💡 The short of it
B2B marketers have let always-on media campaigns become a shell of what they should be – prioritizing internal metrics and accepting briefs that may not address the issue at hand over creating a material impact. The remedy is simple: to get ‘always-on’ back to meaning ‘always relevant’, B2B media practitioners must re-evaluate their account lists, their KPIs, and whether their strategy will create the right outcomes.
The B2B marketing landscape is changing faster than most organizations can keep up. I’ve noticed it, you’ve noticed it, and worryingly for businesses, so have buyers. Now, I’m not here to point fingers – breakthroughs in AI and changes in media consumption have turned the buyer journey on its head almost overnight. But long before even this, there was an industry wide need to strip out old ways of working, to restructure how we think, operate, and activate as marketers, internally and externally.
Strategies justified by nothing more than “this is how we’ve always done it.” KPIs that fit nicely into quarterly reports rather than reflecting the realities of modern business needs. Continuing to fuel a broken volume-based demand generation machine simply to meet internal lead goals. Measuring vanity marketing metrics. Gating all content. Optimizing everything to last-click attribution. You get the idea.
As an industry, we’ve been happy to optimize for known outcomes over material change. But prioritizing predictability and control in the short term over pushing boundaries has limited businesses’ growth potential in the medium-to-long. And it’s about time we reminded B2B that Certainty is the Enemy of Growth.
The always-on conundrum
The reasoning behind an always-on media strategy was – and still is – sound. Stay visible across the full buying cycle. Reach buyers before they raise their hand. Be the brand that’s already familiar when the moment of purchase arrives.
It was rooted in brand science, and a credible, long-game approach based on consistent presence, sustained share of voice, and the compounding effect of familiarity over time. But somewhere between the insight and the execution, ‘always-on’ mutated.
What started as a philosophy about relevance has become a machine optimized for its own continuation – generating just enough measurable output to justify its existence, quarter after quarter, without anyone seriously asking whether it’s driving growth or just producing the appearance of it.
KPIs aligned to internal measures of success rather than the metrics that tangibly affect growth. Optimization strategies that hit the brief rather than the right audiences. At some point, we started prioritizing safety over the science, creating a system held together almost entirely by the need for certainty – of spend, of audience, of output.
That’s where the uncomfortable truth lies: if your always-on program looks clean on a dashboard, that’s not evidence it’s working. It’s evidence it’s been optimized to look like it’s working. That’s not a media strategy designed to drive growth. That’s risk management dressed in media clothing.
A closed-loop, intent-driven justication engine
Intent data arrived at exactly the right moment to give always-on the scientific cover it needed to keep the façade going. Third-party intent provided signals that shed light on the then ‘dark’ stages of the buyer journey. Targeting became defensible, spend became justifiable, and nobody had to make a hard call about where to place real media bets.
It’s a story you’re likely all too familiar with:
- Intent signals feed a targeting model that runs against a fixed business account list
- Said list was probably agreed in a planning session months ago and hasn’t been seriously challenged since
- MQLs come out the other end. Depending on the quality of data, they might not be great, but they’re enough
- Channels, creative, and audiences all quietly bend toward the KPIs identified from the outset (often form fills and gated downloads over time) because that’s what the optimization logic rewards
The brief is the problem, but the brief isn’t questioned because the dashboard looks fine. Pipeline quality is a sales conversation. Revenue attribution is a problem for another quarter. This is how poor always-on practice calcifies – not through negligence, but through the entirely rational behavior of a system optimized for certainty and continuity.
Challenging the list means reopening decisions. Changing the audience means losing benchmarks. Nothing the media program produces is ever quite bad enough to justify stopping it… so it doesn’t stop. The evidence validates always-on. The loop closes. Growth stays roughly where it was, and everyone has plausible cover for why.
Gen-AI has made things worse, but it doesn’t have to
Generative AI should have broken this open. Faster experimentation, genuine creative risk at lower cost, and the ability to treat uncertainty as an asset rather than a threat. Instead, for most B2B media programs, AI has simply accelerated the machine.
Volume has become the goal over value. 40 ad variants generated in an afternoon means something is always running. Automated audience recommendations mean targeting feels continuously optimized without anyone making a real call. It’s the appearance of sophistication with none of the risk.
Always-on media programs are now faster, cheaper, and more self-sustaining than ever – and producing less genuine impact as a result.
The answer? Bring always-on back to basics
Intent-driven always-on media approaches only illuminate the businesses that are already moving toward a decision. That means you aren’t really shaping demand, you’re following it. The 5% of your audience in active buying mode get hovered over relentlessly. The 95% who will be in-market in six or nine months don’t register at all, because they haven’t triggered a signal yet.
In the end, it’s just a very expensive way of reaching people who were probably going to find you anyway.
And that’s the issue: today, we often don’t have the luxury of blockbuster budgets. The decision-making unit is getting larger. Buyers’ research habits are changing. The short-term, quarterly approach to B2B marketing is dying and marketing dollars must go further than they ever have before.
We just can’t afford to do the same thing and expect different outcomes. You have to reach buyers before they know they’re in the market for change – and that means getting back to what always-on media programs should have always been about: playing the long-game.
Experiment. Take risks. Test new audiences. Treat uncertainty not as something to be engineered out of the media plan, but as the mechanism through which you find out what’s actually possible.
Things will get a little messy. You will have periods of concentration and periods of silence. No, your creative might not end up working. But by embracing uncertainty, you accept that there is still room for improvement. That’s where you’ll find incremental performance and real growth. And that’s how we get always-on back to meaning always relevant.
Remember: certainty is the enemy of growth.
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This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s Head of Biddable Media, Alex Beddoe.
