The frontier doesn’t come with a playbook

Most B2B organization’s marketing teams are looking at LLM optimization strategies and have already decided to, at the very least, start testing them at the consideration/decision stages of the content/influence funnel.  But not many B2B marketers are fully embracing the true potential as they’re waiting for an LLM playbook that doesn’t exist yet.

We’re still in the early days of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and paid advertising on LLMs is still in its infancy. It tracks that a lot of businesses would wait for a first mover to do their thing, and only then do they make a move of their own. The thing is, even our contacts at OpenAI say they’re waiting for advertisers to help them create the playbook.

Waiting is a prudent strategy that can bring you varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, it potentially gives your competitors a jump on you and an unfair advantage.  Waiting also means missing the frontier of the biggest technological shift since the Internet and watching any first-mover advantage evaporate before your eyes.

It could be a very expensive mistake, so here’s why doing the logical thing and waiting for certain proof with your LLM approach is the enemy of growth.

We’ve done this before

Two decades ago, our industry ran this same experiment with Google Search, and most of us got it wrong. In the beginning, it was just Search, the demand capture tool that hoovered everyone from those already looking for a solution to those halfway to a decision. Naturally, we categorized it as a narrow, low-funnel channel.

Then Google grew. A slew of acquisitions allowed the business to build out the programmatic infrastructure most digital advertising runs on today. That was the shift. A whole new digital ecosystem built with Google’s business at its heart, and the slow expansion of where its services sat in the marketing ecosystem.

Marketers who saw that early (i.e., those who treated Search as one facet of something enormous, rather than a tidy bottom-funnel utility) banked years of advantage. Everyone else caught up eventually but never reaped the kinds of rewards those on the edge did. The moment it became table stakes was the moment any chance at the enormous first-mover advantages disappeared.

Hold that thought.

It’s the same misread, but for LLMs

Today, too many businesses are treating LLMs like a bottom-of-funnel tool. A buyer is deep in a decision, they ask Claude to compare vendors, and you’re a part of its shortlist – or you’re not. Well worth optimizing for, but nothing special. Into the decision-stage bucket it goes.

Sound familiar? LLM platforms already command an extraordinary volume of attention. More than a billion people turn to them not just to decide, but to learn, explore, and work out what they even want to begin with. But unlike Search, there’s no page two to save you here. You’re either in an answer or you’re invisible.

In the midst of these massive changes, ChatGPT’s ad business has already quietly hit $1B in annualized ad revenue in the eight months or so it’s been offered – and if OpenAI is to be believed, $100B by 2030. Attention at that scale is the prime mental real estate to build your brand.

Just as Google revamped the entire digital ecosystem around itself, LLMs are attempting to do the same. The assumption that these platforms will stay mid to bottom-of-funnel is a bet against the history of ad-supported media. Every platform that has ever drawn this many eyeballs has eventually monetized it, broadened it, and reshaped the market around it.

Being on the frontier of what these LLM platforms offer doesn’t just help with the bottom-of-funnel work that’s emphasized today; it’s also going to help you ride the wave of everything they’re inevitably going to offer three-to-five years down the line.

Testing for a future that doesn’t really exist… yet

Finding success on the edge means working in ways that B2B businesses aren’t particularly fond of: through experimentation.

Some experiments are more accessible – and more necessary – than others. Take content, for example. LLMs have blown open the world of operationalized personalization at scale. They’ve upended how buyers navigate the customer journey, and we still don’t have a hard-and-fast playbook today. You have to at least be working on LLM visibility to stay competitive.

Then there’s the true frontier where platform capabilities change almost daily.

ChatGPT’s infant ad business doesn’t offer in-platform incrementality testing yet, but they have just launched impression-based attribution that can give you an idea of how your brand’s ads influence a user’s conversation. And chances are, by the time you read this, something new has probably been announced.

Building a full-funnel LLM approach into your marketing mix opens up that potentially rich vein on untapped first-mover advantage. But it doesn’t work with the playbook we currently have.

B2B’s ‘set & forget’ attitude is at odds with the more agile, integrated ‘media x content/creative’ strategy that works best on the edge. It takes a systemized, efficient way to test and learn hypotheses. And the buy-in to stick with it no matter what. All that to say, join the frontier the right way or don’t join it at all.  

Can you afford the cost of waiting?

Skepticism is an appropriate response to the argument you’ve just read in this piece. The metrics aren’t there. Attribution is a mess. And the hard results you’d need to build a confident business case simply don’t exist yet. The easy thing to do is wait – especially given everything else you could prioritize for your marketing.

The trouble with certainty is that, when it finally arrives, everyone gets it. You get the same benchmarks your competitor does. They get the same insights into an audience that’s long moved on as you do. The outcome is ordinary and priced accordingly.

Counterintuitively, the most expensive position to be in right now is one of confidence. If you feel like you already know where your buyers will find you, how they make decisions, and which channels deserve the budget, you risk missing this shift in the same way others did the internet, search, and social.

Being early means having to act without proof on both fronts, organic and paid. It means investing in both before there are case studies to reassure your board. It’s uncomfortable – unrealistic, even. But it’s exactly the kind of calculated risk that could come with an oversized reward.

The frontier doesn’t come with a playbook. Waiting for one is just a professional way of arriving too late. And certainty is the enemy of growth.

This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s VP, Activation, Max Massengill.