‘The war for attention’: B2B brands on why the role of creativity is ‘much clearer’

Marketing creativity is climbing up the agenda in B2B brands, bringing implications for recruitment, work practices, use of agencies and the sheer volume of content competing for attention.

Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness study shows more than half (55.7%) of B2B marketers say their focus on creativity has increased compared to 12 months ago, an upward trend that has continued from 2024.

What are these B2B brands hoping to achieve and why is creativity taking on such a level of importance now?

Workbooks CMO Dan Roche welcomes the increased creativity in B2B marketing.

“I’ve been in B2B tech marketing for over 20 years now and there has always been the same challenge: why is B2B so boring?” he says.

Working in the crowded CRM market, where many potential clients will see the market leader as the default choice, Workbooks recognised it had to shun the boring approach if it wanted to stand out.

As a “tiny company”, Roche calculated the brand could improve its marketing effectiveness from a technology perspective and achieve a slightly better performance, but “would never win or achieve the growth goals” it wanted.  

“So we took a step back and said: ‘OK, how do we get in the minds of people who would usually not have heard of us?’” he asked.

Most chief marketing officers I know in B2B are trying their hardest because we have boards to respond to. We are all getting asked about effectiveness.

Addleshaw Goddard, Brian Macreadie

During research the brand found CRM clients felt they had been sold a dream, but supplied with a nightmare. From this insight Workbooks’ ‘No Bullshit CRM’ platform evolved.

“We position ourselves as the ‘No Bullshit CRM’ and we created a hero advert, a video which articulated that, but didn’t show our product. We didn’t talk about ourselves at all. We showed an example of how a couple of guys trying to use a system just basically fail. Then at the end, there’s a payoff and the guy gets splattered with shit. It’s visceral and it rings true,” says Roche.

To further gain attention, Workbooks looked to channels B2B brands might not traditionally use.

“We put this on billboards around Liverpool Street, Kings Cross. We did a tonne of YouTube advertising and that helped us to get cut through,” says Roche.

“With email, we changed our messaging and said: ‘Do you have bullshit CRM?’ That was our best performing email campaign ever. By being human and creative, we got cut through with the traditional channels, as well as doing things in more creative ways.”

65% of marketers say focus on creative quality up on last year

The BS platform was launched in September last year and was crowned Marketing Week’s best campaign of 2024.

“From a brand perspective, it put us on the map. We’ve seen this through qualitative measures, through people putting us on their shortlist and through pipeline as well, and revenue. The attribution that we get from the campaigns that we’ve run has a 140% uplift in pipeline in the months following the campaign,” he says.

However, Workbook’s insight into the effectiveness of its creative is not a given. Marketing Week’s data also shows B2C brands are more than twice as likely (58.6%) to have analysis in place to measure creative quality than B2B firms (24.2%).

While Workbooks was able to measure the effectiveness of some of its activity, it couldn’t measure all of it.

“The billboard stuff is inherently unmeasurable from a B2B perspective, but we trusted that this would make a difference to people making inquiries and our conversion into pipeline and into revenue,” says Roche.

Appreciate the nuance

As head of marketing strategy at law firm Addleshaw Goddard, Brian Macreadie has scored some marketing coups. Among these was the firm being crowned marketing team of the year at the 2023 Marketing Week Awards.

“For a B2B brand that is very, very rare. For a law firm, it’s unheard of,” he says.

An advocate for creativity within B2B, Macreadie identifies the growing maturity of large companies in tech and service categories as one reason for the creative boom.

“When there’s 30 of you offering the same thing, then the importance of standing out from the crowd with your communications and your products, and your pricing becomes more pronounced,” he says.

“A lot of discourse in B2B marketing has been driven by fast growth, new tech brands, but in mature brands, the role of creativity is much clearer. You can stand in a boardroom and say: ‘Here is what our 30 rivals are doing. How are you going to win the war to gain attention? How are you going to win preference? How are you going to win consideration, when this is what it looks like?’”

Macreadie strives to practice what he preaches, taking the legal brand in directions that might seem counter-intuitive, but have proved effective.

“We’ve been doing poetry campaigns. We’re official partners for the Chelsea Flower Show. We’ve had flowers all over the London Underground,” he says.

Poems, targeted at legal experts, about the complexities of managing company takeovers, or the data laws potentially breached by Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, have landed well with the group’s target audience.

Macreadie recognises B2B brands can find it harder to measure creative effectiveness than B2C brands. As well as marketing budgets that are generally smaller in the first place, many B2B companies face structural challenges that make measurement more difficult.

“In most B2B categories sales cycles are very long,” he points out. “If you’re selling massive enterprise software systems, they might not get turned on or off for 10, 12 years. In law firms, it might take you seven or eight years to convince somebody that you’re the right person to help them with their mergers and not somebody else. Because of that, it’s very hard to instantly, accurately connect this marketing tactic to that result.”

Although brand strength can benefit such a long process, the sheer number of touchpoints involved in a six year charm offensive to land a new client make it tough to attribute a win to anything as tangible as an ad campaign.

Macreadie describes “vanity measures”, such as measuring brand searches and web traffic, as useful metrics that are available to all brands, but says they only tell marketers so much. As a result, B2B brands are seeking to fill gaps in their knowledge.

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“There’s one other thing B2B brands are doing more and more of. In my experience, we are going out there and doing market research to understand the results. Have perceptions changed? Has consideration changed?” he suggests.

However, B2B brands that are targeting chief technology officers or HR directors cannot conduct market research in the same way a consumer-facing brand might.

“You can’t just take out a clipboard in the street and ask people: ‘Have you heard of this brand? Have you seen the advert?’ It’s hard to get in the diary. It’s hard to research. These are niche audiences. It’s hard to do that research, so effectiveness is harder to prove than it is in B2C and that’s a nuance people who don’t work in B2B don’t get,” says Macreadie.

Measuring and understanding that nuance is a challenge exercising many marketing minds in B2B.

“Most chief marketing officers I know in B2B are trying their hardest because we have boards to respond to. We are all getting asked about effectiveness,” adds Macreadie.

On the right track

With a career spent mainly at global B2C brands, including Gillette, Coca-Cola and Ferrari, Aoife Hall – now brand director EMEA at AI-powered business services brand ServiceNow – always questioned the distinction made between B2C and B2B brands.

She sees that eroding now, with marketers increasingly able to switch their career focus between the two. That too may have an impact on the drive for creativity.

“No matter what product or service, or anything that you’re trying to engage somebody with, it’s a human you’re talking to and it’s the same objectives. You want them to know you, to trust you, to love you, to consider you,” says Hall.

For her, it is little surprise B2B brands are catching up when it comes to having a clearer focus on creative to help them stand out. She echoes the sentiment that B2B tech or service brands increasingly need to differentiate themselves from rivals.

“Traditionally, they were very much about that 90-day attribution model: ‘We’ve got 90 days to convert this lead.’ When I started with ServiceNow, that was still very much a mindset,” she says.

The billboard stuff is inherently unmeasurable from a B2B perspective, but we trusted that this would make a difference to people making inquiries.

Dan Roche, Workbooks

A growing commitment to brand building means that is no longer the case and B2B brands are seeking – and attracting – a very different kind of marketer as a result, says Hall.

“We have brought into ServiceNow some of the best producers, copywriters, designers, motion graphic artists, people that are just so creatively talented. The strategy team are some of the cleverest people I’ve ever met,” she says.

“Not only are companies like ServiceNow seeking people that truly understand the value of building a brand to grow the business, and accelerating that brand experience to be consistent globally, but in the four and a half years I’ve been in ServiceNow, the number of applications that we get in every market for a single job has just gone through the roof.”

Global mining giant Rio Tinto has seen substantial benefits from its decision to embrace the potential of more creative marketing. In 2024, the business launched consumer facing podcast ‘Things you can’t live without’ with celebrity guests, the intention being to win hearts and minds while providing education and entertainment.

The second season of the podcast, released this year, saw an 86% jump in downloads compared to the first season. More than 640,000 people have downloaded the podcast in total.

However, measuring the effectiveness of the project is more complicated than just counting the numbers. Addressing reputational challenges after some PR disasters, the brand was in the middle of a push to make Rio Tinto a company where employees could be proud to work again.

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As a producer of bulk commodities, the brand does not have a traditional sales funnel in the same way other B2B brands might. While Rio Tinto was not seeking to directly influence sales with its creative push, it was seeking to address a broad range of stakeholders. This includes diverse local communities in areas where it has mining operations.

“We have reputation tracking going all the time,” explains marketing and communications director Lucy Yurek. “But that reputation tracking wouldn’t necessarily be able to ever give us an indication of which piece of content, or what pieces of content, were making a difference.”

For major campaigns, the company carries out pre- and post-testing to check it is spending its budgets effectively.

The shift to embrace creativity has also dovetailed with changes to working practices that allow brands to create more marketing content more cheaply and easily.

Advances in technology have made it easier for B2B brands, even ones of far smaller scale than Rio Tinto, to invest in creative marketing strategies, says Yurek. Platforms such as Canva allow in-house staff to shape campaigns that small B2B brands could not afford to pay an agency for, she says.

“We’re using [visual storytelling platform] Shorthand a lot,” she adds. “It has these easy templates that basically anybody, even lacking in any creative expertise, could use to create more immersive content at a relatively low cost, compared to if you were to go to an ad agency.”

Examples include an in-house campaign developed using Shorthand to tell the story of an endangered parrot in Western Australia and Rio Tinto’s efforts to protect its habitat, which sparked editorial coverage in newspaper The Australian. The strategy allows the brand to set aside its agency budget for major campaigns.

Selling the idea of creativity in traditional B2B boardrooms can be a challenge, but going one step at a time helps.

“What we’ve tried to do is a step-by-step, show not tell, approach,” says Yurek. “Start small, build as you go and use the results to really build that belief, and the confidence that we’re on the right track.”

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