Pears vs. Peaches

The B2B Marketing Awards 2024 showcases remarkable innovation and creativity in the industry.

This year, I had the pleasure of speaking to Judges Dr. Christine Bailey, Senior Director, Marketing - Moodys, Alex Collins, Head of Growth Marketing, EMEA - Wex, and Alina Zheleznyakova, Head of Marketing - NationWide Laboratories and VetIT.

We discussed what makes a good entry, the trends, and if AI has lived up to the hype.

The one thing that always comes up is how judges evaluate campaigns when you have vast chasms in team size, in-house capabilities, budgets, and execution. To coin veteran judge Christine Bailey’s phrase:

“There is rarely an Apples vs Apples comparison; it’s more like Pears vs Peaches”.

What makes a good entry?

First things first. What are the judges looking for when they begin to assess the year’s entries?

• Good, concise writing

• Demonstrating business impact

• Skipping the vanity metrics

• Using visuals where possible

• Tailoring your entry to the category

And for the love of all things precious, answering all the questions!

Okay, that’s Step 1 in the process covered off…

So how do you decide? For the judges I spoke to, it all comes down to critical thinking, articulating business impact, concise storytelling, and the personal experience of knowing the challenges the teams faced to get those campaigns over the line.

This year’s trends…

According to the judges, leveraging customer insight was prolific across all the categories.

Alina observed that B2B marketing is becoming more focused on building relationships and partnerships rather than just pushing products and features. “Customers want to feel understood and supported, not just processed,” she explains, with this trend towards more personalised, values-driven marketing applicable across many industries.

Christine, who wrote the book on customer insight (literally, link here), questions whether or not “customer insight” should be a category in its own right. “Like campaigns, she says, “customer insight should be included in everything.” Christine also notes a significant shift to fully integrated long-tail campaigns.

It sounds like there might be a change to some of the categories next year…

The shift to business metrics

As a community, B2B marketers have been talking for a long time about closer alignment with Sales and demonstrating the impact of marketing on business growth. Now more than ever we have access to the data that enables marketers to articulate the impact they are having on the business.

Alex and I ended up having an interesting discussion on this. Coming from a background in B2C and agency-side marketing, he has observed a seismic shift to reporting on business impact metrics rather than just campaign metrics such as like impressions and views. He goes on to say that even if you are running an awareness campaign and you don’t have a brand lift study from a third party, you can still use tools like Google Trends to benchmark the performance of your campaign.

I was curious and asked him how he does it, as typically, B2B sales cycles are long. He explains they have set up a ‘trading group’ that includes a member of the Finance team. “We have an agreed reporting framework of what success looks like,” he says, “and proxy measurement of revenue from the pipeline.”

The use of AI

Much like the Internet in the ‘90s, AI is one of those things that you need to start getting into – otherwise you’ll quickly get left behind. Arguably we are all using it in some capacity already, but let’s face it, nine times out of 10 when someone says the word ‘innovation’ in today’s world all they really want to hear about is how we are leveraging AI. Turns out, this year’s submissions were not about images and copy but a masterclass in leveraging AI tools and accelerating human thinking.

Top thoughts:

Alex: AI only looks at the now and the past. If you have an aspirational brand and you are basing all your planning on AI-driven insights alone, you’re going to have a customer-centricity problem that will not be aspirational or may lack long-term value.

Christine: “B2B’ers are using AI in amazing ways to speed up a process, overcome blockers, and create analytics in a way that a human being would struggle to do. It was humans using AI to take them up a level."

Alina: “The most successful campaigns balanced AI-powered capabilities to highlight the human element with authentic, relatable storytelling.”

Creativity needs a purpose

A long-term topic in the B2B community is creativity in all its forms. The judges were excited by the level of creativity being deployed and animated about some of the ideas they saw B2B marketers starting to use.

The creativity of entries is getting stronger and stronger.

That said, judges saw a clear distinction between creative ideas that were grounded in a strong strategic platform that would resonate with their audience and beautifully crafted campaigns that lacked customer insight and fell short of this.

Clearly, the creativity B2B Marketers brought to bear was high this year and made judging the entries extremely difficult. So, how do you decide on a winner? Alina’s view is that the most successful campaigns balanced data-driven insights with authentic storytelling.

Good luck to all this year’s entries!

We’re looking forward to another evening celebrating our incredible community of B2B marketers.

A BIG SHOUT OUT!

We should always give more than a passing thought to the judges behind the B2B Marketing Awards. This year, there were 132 judges who all offered their time and energy around their existing work.

Whether you are attending the ceremony or not, we should all raise a glass to the judges.

It would not be possible without you.