B2B has never been more digital and somehow never felt less connected. That’s the tension Dawn Cardy surfaces in (you guessed it) The Drum.

Events aren’t a “brand awareness line item” anymore. They’re becoming the last high-signal channel left in a world drowning in automated touchpoints, AI-shaped sameness, and increasingly faceless content.

When everyone is executing the same optimizations, a little human touch becomes a differentiator.

Cardy’s argument, although presented with a UK-centric lens, reflects an important shift in B2B thinking: Treat live experiences like strategic infrastructure, not trade show decor.

Events are becoming proof-of-work. Every brand claims community. Very few demonstrate it. Showing up physically with a POV, a reason to gather, and clear stakes, is fast becoming the trust accelerator digital channels can’t match.

Experiences are differentiating brands more than messaging. Vodafone turning an API into an immersive exploration demonstrates how to use in-person experiences to compress a complex storytelling timeline.

Emotion is back in B2B (by necessity). In a sea of over-produced booths, engineering a moment, a shift in mood, attention, or perspective, creates connection by allowing people to feel something, not just consume information.

Space is now a creative canvas. The Drum’s examples point to a shift from surfaces (colorways, signage, modular walls) to journeys: how people move, feel, and interpret meaning in a space.

Momentum matters more than moment. Consistency across multiple events outperforms any one “hero” booth in driving recall and community energy.

Events are the counterweight to digital and AI customers are craving.

In a world of infinite content, the scarce resource is human presence.

Humor that carries real emotional weight.

In his roundup for The Drum, Curro Piqueras calls out “Launch It” as a beautifully crafted, character-driven piece that nails the emotional chaos of putting something into the world.

He’s right. But there’s a deeper creative achievement worth calling out for B2B leaders: this campaign captures the pride and terror of entrepreneurship without slipping into full parody or sentimentality.

Most humour makes the product feel trivial. Most emotion turns syrupy or self-important.

Squarespace finds the impossible middle. A silly premise with giant carrots lifting off and horse-statue-rockets screaming into orbit that somehow nails the stakes of building something of your own.

It’s funny, but it’s honest. It’s light, but it respects the journey. It’s entertainment, but it earns its meaning.

It's captivating and, if you've ever dreamed of creating something big, deeply meaningful.

Lead with emotional truth.

Emotion works in B2B when it reflects a truth your buyers already feel, the weight of building, pitching, launching, risking, hoping, not when it’s bolted on as a tactic.

That’s the advantage B2B teams build with us.

B2B teams love to optimize the bottom of the funnel, and then wonder why every dollar feels heavier than the last. Bradley Keefer’s piece for The Drum surfaces the real tension: brands keep cutting the one investment that makes every other investment more efficient.

Short-term ROI worship is costing B2B companies growth. Not because performance tactics don’t work, but because they work better when the brand is healthy.

Mental availability collapses. Your market forgets you faster than your dashboards tell you. Competitors step in. When spending comes back, you’re rebuilding from behind, burning money just to get back to zero.

Performance gets expensive. Without brand equity doing the quiet heavy lifting, every lead, every click, every conversion is uphill. You can’t optimize your way out of a perception deficit.

The whole system slows down. Strong brands shrink sales cycles and lift paid efficiency. Weak brands drag both.

Brand only compounds when marketing, sales, product, and leadership all pull in the same direction. Shared story, shared stakes, shared ambition. Without that, brand becomes a logo exercise and the funnel becomes a treadmill.

You don’t fuel growth by squeezing the lower funnel. You fuel growth by feeding the thing that makes the lower funnel work.

If you want to improve performance, start with the asset your competitors keep treating as optional: your brand.

In her roundup of B2B’s biggest questions for 2026, The Drum’s Maria Greaves spotlights a tension every marketer knows: B2B teams love short-term wins, yet all the evidence points to something harder to ignore: growth compounds when brand leads and demand follows.

Greaves revisits one of the most studied ratios in modern marketing: the 60/40 brand-to-demand split. It’s not a trend. It’s a pattern the data keeps confirming.

Brand builds the memory that demand converts. Most B2B performance metrics measure moments. Brand investment shapes the conditions around those moments: trust, familiarity, emotional preference, the “I know who they are” advantage that buyers carry into evaluation.

When that memory is weak, demand dollars burn faster.

Down-funnel efficiency is a downstream effect. Every company starving the brand budget eventually feels it:

The fix isn’t more targeting. It’s more mental availability, the asset only brand can build.

The ratio flexes by maturity, but the principle doesn’t. Greaves outlines a practical model:

Integration beats efficiency. Run brand and demand to the same audience, from the same narrative, and the whole system accelerates. Brand creates interest. Demand harvests it. The loop compounds.

Brand isn’t the soft half of the funnel. It’s the multiplier the rest of the funnel depends on.

The ratio isn’t the story. The story is that brand and demand stop working when they’re treated like rival budgets.

Every dataset, every creative example, every uncomfortable truth points in the same direction: brand sets the conditions for growth long before performance ever shows up.

When you protect it, everything downstream works harder. And when you don’t, nothing does.

—Jay