Are 75% Of B2B Ads Really Ineffective?

A recent article by Marketing Week referenced a report from LinkedIn stating that 75% of B2B ads are “ineffective,” by which they mean they are, “Contributing zero in terms of long-term market share growth. Essentially meaning the brand is entirely reliant on out-spending the category, rather than benefitting from the strength of the creative.”

Marketing has some anti-B2B bias (vendor lock-in alters the B2B market share formula compared to B2C), but I’d be willing to concede that perhaps half or more of all B2B advertising fails to build a brand through creative excellence. However, as tends to be the case when the marketing world looks down their nose at B2B, I find some of the explanations and thinking a little too facile. And I think some context needs to be added here.

Most B2B Ads Are Crap, But...

Sturgeon’s Law says “90% of everything is crap.” Theodore Sturgeon was a science-fiction writer, and he coined that statement to defend science fiction at a time when it was commonly derided by the mainstream as a genre that didn’t need to be taken seriously.

When it comes to advertising, I’m not going to argue about what percentage of B2C advertising qualifies as crap, but I think we all know it’s a lot. As a cord cutter, I don’t see many TV commercials, unless I plan to as part of my work, but whenever I do visit a home that still depends on broadcast TV, I find it to be agony. The advertising is shit, shit, and more shit. And this is from brands that have infinite creative resources compared to what the average B2B brand has.

Sure, a few notably good things come out during the Super Bowl, but it’s mostly shit the rest of the time, especially when you move away from TV. Most of what’s on social media is horrible. So are the banners you see at airports. So is most of everything else, with 63% of people even saying "Most ads I see online don't look polished or professional." I would rate unpolished and unprofessional as even worse than ineffective, since you may actually be doing damage to your brand. So, if you compare that to B2B, a .250 batting average doesn't look so bad, especially considering the shoestring creative budgets and extremely challenging conditions B2B has to cope with.

But still, most B2B creative is lame, no doubt about it. I just think maybe the 75% number that inspired this article isn't as useful an indicator as it seems.

B2B Creativity Is Marginalized

That aforementioned Marketing Week article, and the people quoted within it, largely laid the blame for B2B creative deficiencies at the feet of clients, without taking the time to discuss the role agencies play. But many agencies, even the big well-resourced global names (unless they’re B2B specialists) seem to look down on B2B accounts. I’ve seen them do it, repeatedly, even when the client has money. Why? I suspect this is because B2B doesn’t win awards. Or they may find B2B clients frustrating to work with with (which can definitely happen). Either way, many times agencies just seem to act like B2B clients are either imaginatively bankrupt or easily duped, and therefore just not worth much effort.

Many B2B industries and businesses are also not as intuitive as B2C. Anyone can understand diet soda or toilet paper. But data centers? Not so much. Many agencies just don’t seem to understand a lot of what B2B companies sell or how to sell it, though it’s not entirely their fault. Clients are often terrible at distilling key selling points into the sort of creative bubble gum that agencies can stretch into interesting shapes. But still, the agency world could do better, both in terms of industry acumen, and general business sense. I attribute this to a lack of proper training and experience. Let’s face it, many agency people are just kids. I didn’t really understand the B2B business world until I was in my thirties, and I’d been in it for several years by then.

B2C will always be inherently easier for young people to understand than B2B, because they’ve been making consumer purchasing decisions, or been in proximity to consumer purchasing decisions, all their lives, while their B2B exposure is only a fraction of that.

B2B Leaders Often Don’t Speak Creative

Of course, the fault is not all agency-side. Good creative is rare client-side, because it’s really hard to do. Stock photography lacks variety (in fact some B2B images I see all the time). And even if you do create images yourself, good results can be freakin’ hard to get.

Once I was in a client-side situation where someone internally requested that we stop using no-name stock photography and take some actual pictures of our own stuff. A laudable request, so we did. And they were ugly. They were all ugly. Uglier than stock, except now our name was on it. Photoshop trickery didn’t help. The original requester wasn’t happy either. They were constantly giving creative demands that nobody knew how to interpret, because the requester had no creative or art direction training, and therefore didn’t really know how to articulate what they wanted.

This is a common problem in B2B. A lack of training in the creative arts amongst stakeholders. This leads to people knowing the difference between what they like and what they don’t like, but not really knowing why, or how to get there from where you are now. This often leads to giving up and settling for mediocrity on the client side, because repeated attempts at improvement don’t lead to progress.

B2B Is Emotional, And Rational

The Marketing Week article recycles another bit of lazy thinking I’ve seen a lot of recently – that B2B marketers need to stop treating business decisions as entirely rational.

Well, guess what? We already know damn well that there are feelings involved. We’re not stupid. Emotion and subjectivity are definitely involved, especially when the time comes to pull the trigger. But that moment happens at the very end of a painstaking process that can take months. 

Numerous vendors will be considered, thoroughly. All the relevant numbers are going to be perused. And a vendor isn’t going to make the final round unless there’s a clear objective reason for them to be there – price, aftersales service, past experience, stronger specs, easy integration, etc.

Nobody is going to stick their neck out even that far without one. And then when the decision is actually made, many times it will be sales, product design, or brand strength, that does that final little bit that determines the winner (instead of creative advertising), rather like what happens when buying a car (the closest B2C analogy I can think of).

Thus, the B2B purchasing process may not be entirely rational, but it is largely rational, especially at the higher stages of the funnel, which is typically where creativity comes into play. Granted, I think B2B could do a better job at playing to emotions earlier in the process (through startling creativity or addressing pain points), especially at conversion points (where you want the prospect to move to the next stage of the funnel), but the buyer’s journey will always be relatively objective compared to what B2C marketers are used to.

B2C buying decisions, on the other hand, are often mostly or entirely subjective, with some sales made almost entirely on the strength of the marketing. Coke, for example, is what it is almost entirely because of branding. Because it has to be. What makes one soda more appealing than another is almost entirely subjective. And it’s the same way with a lot of consumer products. There’s no rational explanation for why I think chunky peanut butter is better than smooth. Or why Wendy’s hamburgers have always bored me. It’s the same with a lot of B2C products, and a lot of B2C brands.

B2B Brandbuilding Is Inherently More Challenging

Not only does it take longer to build B2B brands, because of longer product cycles and vendor lock-in, it's more challenging at the same time, and the reason why is the same reason why young creatives struggle with B2B work.

B2B brands are inherently less intuitive than B2C brands, which makes it harder for the brain to form the sort of associations that you want when first building awareness. In other words, it's harder for a B2B brand to get its foot in the door of your mind, because its harder to learn new things if your brain doesn't already have the wiring in place to categorize them.

Are We Using The Same Definition of Brandbuilding?

Marketing orthodoxy says that creativity is the single most important force multiplier for marketing and advertising, and therefore brandbuilding. And most B2C types would probably agree with that. As for B2B, LinkedIn numbers indicate that "powerful creative" that creates 4-5 star ads (compared to the 1-star "ineffective" ads that 75% of B2B ads are accused of being) generate ~2.5% points of market share, or 10x more sales.

Sounds great, right? But this thinking isn't quite the law of the land. A more representative example of the way B2B creativity is viewed is to look at IT branding. And as far as the average IT marketing department goes, there are four types of brands – Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players, and Challengers.

Those are the names of the four magic quadrants devised by IT kingmaker Gartner. And it has largely turned IT brandbuilding into a game that could be called “North by Northeast.” If you look at Gartner’s criteria, you will see some legit marketing relevance in most of them, and branding relevance in some of them, but you’ll also see the word “creativity” mentioned only once, as part of a single criteria, among 15. And in the IT industry, these criteria are gospel, and unyielding.

Your brand can have a catchy name, stylish logo, compelling advertising, and great content. And that’ll get you in the door. But when the time comes to go before the board, you’d better not be in that southwest quadrant, no matter how creative you are. Because if you are, you’d better be cheap. And cheap B2B brands have unhappy employees because their bonuses suck.

What’s Past Is Prologue

Another disadvantage of B2B brandbuilding is a lack of recent examples. When people talk about the top B2B brands, they’ll point to IBM, GE, HPE, Cisco, and the like. But those companies are old (or have old origins). Few remember how they were built anymore. And they aren’t so much building their brands at this point as maintaining them, or repositioning them.

Granted, brands must be continuously rebuilt, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to stay on top than it is to reach the top, and few top B2B brands have been built in the Internet era. Salesforce comes to mind. Adobe, though dating back to the 1980s, is definitely a modern-built brand. But still, recent B2B cases are few and far between, while B2C brands are springing up all the time.

This lack of recent B2B cases is partly due to the fact that B2B brands take longer to build, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but one also has to wonder if there isn’t something else that’s holding back B2B brands in this century, especially with Cloud infrastructure, globalized teams & workflows, and easier access to venture capital lowering the barriers to entry.

Could the overuse of digital shortcuts have led to a neglect of brandbuilding? Probably, especially considering that B2B advertising is heavily digital, and targeted digital ads will never strengthen a brand on their own as well as the old-fashioned kind, because analog ads are a shared experience, out in the open, where everyone can see them, hear them, and be impressed by them, instead of just you and a few other people like you scattered around the Internet, with heavy creative shackles imposed by the likes of Google and Facebook.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

So how can B2B brands do better? The answer to this could fill an entire book, and maybe I’ll write it one day. But it’ll take more than a few band-aids to cure what ails B2B creativity. And it’ll take more than a few reports and articles that offer solid psychological principles, but few case studies. Nonetheless, I’ll offer a small selection of low-hanging fruit.

Get A Little Animated

I’ve badmouthed quite a bit of that Marketing Week article, but one thing I did like about it was it made a useful suggestion. It drew upon the example of American insurance companies, which sell to consumers in the US, but are a good B2B analogy because insurance is a dry yet complex product often agonized over during the purchasing process. Insurance ads are often humorous or playful, with the best examples being the mascots used by Geico (a gecko) and Aflac (a duck). I think it wouldn’t hurt B2B brands to try creating such characters to help lull people out of their office work torpor.

Another way to do this is the use of a bit of whimsy, humor, or animation, which can be done in a lively, lighter style to demonstrate or explain relatively dry subjects. Airlines sometimes do this, using humor in their safety videos in order to convince people to pay attention. And what’s more, a low-key sense of humor can convey a certain comfort with a subject, which can actually build a sense of authority for your brand – excessive seriousness can make you seem nervous (i.e., amateurish).

Start Small

I know it can be hard to embrace creativity in a B2B organization. So I recommend starting out with experiments on something low-risk, like organic social. Start creating two drafts for evergreen post visuals, one standard and one creative, and run them a month or two apart. See how they perform. If you can demonstrate that creativity does better with the nerds who already follow you, it'll be easier to get permission to try it out for bigger stakes on more mainstream audiences.

Respect The Ground Game

This is not exactly low-hanging, but it's still worth mentioning. It’s generally accepted in the marketing world that short-term digital activation tactics have been overused in recent years at the expense of long-term brandbuilding. How did we end up here? I think a lot of us expected digital marketing to make obsolete the old adage "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

Sure, attribution is beautiful, but it’s also painfully unrealistic, especially in B2B. Too many stakeholders are involved in purchasing. Product lifecycles can take years. Persuasion to try a new vendor can require a lot of touches. And audiences only want to be sold to when they’re looking to buy. The rest of the time you need to be building your brand. Blogs, whitepapers, e-books. Sure, these things can generate leads, but they're better at building brands. Case studies, email, SEO/SEM, product selectors, and sales content are more useful for audiences that are actively looking to buy.

And it doesn’t have to be the same-old same-old. One of my favorite pieces of B2B content from the past few years is this award-winning quiz from Adobe. Granted, this isn’t strictly B2B, but building a brand never is.