The content machine is working perfectly. That’s the problem.

Here’s a fact that should keep more B2B CMOs up at night: The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found that while more than a third of B2B teams consider content a top three area for investment, only one in eight rate theirs as ‘highly effective’. Most of us settle for the tepid middle ground of ‘somewhat effective’.

So, we recognise the value of content. We spend the money. Yet, by our own admission, we aren’t exactly confident it will work. Our instinct tells us the message was wrong, that the targeting needs to be honed. That once we get them right, things will face into place.

Unfortunately, the instinct is wrong.

That certainty – about format, gating strategy, and scoring model – stops us from questioning whether any of it really connects. It’s a very B2B problem to have. But because certainty, as ever, is the enemy of growth, it’s one we must dissect.

The format we just can’t quit

Let’s start with the emblem of B2B content certainty: the trusty eBook.

It’s a format that’s survived every trend cycle and every “is this dead?” think-piece thrown its way. Supply-side, it makes sense – the CMI once found that almost two-thirds of B2B marketers produce thought-leadership eBooks, and almost half rate it among their best-forming formats. It’s the same distribution-side too: a single eBook pulls around 859 registrations on NetLine’s syndication network vs. just 63.5 for a whitepaper. All is well then, surely?

Not quite. The same NetLine data also shows that syndication-network registrations aren’t market demand: eBooks are absent from every list of formats that correlate to near-term purchase, and they’re also the format with the slowest request-to-open time. They’re the most dominant signal but also the emptiest one – and people aren’t even reading what they download.

eBooks have become the face of a self-reinforcing ecosystem that rewards larger, often meaningless metrics for the sake of satisfying internal KPIs. And it all links back to how the marketing function has been reduced to a lead generation machine (we’ll get there later). Marketers look for ways to hit their lead quota, and lead-gen vendors are more than happy to oblige.

To be clear, it’s not long-form content I’m arguing against. It’s the format. A locked PDF can only tell you if it was downloaded and opened – not how it was read or where buyers lost interest. Worse, they make you functionally invisible to the LLMs crawling every corner of the internet to decide whether you should be recommended to a buyer.

Depth doesn’t have to live in a PDF. If those downloading eBooks aren’t ready to buy, why gate? And if you aren’t gating, why use a PDF at all? The format only survives because of the system around it. So, let’s dismantle that next.

The system built around it

The eBook persists because of the machinery bolted to it: lead scoring, MQL targets, the sales handoff. It’s all based on the shaky assumption that content consumption signals purchase intent. The trouble is, it doesn’t.

B2B often ranks eBooks among its best-performing formats. But dig a little deeper and we find that we’ve quietly defined “best performing” by the one metric the format reliably drives: the download. It’s neat, circular, but completely hollow – an attribution illusion rooted in how things work in our industry.

Marketing has become a volume machine, measured on form fills and optimised to the last click. We can’t pin a sale to one asset because buying involves many people, many touches, over many months. The download, on the other hand, gives us a discrete, attributable data point, and we’ve been trained to read that as proof of contributing to pipeline. When that’s the KPI you’re held to, the rational move is to keep the machine running.

It’s the long-game challenge scaled down. Because the business focus is forcing demand now, you don’t have the luxury of patiently creating organic demand. So, you create content that feeds a funnel rewarding the cleanest numbers.

The signal has degraded and the scoring model hasn’t kept up, hence the bad lead paradox: a motivated prospect fills in a form purely to keep researching, a seller pounces, gets no reply, and writes them off as a dud, when in fact they were a future buyer contacted far too early.

The point isn’t necessarily that gating is dead (though Forrester has bluntly stated that gated content and MQL obsession are among the practices AI is making untenable) but rather, what we should gate and how we should score the downloads. Someone using your ROI calculator, a migration-readiness assessment, or benchmark comparison tells you something. A 9am PDF download does not.

Build things that earn their place

Here’s a filter to run everything through before a single word gets written: does this idea earn attention on its own merits? Not “will the gate force an exchange?” or “will media spend prop it up?” That one question rules out an uncomfortable amount of what B2B currently produces.

What does survive that scrutiny has earned its place. Web-first long-form gets found, read, shared, and crucially, cited by both humans and the AI engines doing research for them. Social-first content earns attention in the feed. Interactive tools get used because they’re useful, surfacing real intent in the process.

It’s all about focusing on what you want out of it. If you’re serious about being cited in AI answers, you need to invest in GEO and structure your content in ways that get surfaced by those platforms. At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re looking at really engaging your audience, invest in different ways to entertain them. Use brand storytelling, build a game, try anything that you think will stop a scroll better than another eBook on the timeline.

McKinsey does this well. Its flagship thinking sits ungated on the web – built to earn authority and get cited, not to harvest email addresses. And yet no one would accuse McKinsey of giving its expertise away cheaply. That’s the model: audience first, distribution second. Good content should have to earn its place, the way it did before B2B started gating and scoring everything in sight.

The uncomfortable bit

I want to be clear that the system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as designed. It produces eBooks, MQLs, and downloads with beautiful reliability. But what it doesn’t produce is content anyone wants, or leads Sales want to talk to.

To borrow McKinsey’s ‘survival threshold’ framing: the things that used to set you apart are now simply the cost of staying in the game. The same is now true of B2B content. The standard formats no longer differentiate you. They just keep you in the noise, alongside everyone else running the same machine.

So the ask is a simple one. Before your next brief goes out, picture what you’d make if there were no gate, no PDF template, and no media plan to feed. Whatever that thing is, it’s probably the only content worth making. The machine will keep humming along quite happily without it. And that’s the point.

Remember: certainty is the enemy of growth.

This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s Content Director, Stuart Roberts