Unmatched: Why B2B Advertising Needs a Rethink
The problem isn’t that B2B advertising doesn’t work.
It’s that we’ve been pretending it does - while using tools, signals, and strategies designed for someone else’s reality. That someone else’s reality is the B2C marketer — and yes B2B is different enough to warrant that statement
We have programmatic systems built for FMCG, identity frameworks held together with rapidly crumbling cookies and IP string with the sticky plaster of some wishful thinking, and an attribution and measurement stack stitched together from whitepapers that never met a use case.
Most TALs are broken before the campaign even starts. In 2025 we still see Lehman Brothers and other companies who barely traded into this century as we pass the quarter mark on our journey through it. Many more companies on TALs don’t have a preyer of being addressable on the internet
Most ABM strategies collapse at the matching layer.
Most buyers are lost in a black box of click-through rates and attribution fiction. Targeting metrics which are vanity at best and actively counter productive at their worst
And no one’s talking about it enough.
Welcome to
Unmatched: The B2B Ad Challenge
This is a newsletter about what’s broken — and what could be built better. A newsletter about how we CAN do it better
It’s not a playbook. It’s not an ops manual.
It’s a product-led perspective on:
Designing B2B media systems that actually work in a world which is changing at the fastest rate I’ve seen in my near 20 years building programmatic adtech
Understanding identity in a cookieless, cluttered, overpromised ecosystem and navigating the emergence into the signals era
Why TALs fail (and how to fix them upstream)
How to think about signals, targeting, and measurement like a builder — not a buyer
Who’s it for?
If you’re in B2B marketing, adtech, demand gen, or product — and you’re tired of vendor fluff and generic playbooks — this is for you.
This is not a recap of industry news. It’s for operators, strategists, and innovators who want to understand what’s possible — and what’s preventing it. Those who want to be at and even beyond the cutting edge of this ecosystem and the battlegrounds of the future for the B2B marketer
Why me?
I first started building programmatic adtech in 2010. I’ve designed cutting edge systems across native programmatic, got a contextual patent, and have built 3 data and advertising businesses - most recently FunnelFuel.io, a business which has grown at least 100% year on year since 2022
I’ve spent the last 7 years building systems to make B2B programmatic smarter — across data, identity, and activation. That includes running platform and product strategy at FunnelFuel, where we’ve been pushing on what it really means to match a signal to a company — and make it actionable.
You’ll get the real lessons here. The ones that didn’t make the pitch deck.
What to expect:
One post per week (ish), focused on:
Strategic breakdowns of what’s failing in B2B media
Identity and TAL mechanics (not magic)
Bidstream thinking for product people
Innovation case studies (good, bad, and delusional)
Coming next:
Why most B2B ad strategies fail before the first impression
The fantasy of fixed match rates
ABM as product design, not just media targeting
If you’re trying to build what’s next, you’re in the right place.
Let’s fix what’s broken.
One signal at a time.