CMO Poaches, 67/26 ABM Split, and a $200B Market in Flux
What has happened in B2B marketing this week?
• US programmatic spend crossed the $200B milestone in 2026 but the story isn’t scale, it’s where the value actually lives in the supply chain. More on that below. This could expand rapidly if the rumoured ChatGPT ads go programmatic - and their 6 week test on a limited cohort hit a $100m a year advertising run-rate - watch this space
• Microsoft Invest DSP shut down on 28 February 2026. Microsoft Monetize (the SSP) lives on and has joined Amazon’s Certified Supply Exchange. One less buy-side option; one cleaner supply path. The AppNexus DSP was a long time favourite of B2B marketers and this was the end of an era
• Bombora + Proximic by Comscore launched 300 new predictive B2B contextual audiences — activatable on TTD’s Contextual Marketplace and via portable Deal IDs across DV360, Yahoo DSP and Adobe. Worth knowing about. Worth keeping in perspective too.
• B2BMX 2026 sessions are calling out the “Intent Trap” - the argument that signal-based marketing is mostly “15-year-old intent data with a new AI wrapper.” The best conferences are now doing our jobs for us.
• Bombora data now reaches Reddit’s 116M daily active users — company-level audience targeting on the platform where real B2B peer research actually happens. A genuinely useful signal environment for B2B.
LEAD STORY
The Trade Desk is fighting to stay king but the fight has changed shape
The question is no longer DSP vs DSP. Curation, supply-side containerisation, and a new generation of infrastructure players are rewriting the rules underneath everyone’s feet.
This week, Marketing Brew ran a piece examining The Trade Desk’s position in a shifting market. CMO Ian Colley and two other senior executives departed as part of what the company called a “changing of the guard.” Omnicom and Publicis are both running agency audits of TTD’s fee structures. Jeff Green responded by buying approximately $150M of company stock. The numbers underneath it all remain very solid; roughly 19% year-on-year revenue growth for three consecutive quarters, JBPs now accounting for well over half of revenue, pipeline more than doubled year-on-year.
So the business is performing. The narrative is what’s under pressure.
But the deeper story isn’t about executive changes or agency relationships. It’s structural, and it’s being driven from the supply side.
The programmatic market is in the middle of a genuine architectural shift around curation and audience containerisation. The traditional model — an advertiser loads targeting parameters into a DSP, the DSP bids across open exchange inventory, audiences get assembled on the demand side — is being challenged by a different thesis: that the audience is better shaped in the supply layer, closer to the publisher, before the bid ever happens. Curated deals and private marketplaces aren’t new. What’s new is the sophistication and the commercial models being built around them.
A good example of this direction is Bedrock platform, a newer entrant approaching the DSP market with a fundamentally different architecture. The proposition: bake curation into the core of the platform rather than treating it as an add-on, and load the bidder directly into the SSP’s infrastructure. The logic being that by living on the supply side, you stop losing relevant traffic to the filtering and path optimisation that happens before a bid request even reaches a traditional DSP. Audiences get assembled with better signal fidelity. Waste is reduced before it’s even created. The commercial model is differentiated accordingly — not the standard DSP fee layer on top of media, but something built around the curation value itself. This is the cutting edge of programmatic advertisings direction of travel, and it stands to solve a bunch of structural problems in one big fowl swoop
Bedrock is just one example. But the direction of travel it represents is a market-wide signal. The comparison is no longer DSP vs DSP. It’s about where in the supply chain you want to do your audience work, and what infrastructure model best serves that. For B2B specifically — where audiences are finite, targeting precision is everything, and identity resolution matters more than reach — this has significant implications.
TTD’s response has been Kokai and its expanding direct-brand relationships. Smart moves. But as the supply-side curation model matures, the question of where the intelligence layer should sit — demand side, supply side, or both — is genuinely open. The independent DSP’s strongest argument has always been neutrality and breadth. Both of those things are harder to defend when your competitors are operating inside the supply chain rather than across the top of it.
My take
The agency audits are ultimately about leverage, not fees. When TTD deepens direct brand relationships and JBPs, it compresses the agency’s role in the media supply chain. Omnicom and Publicis understand exactly what that means over a five-year horizon. The audit is a message sent in commercial language.
For B2B programmatic, TTD remains the best open-web infrastructure available — 1 trillion QPS, unmatched supply breadth, the Bombora iABM integration, the UID2 ecosystem, the choice of platform for businesses like FunnelFuel who are building the B2B layers into the wider adtech layer. None of that changes with a CMO departure. What it does lose is the person best positioned to articulate the measurement story at a moment when B2B CMOs are demanding exactly that. The risk for TTD isn’t losing the open web. It’s losing the narrative just as the supply-side architecture conversation gets louder.
STORY TWO
ABM in 2026: 67% claim it. 26% can prove it. And 6sense may have a bigger problem than the data suggests.
New figures from the State of Account Based Marketing report land a stat that should embarrass a lot of CMOs: while 67% of organisations define ABM as a strategic GTM motion, only 26% describe their programme as truly successful. Fifty-five percent say ABM influences 0–20% of company revenue. Another 26% aren’t sure of its financial impact at all.
The structural diagnosis is familiar: most teams are running campaign-based ABM — time-bound, light on personalisation, reporting on engagement and meetings at best and media vanity metrics like CTR at worst — rather than an always-on system that adapts to signals, coordinates sales action, and compounds. Campaign ABM creates movement. It doesn’t create momentum.
But there’s a sharper conversation happening beneath this data, and it’s landing loudest around 6sense specifically. Spend any time on LinkedIn this week and you’ll encounter a growing volume of practitioners expressing genuine frustration: the signals that 6sense produces don’t appear to be correlating reliably with pipeline outcomes. Sales teams are increasingly sceptical of the intent scores they’re handed. Marketing and sales misalignment, the very problem ABM was supposed to solve, is reportedly getting worse in some organisations running 6sense, not better. For a platform that built its entire identity around predicting buyer readiness, that’s a serious reputational problem. Increasingly I’m reading about more tech centric marketers in big vendors building their own solutions with Claude
This is hard to quantify from the outside, and to be clear, anecdote is not data. But the sentiment is consistent enough and the voices prominent enough that it warrants naming. 6sense also feels notably quieter in the practitioner conversation than it did even twelve months ago. The category energy has shifted. Whether that’s a product problem, a go-to-market problem, or a consequence of the full C-suite reset the company is currently mid-way through — new CEO Chris Ball arrived in September, and since then there’s been a new CSO, COO, CPO, and CMO, the last of whom was poached directly from Demandbase — is genuinely unclear. But a company rebuilding its entire leadership team while managing growing signal-quality questions in the market is navigating a difficult combination.
Salesforce’s 2025 State of Marketing report adds useful context: B2B deals now involve an average of 11 stakeholders, each consuming 5–7 assets before touching Sales. An intent score against a single account, delivered to a sceptical sales rep, doesn’t capture any of that. If your ABM programme is built around a single buyer signal, it was never really ABM.
My take
The 26% success rate is not a platform problem. It’s a systems problem. Most organisations bought the software before they sorted the operating model; shared KPI contract, ICP tiers, MQA thresholds, SLA timelines, a single definition of what “an in-market account” actually means between Marketing, Sales, and RevOps. No platform resolves that misalignment for you. There is no silver bullet in the software as a service biz, and solving for that needs more of a white glove service then a tech stack
But the 6sense signal quality conversation points at something harder to fix with process. If the correlation between platform signals and actual revenue outcomes is genuinely weak, that’s a data and model problem. And the market’s patience for expensive platforms that don’t move pipeline is running out faster than the renewal cycles.
STORY THREE
6sense just poached Demandbase’s CMO. The ABM platform wars are getting personal.
On 19 March, 6sense announced the appointment of Kelly Hopping as Chief Marketing Officer. Her previous role: CMO at Demandbase. That is not a polite industry transition. That is a direct competitive strike and it signals where 6sense’s new leadership thinks the battle is being won and lost.
On the Demandbase side, the company isn’t standing still. This week, Demandbase and NetLine announced a joint integration syncing Demandbase’s ABM account lists directly into NetLine campaigns — bridging account-level intelligence with buyer-level content engagement in target accounts. Demandbase has also shipped its “Agentbase” GTM AI agents on AWS Marketplace and a deep real-time integration with Salesforce Data Cloud. Both platforms are in an arms race to own the label “agent-powered” before the other gets there first.
My take
Watch the Hopping hire for what it tells you about product direction. She came from the advertising and orchestration side of Demandbase, not predictive analytics. That tells you 6sense under Ball is prioritising execution and activation over dark funnel intelligence — which is a meaningful strategic pivot for a company built on predicting buyer readiness. I have said for a while that media execution, especially in channels like programmatic where the data exhaust fumes are so rich, is the best bet to cast for usable signal and cracking the dark funnel is a fools errand.
There’s also a structural point worth making about where both of these platforms sit relative to actual intent data. 6sense and Demandbase both bundle Bombora into their platforms. What reaches you is a processed Company Surge score — Bombora’s aggregated view of account-level topic activity. What you don’t get is the raw signal layer: the individual content consumption events, the publisher-level data, the granular research threads that Bombora actually collects before summarising. Platforms that surface a score are giving you a summary. Operating at the raw signal level means reading the original material. That gap is structural, and it doesn’t close with a CMO hire or an agentic product launch. Watch out for a big announcement in the coming weeks which will change this game completely
ICYMI = publisher rev splits from programmatic are back in the news again
The “36 cents to the publisher” narrative needs some serious pushback. This argument is as old as programmatic itself, and it persistently misses the point of where value actually lives in the supply chain. Yes, the open exchange has historically had dirty, multi-reseller paths and intermediaries who add nothing. That’s a real problem and curation is the right response to it. I strongly believe that the best users of programmatic do not have this issue any more - its a solved problem, move on.
But the implication that publishers should be capturing close to 100% of what enters a DSP fundamentally misunderstands what transforms an impression from worthless to valuable. In B2B especially, the difference between a raw impression — a device ID on a publisher page — and a verified impression reaching a CFO at a named account on your target list is entirely downstream of the data layer. Without identity resolution, without intent signals, without firmographic targeting, that impression is worth nothing to a B2B advertiser. Zero budget would be allocated. The publisher would get nothing.
Add in the humans managing campaigns, the brand safety technology, the viewability and attention measurement, the attribution infrastructure, the ad serving keeping the system honest — all of these represent real value that has to get paid for somewhere in the chain, and the accepted industry model is that it comes from media margin. When you view programmatic “waste” purely through the lens of publisher revenue yield, you miss the entire value exchange that makes B2B programmatic worth running at all.
Contextual: let’s be honest about the scale problem. The 74% of marketers planning to maintain or increase contextual targeting is a real signal. But before we declare contextual the quiet winner of programmatic, it’s worth naming the constraint that tends to get left out of these reports: there is no meaningful scale in contextual advertising for B2B, and there never has been. Bluntly, it borders on a waste of time
B2B audiences are finite and tiny. The personas we care about — C-suite and senior buyers at named accounts in specific verticals — spend a decreasing share of their time in environments where we can contextually target them today. LLMs are eating traditional editorial consumption patterns faster than new contextual inventory is being created. In fifteen-plus years of building and operating B2B adtech, contextual has always been a thin sliver of overall delivery. It works as a signal layer and a brand safety control. It does not work as a volume channel. I do not think about it as a delivery mechanism - instead I think of it as a signal amplifier. That is why we use it
The real value in B2B programmatic is audience — verified, identity-resolved, intent-qualified buyers — placed in premium, brand-safe environments where you have enough scale to optimise to high-attention units, which correlate to engagement, which drives account-level engagement scores and measurable shifts in vendor-level intent. Contextual tells you about the page. Audience tells you about the person. In B2B, the person is everything.
On intent data providers: Intentsify scored highest on Current Offering in Forrester’s B2B Intent Data Wave, ahead of better-known peers. Worth knowing about, though the important context is that Intentsify’s core heritage is content syndication — the signal depth they’re known for comes from tracking content consumption within their own publisher network. That’s genuinely useful for understanding what specific content buyers are engaging with. What it doesn’t address as well is the advertising execution layer — reaching those buyers programmatically, at scale, in premium environments, with account-level frequency control and buying committee analytics. Data depth and advertising chops are different capabilities, and the market conflates them more often than it should.
Genius Monkey + CTM integration. Programmatic meta-DSP Genius Monkey integrated impression-level campaign data with CallTrackingMetrics’ multi-touch attribution this week. The goal: connecting programmatic exposures to inbound call conversions — a measurement gap that matters especially in B2B, where enterprise deals still close over the phone.
References:
Here’s the full source list for the edition:
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Trade Desk / Programmatic Infrastructure
Marketing Brew — “Can The Trade Desk Remain King of the Open Web?” — April 9, 2026 — marketingbrew.com
eMarketer — Programmatic Advertising Forecast & Trends H1 2026 — January 2026 — emarketer.com
Basis Technologies — Expert Roundtable: Trends That Will Shape Advertising in 2026 (36 cents stat, supply chain waste) — December 2025 — basis.com
Basis Technologies — 7 Programmatic Advertising Trends Shaping 2026 ($26.8B waste estimate, curated deals) — January 2026 — basis.com
ABM & Intent Data
N.Rich — Why “ABM Campaigns” Don’t Work in 2026 (67%/26% State of ABM data) — February 2026 — nrich.io
Salesforce — State of Marketing 2025 (11 stakeholders, 5–7 assets per deal) — 2025 — salesforce.com
Demand Gen Report — 2026: The Year Marketing Enters the Age of Accountability (VTA, 266 touchpoints, MQL decline) — March 2026 — demandgenreport.com
Forrester — Wave: B2B Intent Data Providers, Q1 2025 (Intentsify highest Current Offering score) — Q1 2025 — forrester.com
Forrester — Wave: Revenue Marketing Platforms for B2B, Q1 2026 (6sense named Leader) — January 2026 — forrester.com
6sense
Demand Gen Report — 6sense Launches AI Email Agents, Names Chris Ball as New CEO — September 2025 — demandgenreport.com
Business Wire — 6sense Appoints Kimberly Bloomston as CPO and Kelly Hopping as CMO — March 19, 2026 — businesswire.com
6sense Newsroom — 6sense Welcomes Chris Ball as CEO — September 9, 2025 — 6sense.com
Demandbase
Demand Gen Report — NetLine and Demandbase Join Forces to Elevate ABM Programs — April 6, 2026 — demandgenreport.com
Demand Gen Report — Demandbase Experts Share Strategies for Privacy-First Marketing: 2026 COSeries — March 2026 — demandgenreport.com
Bombora / Contextual / Data
PPC.land — Bombora and Comscore Unite to Create 300 B2B Contextual Audiences (Proximic partnership, Reddit integration) — January 2026 — ppc.land
Comscore — 2026 State of Programmatic Report (74% contextual usage stat, curated marketplace data) — January 2026 — comscore.com
Other
Newsfile Corp — Genius Monkey Announces Programmatic Integration with CTM — April 7, 2026 — newsfilecorp.com