Editor's Picks for ANA Magazine's B2B Department

Despite recent fluctuations, marketing jobs are fundamentally changing amid the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). The best marketing job candidates for the AI era demonstrate not just curiosity, but impatience, marked by a burning desire to experiment and pursue projects without handholding.

As traditional B2B advertising channels continue to wane, savvy B2B marketers are turning to videos featuring influencers to drive engagement and build brand trust. Most B2B marketers (81 percent) have dedicated influencer-marketing budgets, says a new survey, while another 9 percent plan to follow suit this year.

B2B marketers consider brand advertising important, says a new study, but most of them are still in the preliminary stage of developing a branding strategy. The gap between rhetoric and reality carries major risk as an increasing number of younger buyers attuned to branding enter the market and demand more original content.

While immensely popular with consumers, gaming commands less than 5 percent of global media spending. That's starting to change, as brands like Jack in the Box, Jägermeister, and Lowe's ramp up their investments in the sector either by creating their own online venue or partnering with big gaming platforms.

While marketers know multiscreen TV — both traditional and streaming — drives brand awareness, it has seldom been easy to demonstrate its direct influence on sales and business outcomes. Amid the expansion of social media, artificial intelligence, and data, brand marketers need to prove the value of their TV media spending just as they do with their digital campaigns.

In 1999, Edward Wimmer IV was a college senior training for a marathon when he was nearly hit by a pickup truck and landed in a roadside ditch — without any proper identification. A few months later he launched ROAD iD, a tags and bracelets company catering to runners, cyclists, and triathletes.

Marketers who trust their data are three times more likely to report revenue growth, according to a new report from Anteriad. The report, based on a survey of 450 B2B marketing leaders, found that 39 percent of marketers use intent data, while marketers reporting strong revenue growth are 62 percent more likely to use it.

When it comes to giving feedback on creative projects, shifting the focus from prescribing solutions to defining problems is the key to unlocking work that will help to distinguish the brand. By grounding all critiques in a well-crafted strategic brief, this method builds trust and collaboration, rather than stifling creativity.

Agencies can't control inflation, interest rates, or client budget cuts. But they can control how well they manage spending and the cash available to invest in the business. Agencies that continue to rely on manual accounts payable processes will struggle with visibility, inefficiency, and profitability.

Search engines fueled by artificial intelligence, or zero-click search, are starting to eclipse traditional search. That's leading marketers to reevaluate their search engine optimization strategy from keyword-stuffing to context-crafting.

Generative engine optimization (GEO), a digital marketing strategy centered on ensuring a brand's name is featured in the top answers provided by platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and other large language models, is starting to accelerate throughout the marketing and ad sector.

A micro-analytics approach, or single "tree" view, to marketing and advertising is valuable, but it risks missing the broader perspective of the "forest." Macro analytics — an aggregated look across all brands, agencies, and regions — can reveal strategic opportunities that individual scope reviews simply cannot.

It was just a few years ago that brand purpose — what a company stands for other than making money — was trumpeted as a transformative force in marketing and advertising. However, brand purpose seems to have lost its way lately. Thomas Kolster, founder and creative director of Copenhagen-based Goodvertising Agency, and author of The Hero Trap, says brands often struggle because they "tiptoe" around areas that don't align with their company.

Some marketers may be quick to dismiss direct mail, believing it's an outdated mass-blast relic that's too complicated to track, too difficult to optimize, and too expensive to be worth it. But today's direct mail is as measurable as digital, offering real-time customer insights and clear attribution metrics.

The growing complexity of the marketing data landscape only increases the risk of misalignment. Customer journeys span dozens of touchpoints across digital, offline, and partner channels. When the data and its interpretations don't align, organizations lose the clarity they need to act decisively.

Marketing managers often hesitate to provide feedback on a creative project. They want to be helpful, of course, but don't want to clog the creative flow. The ultimate solution for marketers is to shift their focus from telling creative teams that something needs to be fixed to pointing out the problem(s).

Social media continues to be a critical marketing channel for SMBs, yet many companies struggle with creating enough content to feed the maw and measure ROI effectively. To close the gap, SMBs are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI), which can spur content creation and personalize messaging, new surveys reveal.

While connected TV (CTV) remains the center of gravity for live sports, it's no longer the only screen in town, as fans engage with games in multiple layers. What used to be a single broadcast has evolved into a cross-platform narrative that stretches across myriad channels and continues long after the match ends.

Ricky Abbott, president of global B2B marketing agency Transmission, thinks the status quo is untenable for B2B advertising and says marketers needs to embrace more of an entertainment model to serve both existing and emerging customers.

Marketers love to talk about creativity, but their confidence is another story. A recent survey shows that 41 percent of marketers still see creativity as a risk, which holds brands back from making bold, emotionally driven work that can boost engagement and expand their audiences. To reverse course, marketers need a new toolkit.