For B2B marketers, the challenge may no longer be convincing the organization that creativity matters. It’s proving what that creativity does for the business.
Nearly all respondents to a new Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey — 98% — said creativity is extremely or very important to B2B advertising and marketing communications. But fewer than half, 47%, said they were equally confident in their company’s ability to measure the impact of creativity. Among client-side marketers, that figure fell to 42%.
That gap is central to the ANA’s latest report, “B2B Creativity: Busting Myths,” which surveyed 327 jurors for the ANA B2 Awards. The respondents were largely senior marketers and industry professionals, with 48% at the CMO or VP level and 86% at least director level.
The report argues that B2B marketers are beginning to rethink creative effectiveness as buying journeys become more complicated, brand and demand efforts converge, and AI changes how customers discover and evaluate brands. Instead of treating creative as the output of an individual campaign, the ANA says marketers increasingly need to connect creative with content, customer experience, sales enablement, data, technology and measurement.
Moving Beyond the Campaign
For Bill Duggan, group executive vice president at the ANA and a contributor to the report, the shift is partly a consequence of how B2B buying works. Unlike many consumer purchases, B2B decisions can involve large investments and multiple stakeholders, creating a longer path from initial awareness to purchase.
“I think creativity is as important in B2B marketing, or perhaps even more important, [than] in B2C,” Duggan said. “Often B2B purchases could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. They’re more considered purchases.”
That longer journey also complicates the way marketers measure creative. The ANA found that 57% of respondents were extremely or very confident in their ability to measure marketing’s impact on financial performance, while 78% said measuring creative’s impact was extremely or very important.
Closing the Measurement Gap
The report argues that impressions, click-through rates and short-term engagement don’t fully capture creative’s value. Instead, marketers should consider measures such as pipeline, revenue and conversion alongside brand outcomes including trust, perception and differentiation.
That doesn’t mean those campaign metrics are irrelevant. Rather, the ANA is arguing that they become less useful when viewed in isolation, particularly for creative intended to influence a buying journey that can stretch over months or years.
The same tension appears in B2B marketers’ approach to brand and demand. According to separate ANA and Stein research cited in the report, 46% of respondents described their current investment as demand heavy, while just 26% said they were in a balanced brand-demand “sweet spot.” Yet 72% said that a balanced mix would be ideal.
Duggan sees the two sides as complementary rather than competing priorities. “It’s really important to have both,” he said. “It’s important to have brand advertising so that when the consumer is in the market, your product is top of mind.”
Making Room for Emotion
The report also pushes back on the idea that B2B creative should be primarily rational. Fifty-six percent of respondents said emotional connections and functional benefits matter equally for B2B brand building, while the remaining respondents leaned toward emotional connections being more important.
The report’s case studies illustrate how that balance can work. For example, Zoetis faced the prospect of a 40% revenue decline as a key product came off patent. Its “Born of the Bond” campaign focused on the emotional relationship between ranchers, dairy producers and their animals rather than relying solely on product benefits. The campaign generated a reported $110 million increase in revenue across the portfolio over four years and 3% market share growth in the cattle portfolio.
Data and AI Add New Pressure
Data and AI add another layer to the challenge. Ninety percent of respondents said that using data to enhance creativity was extremely or very important, but only 65% were equally confident in their company’s ability to use data effectively. AI showed a similar gap: 66% said it was important to enhance creativity, while only 47% were confident in their company’s use of it.
Duggan said that gap should encourage marketers to treat AI as an aid rather than an authority. “I think of AI to some extent as an opinion. It doesn’t mean that it’s always right,” he said, pointing to hallucinations and the risk of outputs falling off strategy.
For marketers, the broader implication is less about abandoning campaigns than putting them into a larger business context. Creative still has to earn attention and communicate a compelling idea. But marketers are increasingly being asked to connect that work to the broader buying journey and, ultimately, to business results.
The question for B2B marketers, then, isn’t simply whether a campaign was creative. It’s whether that creativity helped move buyers, strengthen the brand and create value that the business can measure.
