Joe Burns, currently of Quality Meats, recently published a piece that reminded me of what’s really important in advertising: attention. It’s hard to capture attention amidst the realities of our hyper-distracted, ad-saturated modern world. If you dig deeper than that, our beautiful, strange brains are wired for survival, and deep down, that means conserving energy and not thinking until you absolutely have to.
Joe’s all-caps climax, “ADVERTISING ONLY WORKS IF IT ISN’T IGNORED,” has been rattling around loudly in my brain since I read it–not only because Joe took his own advice with an off-kilter, Wes Anderson-coded aesthetic in his slideshow, but also because we can forget this advice in B2B spaces.
People have been conditioned to believe that B2B is boring: fact-based, numbers-centric, and focused on the bottom line. We want to believe B2B decision-making is more rational, but it’s still people who are making the purchasing decisions–and people are not going to use your product if you don’t engage them. Your facts and insights don’t have a chance to persuade if your marketing can’t get somebody to pay attention to them.
In the B2B marketplace, our most common goal is to educate people on how we can help them and their businesses. But when every ad is offering to “transform” and “streamline,” people will only remember your stuff if they see it frequently and it stands out from every other ad in a fresh, creative way. Yes, creative.
This is where the value of agencies comes in.
Agencies provide more predictable, reliable access to creativity, which is typically unpredictable and unmanageable. There are attempts to automate it, but those attempts will often produce marketing that blends in and gets caught in those pesky filters. If you want a chance at something that will stand out, you need a great creative agency that can spend its time thinking up answers to questions like, “How do we make accounting heroic?” and “What can we do to make this internal communications deck stop people in their tracks?” while you run your business.
I will argue that B2B requires even more creativity than B2C because of the complexity in context: multiple audiences within organizations, guardrails from industry regulations and legal teams, and users who are experts on the product you’re trying to sell. And that’s not even the half of it.
To borrow some phrasing from Joe: If B2B brands want to make people do things, they need to lean on creative agencies now more than ever. Let your creative partners do some thinking for you so your consumer doesn’t have to think at all.
