Insight

A cheat sheet for effectiveness from FT’s Media Matters Event

Last week we hopped out of the coop for a morning at the FT Media Matters event, where leaders from the FT and Salesforce unpacked what it really takes for B2B campaigns to cut through in 2025. Here’s what stood out.

1. Engagement beats eyeballs, every time

For all the talk of granular audience targeting, it’s still astonishing how often B2B briefs cling to the fantasy of reaching ‘everyone, everywhere.’ Spoiler alert: that strategy never ends well.

A big idea works best when it’s tailored to a specific audience, grounded in real insight and delivered in a format they naturally gravitate toward.

Channel choice is key. Recent FT/IPA research shows 60% of respondents are more likely to trust a brand when its ads appear in high-credibility ‘gatekeeper media’ like business news outlets, rather than in the wild west of user-generated content (UGC).

But further down the funnel, UGC still plays a starring role, with 91% of B2B sales influenced by word of mouth. Salesforce has even operationalised customer voice into its own channel, from advocacy networks to reviews and influencers.

Audience specificity is also critical. It’s high-time to stop chasing ‘C-suite decision makers’ as one big, amorphous blob. Start building personalised, behaviour-led experiences that respect audience nuance.

2. GEO has dethroned SEO

Search behaviour is shifting at pace – and Google’s once-unquestioned dominance is showing cracks.

Pew Research found that when an AI Overview appears, only 8% of searches lead to a click on a standard result, and links inside the overview are clicked just 1% of the time.

Welcome to the new era of GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation, where visibility depends on credibility, depth and originality.

Winning in GEO is about prioritising quality over quantity, using case studies, third-party voices and proprietary research to build content that earns its place inside AI summaries.

LLMs are now powerful branding tools. If you don’t shape your narrative, they’ll do it for you.

3. B2B marketing metrics are undergoing a tectonic shift

As one panellist put it, “Our measurement framework is tectonically shifting before our eyes.”

With AI-assisted discovery accelerating, Gartner predicts that by 2026, traditional search volume will drop 25% as chatbots and virtual agents take centre stage.

In this brave new world, click-through rate feels increasingly irrelevant. Instead, marketers are moving toward richer signals such as attention, dwell time, and behavioural engagement across the full customer lifecycle.

Salesforce also stressed the importance of balancing leading and lagging metrics; pairing long-term indicators like market share, awareness and attrition with short-term, real-time signals. 

It’s this mix that helps secure buy-in from commercial leaders and gives marketers a clearer view of what actually drives impact across different customer types.

Marketers can’t rely on the same old metrics. We need a more nuanced, lifecycle-wide approach.

4. People – not personas – are driving the B2B agenda

The FT team highlighted a trend we at Rooster Punk have championed for years: B2B is finally embracing its inner B2C.

The industry is shifting from rational proof points to emotional storytelling – and it’s working. FT campaigns that spotlight real people (their ingenuity, relationships, challenges and triumphs) consistently outperform anything abstract, corporate or overly sanitised.

These stories tap into something primal: a hero’s journey that invites empathy, curiosity and connection – and ultimately drives business impact.

Generic case studies are never going to capture the most attention. Humans respond to humans: so tell stories about them.

5. AI is only as good as the ideas that fuel it

In a surprise to no-one, AI was a hot topic of the day.

Agentic AI is already proving highly effective in ecommerce, shortening the customer lifecycle, driving conversion, and directly impacting the bottom line. 

This momentum is growing: a recent Capgemini study found that 82% of companies plan to integrate AI agents within the next 1–3 years.

But the panel’s consensus was clear: AI can automate, accelerate and augment – but it cannot imagine, provoke or emotionally resonate.

Just look at this year’s Christmas ads. John Lewis’s human-centred storytelling was met with fame and success. On the other hand, Coca Cola’s AI-generated, uncanny-valley experiment sparked widespread furore.

Craft, connection and creativity remain your competitive moat. AI amplifies strong ideas – and exposes weak ones.

6. Connection wins, and it always will

The loudest message of the day? Effectiveness isn’t about novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s about anchoring your campaign in real audience insight, then having the courage to back a distinctive creative idea.

Ready to shake things up?

If these takeaways hit home and you’re ready to launch a B2B campaign that actually connects – or if you just fancy a chat – we’d love to hear from you.