in the door to allow differentiation to make a commercial difference. We need to rip the door off and embrace the change that will.

The uncomfortable truth is that playing it safe is now a strategic choice with real commercial consequences. It’s just that those consequences tend to arrive slowly, and then all at once. A slight dip in web enquiries turns into a pipeline that’s dried up. A slow taper in brand awareness that chips away at the premium you can command. A marketing team that can’t explain why the numbers look the way they do.

Bravery isn’t the opposite of strategy. Done right, it is the strategy. The risk isn’t in being bold; it’s in being forgettable.

This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s VP, Creative EMEA, Andrew O’Sullivan.

A Cannes Lions, Effie winner, One Show honoree, and named in Adweek’s Top 100 Creative New Icons and Top 20 Creatives Breaking into Culture, Azarian brings 25 years of creative leadership across both B2B and B2C. She spent 14 years at Ogilvy as Executive Partner, Executive Creative Director, and a member of the Worldwide Creative Council, driving collaborative creative leadership for IBM Smarter Planet – one of the defining B2B campaigns of its era – and IBM Watson, as well as Citizens Bank, IQVIA, Kimberly-Clark, and IKEA.

As Chief Creative Officer of U.S. Experiential at MKTG (Dentsu Creative), she transformed a 50-person team from production-driven to concept-led, delivering connected experiences for Diageo, Meta, Nike, Ally, Walmart, and the NFL.

More recently, Azarian led creative at SharkNinja as SVP, Chief Creative Officer, where she restructured the in-house function into a cross-functional, social-first creative engine – unifying design, content studio, and social – and directed 23 product launches across new and adjacent categories that helped position the business for its 2023 NYSE IPO. Her Shark Beauty NYFW Master Class livestream, broadcast live to Times Square, drove a 27% sales lift and became Sephora’s top-performing live event.

At SharkNinja she also piloted an Amazon AI content program that drove a 150% sales lift in four months and was subsequently scaled across the company’s portfolio. From her own fractional creative leadership practice, AzarianCo, she has most recently led the MoneyLion x MrBeast Beast Games partnership on Amazon Prime, which generated a record 9 million sign-ups. Her earlier IBM Watson Thinking Dress – one of the first AI-powered creative pieces in advertising – has a permanent place in the Henry Ford Museum of Innovation. Azarian is a former juror of the Cannes Lions and One Show, and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.

“What drew me here is a shared belief that B2B doesn’t have to be boring or feel transactional. The future of B2B is cultural, emotional, human, and impossible to ignore,” said Azarian.

Azarian will lead the North America creative function across three US offices.

So, what does that actually mean for our clients in practice?

The certification itself

LinkedIn Ads Agency Certification is only given to agencies whose people have demonstrated in-depth knowledge of LinkedIn Ads best practices. For us, that meant having our teams across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific complete structured learning paths and assessments in LinkedIn Ads Fundamentals, Marketing Strategy, Measurement, and Content & Creative Design. You can also learn more about the certification here.

Transmission has supported global B2B brands on the LinkedIn platform for as long as we’ve existed. And this certification perfectly complements the integrated approach at the heart of our agency engine, Propulsion OS – ensuring our Biddable Strategists, Planners, and Buyers work hand-in-hand with Brand Strategists and Creatives to design programs that are not only optimized to channel-level metrics, but also pipeline, revenue, and long-term business goals.

Best-in-class expertise for best-in-class LinkedIn Ad campaigns

LinkedIn is THE gateway for our clients to interact and engage their customers, prospects, and wider audiences.

Becoming LinkedIn Ads Certified reinforces what our clients experience from Transmission on the platform day in, day out: market-leading expertise across audience, creative, and measurement, applied with the integrated thinking that makes LinkedIn Ads work harder for the business.

By having our global teams come together to complete this certification, we not only cement our years of experience driving impact for B2B brands on LinkedIn; we also combine platform best practices with our AI, data, strategy, and creative expertise to deliver B2B marketing campaigns that maximize clients’ ROI, and turn opportunity into measurable business growth.

What do our clients need to do?

If you’re already working with us for LinkedIn Ads, nothing! If you aren’t, you can always get in touch 😉 In the meantime, our certified team members are already applying their insights across global client campaigns, sharpening targeting precision, and designing creative built to show and stick with professional decision-makers.

This certification is just further proof of how seriously we take the responsibility of tightening the loop between LinkedIn investment and business outcomes. To that end, we’re also continuing to invest in platform education and our proprietary AI capabilities to help clients employ more effective measurement frameworks – ensuring they have the tools they need to better navigate the evolving B2B marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: LinkedIn does not endorse or guarantee the services of any agency that completes the certification program.

💡 The short of it

B2B marketers have let always-on media campaigns become a shell of what they should be – prioritizing internal metrics and accepting briefs that may not address the issue at hand over creating a material impact. The remedy is simple: to get ‘always-on’ back to meaning ‘always relevant’, B2B media practitioners must re-evaluate their account lists, their KPIs, and whether their strategy will create the right outcomes.

The B2B marketing landscape is changing faster than most organizations can keep up. I’ve noticed it, you’ve noticed it, and worryingly for businesses, so have buyers. Now, I’m not here to point fingers – breakthroughs in AI and changes in media consumption have turned the buyer journey on its head almost overnight. But long before even this, there was an industry wide need to strip out old ways of working, to restructure how we think, operate, and activate as marketers, internally and externally. 

Strategies justified by nothing more than “this is how we’ve always done it.” KPIs that fit nicely into quarterly reports rather than reflecting the realities of modern business needs. Continuing to fuel a broken volume-based demand generation machine simply to meet internal lead goals. Measuring vanity marketing metrics. Gating all content. Optimizing everything to last-click attribution. You get the idea.

As an industry, we’ve been happy to optimize for known outcomes over material change. But prioritizing predictability and control in the short term over pushing boundaries has limited businesses’ growth potential in the medium-to-long. And it’s about time we reminded B2B that Certainty is the Enemy of Growth.

The always-on conundrum

The reasoning behind an always-on media strategy was – and still is – sound. Stay visible across the full buying cycle. Reach buyers before they raise their hand. Be the brand that’s already familiar when the moment of purchase arrives.

It was rooted in brand science, and a credible, long-game approach based on consistent presence, sustained share of voice, and the compounding effect of familiarity over time. But somewhere between the insight and the execution, ‘always-on’ mutated.

What started as a philosophy about relevance has become a machine optimized for its own continuation – generating just enough measurable output to justify its existence, quarter after quarter, without anyone seriously asking whether it’s driving growth or just producing the appearance of it.

KPIs aligned to internal measures of success rather than the metrics that tangibly affect growth. Optimization strategies that hit the brief rather than the right audiences. At some point, we started prioritizing safety over the science, creating a system held together almost entirely by the need for certainty – of spend, of audience, of output.

That’s where the uncomfortable truth lies: if your always-on program looks clean on a dashboard, that’s not evidence it’s working. It’s evidence it’s been optimized to look like it’s working. That’s not a media strategy designed to drive growth. That’s risk management dressed in media clothing.

A closed-loop, intent-driven justication engine

Intent data arrived at exactly the right moment to give always-on the scientific cover it needed to keep the façade going. Third-party intent provided signals that shed light on the then ‘dark’ stages of the buyer journey. Targeting became defensible, spend became justifiable, and nobody had to make a hard call about where to place real media bets.

It’s a story you’re likely all too familiar with:

• Intent signals feed a targeting model that runs against a fixed business account list
• Said list was probably agreed in a planning session months ago and hasn’t been seriously challenged since
• MQLs come out the other end. Depending on the quality of data, they might not be great, but they’re enough
• Channels, creative, and audiences all quietly bend toward the KPIs identified from the outset (often form fills and gated downloads over time) because that’s what the optimization logic rewards

The brief is the problem, but the brief isn’t questioned because the dashboard looks fine. Pipeline quality is a sales conversation. Revenue attribution is a problem for another quarter. This is how poor always-on practice calcifies – not through negligence, but through the entirely rational behavior of a system optimized for certainty and continuity.

Challenging the list means reopening decisions. Changing the audience means losing benchmarks. Nothing the media program produces is ever quite bad enough to justify stopping it… so it doesn’t stop. The evidence validates always-on. The loop closes. Growth stays roughly where it was, and everyone has plausible cover for why.

Gen-AI has made things worse, but it doesn’t have to

Generative AI should have broken this open. Faster experimentation, genuine creative risk at lower cost, and the ability to treat uncertainty as an asset rather than a threat. Instead, for most B2B media programs, AI has simply accelerated the machine.

Volume has become the goal over value. 40 ad variants generated in an afternoon means something is always running. Automated audience recommendations mean targeting feels continuously optimized without anyone making a real call. It’s the appearance of sophistication with none of the risk.

Always-on media programs are now faster, cheaper, and more self-sustaining than ever – and producing less genuine impact as a result.

The answer? Bring always-on back to basics

Intent-driven always-on media approaches only illuminate the businesses that are already moving toward a decision. That means you aren’t really shaping demand, you’re following it. The 5% of your audience in active buying mode get hovered over relentlessly. The 95% who will be in-market in six or nine months don’t register at all, because they haven’t triggered a signal yet.

In the end, it’s just a very expensive way of reaching people who were probably going to find you anyway.

And that’s the issue: today, we often don’t have the luxury of blockbuster budgets. The decision-making unit is getting larger. Buyers’ research habits are changing. The short-term, quarterly approach to B2B marketing is dying and marketing dollars must go further than they ever have before.

We just can’t afford to do the same thing and expect different outcomes. You have to reach buyers before they know they’re in the market for change – and that means getting back to what always-on media programs should have always been about: playing the long-game.

Experiment. Take risks. Test new audiences. Treat uncertainty not as something to be engineered out of the media plan, but as the mechanism through which you find out what’s actually possible.

Things will get a little messy. You will have periods of concentration and periods of silence. No, your creative might not end up working. But by embracing uncertainty, you accept that there is still room for improvement. That’s where you’ll find incremental performance and real growth. And that’s how we get always-on back to meaning always relevant.

Remember: certainty is the enemy of growth.

This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s Head of Biddable Media, Alex Beddoe.