I make commercials, but I don’t like commercials.
I don’t like dry B2B ads that all open the same way. Logo. Dashboard. Some corporate Voiceover. More dashboard. Your buyer has seen that a thousand times. They skip. They forget. Then your team wonders why every downstream channel feels harder than it should.
I want video ads that don’t feel like ads. I want them to feel more like an entertaining piece of content.
If you’re the marketing champion trying to get CFO approval, I get it. You need more creative. You need more hooks. You need more than one tired asset getting burned out in paid. But the second you say “brand awareness,” finance starts asking for hard proof.
Fair enough.
I’m a filmmaker first, entrepreneur second. So yes, I care about lighting, pacing, sound, casting, jokes, all of it. Finance cares about leverage. Good brand video gives your team leverage. It earns attention, warms audiences up, builds recall, and gives demand gen more chances to win.
Safe videos get impressions. Bold videos get views.
That’s how I’d frame this conversation in 2026.
Key Takeaways
- B2B buyers spend just 17% of their purchase journey meeting with suppliers, forcing vendors to build brand memory before direct sales engagement occurs.
- Data from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute indicates that 81% of B2B purchases are awarded to vendors the buying group already knew at the start of the procurement process.
- Viewers pay attention to B2B video advertisements for an average of 3.7 seconds, making initial visual hooks and three-second hold rates critical early performance metrics.
- B2B video advertisements containing three or more explicit brand mentions achieve a 48% correct brand identification rate, compared to just 32% for ads with a single mention.
- B2B conversion campaigns achieve a 2.3% response rate from audiences previously exposed to top-of-funnel brand messaging, compared to a 1.0% response rate from cold audiences.
- Consolidating B2B video production into tightly structured batch shoots allows marketers to generate 15 distinct commercials and 45 multi-format assets for approximately $30,000.
Why Brand Awareness Matters More Now
Buyers are giving you very little time.
A Gartner study found that buyers spend only 17% of a complex purchase journey meeting with suppliers. If three vendors are being considered, each supplier gets about 5% of the buyer’s time. That is almost nothing.
So where does the rest of the decision get shaped? Before the meeting. Before the demo. Before sales gets its shot.
It gets shaped by what the market remembers.
That matters even more because buyers want to self-serve. Gartner’s 2025 survey found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer an overall rep-free buying experience, 73% avoid suppliers that send irrelevant outreach, and 69% notice inconsistencies between the website and what sellers say. Your brand has to do more work before a rep ever shows up.
Then there’s the simple reality of timing. The 95-5 Rule says that roughly 95% of B2B buyers are out of market at any given time. Most people seeing your ad are not buying today. That does not make the ad useless. It makes memory more important.
And when buyers do enter the market, they lean toward brands they already know. Research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that 81% of B2B purchases went to vendors already known by the buying group at the start of the process.
That is the whole argument for brand awareness right there.
If the room already knows your competitor and barely knows you, your retargeting budget, your search budget, and your sales team all have to work harder. And in 2026, with feeds filling up with AI content, real human-made creative starts to feel more premium. There’s that human nuance that AI doesn’t have.
Where Most Budget Pitches Go Sideways
Most brand budget pitches fail because marketers present brand too softly.
They lead with impressions, reach, maybe some comments, maybe a nice note from the CEO, and a vague line about “building awareness.” Finance hears that and sees a fuzzy top-of-funnel spend with no economic story attached to it.
I think that’s the wrong way to frame it.
Video ads are just a splash in the bucket when it comes to marketing. I say that all the time because it’s true. Video is one part of a bigger system. But it can be a very important part. Its job is to make the brand memorable enough that your other channels work better.
The other problem is this. Teams judge top-of-funnel brand work the same way they judge a direct-response lead form ad. That pushes you toward safe, obvious, low-attention creative. Ask yourself a simple question. If nine brands in your space are doing dry, corporate, explainer-looking videos, why would your buyer remember yours?
It’s the best marketing that wins.
The First Metric I Care About: Engaged Attention
Let’s start with the thing most teams skip over.
Attention.
In a MediaScience study on B2B ads, viewers paid attention for only 3.7 seconds on average. So no, you do not have 30 clean seconds of focus. You have a tiny window.
That’s why the first numbers I want to see are your hold rates. How many people stayed for three seconds? How many reached 25%? How many reached 50%? How many finished?
Those numbers tell you if the opening worked.
This is why I push so hard on the first visual. I don’t want the viewer thinking, “Oh no, not another ad.” I want curiosity. I want tension. I want beautiful cinematography. I want some gag or shock value image where people say, what the heck is going on here? Sometimes a hook doesn’t need to be dialogue. The hook can be a strong visual.
That first moment can be funny. It can be dramatic. It can just look amazing. I’ve said before that I want some ads to feel like a David Fincher movie where the audience questions which platform they’re even on. Wait, am I on LinkedIn or am I on Netflix?
A lot of B2B teams still open by showing the product interface or saying the company name right away. I’m not dogmatic about that. I just think it often makes the piece feel like a commercial too fast. And once it feels like a commercial, people want to skip.
I’d rather open with a funny, bold, unhinged scenario that gets the viewer eating their popcorn. Then I tie in the brand.
There is one nuance here. The opening should earn the watch. The brand still has to land clearly. The same MediaScience research found that ads with three or more brand mentions reached 48% correct brand identification, compared with 32% for ads with one mention. So after you earn attention, close the loop. Give the viewer the aha moment. Make sure they know who the ad was for.
Short also helps. Ads that were 10 seconds or shorter got 68% ad recognition, versus 59% for longer ads. That lines up with how I like to build top-of-funnel work anyway. Short. punchy. memorable.
Cost per Engaged Viewer Beats Cheap CPM
A lot of teams still brag about cheap impressions.
I don’t care that much.
Cheap impressions are easy to buy. Real attention is harder. So I’d show finance a metric like cost per engaged viewer. Take your media spend and divide it by the number of viewers who watched 50% or more. Now you’re looking at something more honest.
Why do I like that metric? Because it connects creative quality to media efficiency. A cheap CPM with weak watch time can still be waste. A higher CPM with strong engagement can be a better buy if it builds memory and feeds warm-audience retargeting.
This is also where humor helps. Kantar’s research found that emotionally strong digital ads were four times more likely to drive brand equity, and humor was the top reason people chose not to skip ads in 30 of 42 countries.
People remember funny. People remember an emotion. Whether it’s a mental laugh or an outside laugh, like an LOL, that reaction matters.
Art is opinion, not fact. The audience still tells you what landed.
Warm Audiences Are Where the CFO Story Gets Stronger
Here’s where brand awareness starts sounding a lot less fluffy.
I like a sequence. First, run a short top-of-funnel brand ad. Make it funny. Make it cinematic. Keep it less dashboardy. Then build an audience of people who watched more than 50%, and retarget them with a deeper explainer or product-focused cut.
That’s how I think the funnel should work.
The data backs that up. LinkedIn found that conversion campaigns got a 2.3x higher response rate when the audience had already seen brand messages. Warm audiences responded at 2.3%. Cold audiences were at 1.0%.
That is a CFO sentence.
Now you can walk into the room and say, “We are not spending on brand for vanity. We are warming up the right people so our lower-funnel campaigns convert better.”
If leadership insists on showing the product, fine. I do that all the time. I’ll keep the front half narrative-driven and put the UI or solution shot at the back end. Sometimes I’ll even deliver two versions so you can A/B test the problem-only cut against the problem-and-solution cut. I’m practical about it.
Just make sure the media budget is real. If leadership gives the campaign a toy budget, like a dollar a day in ads, you are not getting a fair read on the creative.
Brand Recall Is a Metric if You Track It Properly
A lot of marketers talk about recall like it lives in the clouds.
It doesn’t.
MediaScience found that only 19% of viewers both noticed a B2B ad and correctly identified the brand. That tells you how fragile memory really is. People may kind of remember the ad and still forget who it was for.
So you have to track recall on purpose.
I’d look at branded search lift during the campaign. I’d look at direct traffic. I’d ask sales to log when prospects mention the ad, the character, the joke, or the scenario on discovery calls. I’d look at self-reported demo sources. I’d compare exposed audiences against non-exposed audiences.
I’ve seen this play out very clearly with Lavender. We built the Lavender Joe campaign and kept expanding it. Over time, people started mentioning the character during demo requests. That’s exactly what you want from top-of-funnel work. The market repeated the creative back to the brand. I even saw the recognition show up in real life at Collision in Toronto, where people knew the character already.
That is not fluff. That is the market remembering you.
And remember the bigger point. If 81% of purchases go to vendors already known by the buying group, brand recall is a pre-pipeline metric. It shows up before last-click attribution does.
Creative Yield Matters to Finance More Than Most Teams Realize
One hero ad is a risky bet.
A lot of CFOs miss that. They feel conservative approving one polished video. To me, that is more dangerous. You are betting the whole thing on a single asset.
Creative is already a portfolio problem. LinkedIn’s research found that the average B2B brand supports 15+ paid-media creatives per year. So the question is not whether you need multiple assets. You do. The question is how efficiently you can make them.
That’s why I batch shoot.
A single commercial can cost around $20,000. My bigger packages are around $30,000 for roughly 15 videos. That brings the cost per asset way down. Then I convert everything into horizontal, square, and vertical. So when we’re delivering 15 videos, clients are really getting 45 assets.
That is how I think about value. You’re bringing down the budget by 50% or more and adding 10x the content.
The whole thing works because the shoot is tightly structured. One location. Strong pre-production. Actors ready. Shot lists ready. That’s how I can move fast without the quality falling apart.
Now you are not asking for one expensive video. You are asking for a testable creative system. You have multiple hooks, multiple pain points, multiple versions, and enough content to avoid fatigue. If a couple of ads flop and a couple do really well, now you’re already winning. You have something to scale.
I hate ad fatigue. Seeing the same exact ad again and again is painful. Your audience feels it, and your CTR usually tells you when it starts happening. A bigger asset pool gives your team room to rotate, learn, and keep the account healthy.
Pipeline Influence and Payback Are the Closing Arguments
I don’t promise magic. I can’t guarantee that one funny video books demos by itself forever. I hate that guru stuff.
What I can say is this. Memorable top-of-funnel creative helps move buyers into the rest of the system. And when you track influenced pipeline and payback properly, the business case gets much easier to defend.
Replicant is a good example. We created a cinematic CTV campaign for them built around a dramatic diner scene at night. That campaign helped generate a sale that allowed them to recoup the full production investment within six months, and they came back for another campaign. That is the kind of story finance understands immediately.
For B2B, I also like CTV because it creates premium perception. A commercial that looks like a movie, like a CinemAd, hits much harder on a big screen. If we’re going to interrupt someone while they’re watching a movie, why not interrupt them with an ad that looks like a movie?
And the channel is only getting bigger. B2B digital video spend is projected to hit $5.2 billion in 2026. More brands are moving this way. The smart question is how to measure it well.
At the budget level, I’d also remind finance that brand should not be starved. Binet and Field’s B2B analysis found that efficiency is strongest when budget is split roughly 46% to long-term brand building and 54% to short-term activation. I’m not saying you copy that ratio line for line. I am saying that 100% demand capture is a trap. It leaves you fighting for the last click with no memory in the market.
How I’d Take This Into the CFO Meeting
Start with Buyer Reality
Open with the market, not with your creative idea.
Show that buyers give suppliers only a tiny slice of their time. Show that most buyers are out of market. Show that known brands win more often when the buying journey starts. That frames brand awareness as a revenue problem, not a creative hobby.
Then Show the Attention Gap
Next, show the team how little attention normal B2B ads actually get. Bring your own watch-time numbers if you have them. Compare them to the hold rates you want from the new campaign. That makes the creative problem very concrete.
Then Show the Retargeting Plan
After that, explain exactly how the ads will be used. Short top-of-funnel videos first. Retarget viewers who watched 50% or more. Then serve the deeper product video, the case study, the explainer, whatever you need.
That helps the CFO see a system, not just a line item.
Then Show the Asset Economics
Walk them through the volume model. One hero ad is one bet. A batch of 10 to 15 gives you more chances to find a winner, more hooks to test, and less fatigue over time. That is how you de-risk a video campaign by shooting 10 to 15 ads in one day.
Then Bring Them Something Concrete
This part matters a lot.
When marketers come to me and need approval from a CEO or CFO, I often write sample scripts before any money changes hands. I’ll ask, “Tell me what your product does like I’m 10. Give me a metaphor for how your product works.” Then I build ideas the room can react to.
A script sells budget faster than a vague promise.
And if the room is nervous, fine. I’m happy to diversify the scripts from safe to bold to unhinged. We can make one or two risky concepts and a few safer ones. Then performance decides. Bold never means mean, by the way. I push hard on comedy, but I never want humor that punches down or tries to embarrass people.
Final Thought
Brand awareness is one of those things people call soft right up until the market forgets them.
In 2026, buyers spend very little time with suppliers. Most of your audience is not in-market today. And when they finally are, they usually choose brands they already know. That means memory has value. Attention has value. Creative shelf life has value.
So when you go ask for budget, talk about engaged attention. Talk about warm-audience lift. Talk about recall signals. Talk about asset economics. Talk about influenced pipeline and payback.
Then make something people actually want to watch.
That’s the whole job.
Always Be Cinematic.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we prove extra share of voice actually translates to market share?
The CFO wants hard math. Binet and Field found that every 10 points of extra share of voice above market share drives a +0.7 point bump in annual market-share growth. It is a slow burn, but it is proven leverage.
What is a healthy budget split between brand tracking and direct demand capture?
100% demand capture is a trap that leaves zero memory in the market. Binet and Field show B2B efficiency peaks when 46% of budget targets long-term brand and 54% targets activation. Use brand metrics to ensure you actively warm audiences for that activation split.
How long should we measure top-of-funnel brand metrics before expecting pipeline impact?
Stop judging brand campaigns on a 30-day window. The LinkedIn 95-5 Rule states roughly 95% of buyers are out-of-market at any given time. Measure engagement and recall immediately, but pipeline shifts take quarters. You build memory for when that 95% finally enters the buying window.
Can you measure fame as a distinct metric from standard brand awareness?
Awareness means they know your logo. Fame means your creative is the industry inside joke. Binet and Field found B2B fame campaigns average 2.2 large business effects versus 1.6 for awareness. Track fame via direct traffic spikes, dark social sharing, and unprompted feedback on discovery calls.
If buyers prefer self-serve, what metric proves our creative is replacing the sales pitch?
Gartner found 61% of B2B buyers prefer rep-free experiences. Your brand content must do the heavy lifting before sales speaks. The best metric here is high-intent website velocity – tracking how quickly warmed viewers move from top-of-funnel video consumption directly to pricing pages without SDR interaction.
