Brand and creative teams under pressure

A lot of business-to-business marketing teams can now prove that brand work pays off over years, and still lose the internal argument every quarter because the dashboard only rewards this month’s leads. A 2024 WARC and Stein IAS report says many business-to-business organizations still split brand and demand into separate teams, budgets, and metrics, which makes it hard to connect upper-funnel signals to revenue. (warc.com) (hubspotusercontent-eu1.net) That gap is showing up in the creative itself. Research covered by Marketing Week found that 75% of 1,600 business-to-business ads tested by LinkedIn’s Business-to-Business Institute and System1 scored one star or less, which System1 ties to zero contribution to long-term market-share growth. (marketingweek.com) The internal politics behind that result are blunt. In the same research, LinkedIn’s Peter Weinberg said business-to-business companies are usually led by product, engineering, or sales teams, and those groups tend to prefer rational feature messaging over emotional creative. (marketingweek.com) That creates a measurement trap. Les Binet’s work collected by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising argues that marketing has become too focused on efficiency, targeting, and short-term metrics, while long-term brand-building depends on scale, reach, and creative quality. (ipa.co.uk) The practical problem is that most future buyers are not shopping today. Ehrenberg-Bass research popularized in business-to-business marketing circles argues that only about 5% of buyers are in market at any given time, so the job of brand work is to stay easy to remember for the other 95% until they are ready. (ebims.emdev.au) (minimba.com) NetApp’s recent “Unleash Genius” campaign is a good example of what teams are trying to do instead of listing features. NetApp’s own campaign language moves from “storage” and “cloud” to “intelligent data infrastructure” that is “built for speed, scale, and artificial intelligence,” framing the company as the foundation for customer breakthroughs rather than a box of technical specs. (netapp.com) The company then ties that broad story to a concrete outcome that a finance team can understand. NetApp says the National Football League uses its infrastructure to deliver plays, stats, and media to more than 380 million fans, with each game generating about 3.5 terabytes of data. (netapp.com) That is the new burden on analytics teams. They are no longer just counting clicks on a product page; they have to connect a brand idea like “Unleash Genius” to evidence such as customer adoption, partner stories, pipeline quality, deal velocity, and expansion inside large accounts. (hubspotusercontent-eu1.net) (netapp.com) The pressure on creative teams comes from that double demand. They have to make work memorable enough to influence buyers who may not purchase for 6 or 12 months, and measurable enough to survive a quarterly review run by sales and finance. (forrester.com) (marketingweek.com) The companies that get through that squeeze are trying to stop treating brand and demand like rival departments. WARC and Stein IAS call for one connected model from brand to demand, because a business-to-business buyer does not experience separate funnels just because the org chart does. (warc.com)