If you want the single largest arbitrage in advertising, it is here, and it has been sitting in plain sight for years. Part five of the ad creative series.
The gap
System1's testing with the LinkedIn B2B Institute rated business-to-business ads against consumer ads on the same effectiveness scale.
A one-star rating in this system means the ad is predicted to generate essentially no long-term brand growth. Three-quarters of business-to-business advertising is in that bucket. Consumer advertising is bad too — 53% is not a triumph — but it is 24 points less bad.
Why: nobody is in the room
LinkedIn's Creative Labs ran a machine-learning analysis over more than 13,000 business-to-business video ads, covering more than 550,000 frames across 70-plus dimensions. The finding that explains the star ratings is a single number.
7% of those ads show any human emotion at all.
Not "not enough emotion". Ninety-three percent of business-to-business video contains none that a model can detect.
What actually lifts engagement
The same analysis measured what happens when B2B advertisers do the things B2B advertisers mostly refuse to do.
Memes. In business-to-business. Worth 111%.
The buyers were never the problem
The standard defence is that business buyers are rational, so rational advertising is correct. The research says the opposite, and has since 2013.
Google's work with CEB and Motista surveyed 3,000 business-to-business buyers across 36 brands and seven categories. Consumer brands typically achieve an emotional connection with 10 to 40% of consumers. Seven of the nine business-to-business brands studied cleared 50%. Business buyers were more emotionally connected to their suppliers than consumers were to consumer brands, not less.
The mechanism is obvious once stated. A consumer buying the wrong shampoo has wasted a few dollars. A procurement lead buying the wrong platform has staked their professional credibility on it. Personal value made buyers around 50% more likely to buy and eight times more likely to pay a premium, while only 14% saw enough difference between suppliers to pay more for it on business value alone.
That study is from 2013 and should be labelled as such. It has not been replaced, and the star ratings above suggest its advice has not been taken either.
What "emotional B2B" actually means in practice
It does not mean abandoning the rational claim. It means keeping the claim and translating it.
Business-to-business marketing defaults to four promises: easier, faster, cheaper, more revenue. Every one of them has a human consequence sitting one step behind it, and that consequence is what the buyer will repeat to a colleague.
- Time saved becomes being home for dinner.
- Increased revenue becomes a happier workplace, or a team that stops being asked to do more with less.
- Fewer errors becomes not being the person who has to explain the error.
The rational claim earns the click. The translation is what gets remembered and retold. You need both, and most business-to-business creative ships only the first.
The industry knows and does it anyway
WARC's analysis with the LinkedIn B2B Institute reviewed ten years of business-to-business effectiveness case studies — 435 of them, analysed by James Hurman. Seventy-six percent were focused on sales activation and short-term funnel optimisation.
The number underneath that one is worse. Only 5% of the 435 cases pursued long-term strategic effects at all. Not 5% succeeded — 5% tried.
Distinctiveness, and one caution about it
Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie tested 5,046 brand assets from 523 brands across 33 categories with more than 26,000 respondents in 25 countries, grading each asset on how distinctively it identified its brand. Fifteen percent reached the top grade. Broken out by type: product assets 31%, logos 19%, mascots 16%, slogans 6%, colour 4%.
Slogans and colours — the two things brand guidelines spend the most words on — are the two that identify the brand least.
A caution on this one. I could not reach the primary release from here; it was corroborated across two independent paths but not read first-hand. Ipsos has separate work on brand-asset usage against effectiveness with different figures, and the two must not be combined into one chart. They are different studies asking different questions.
What to read next
- AI ad creative — where the production cost of doing more of this is falling fastest.
- Ad creative testing — how to test emotional variants without a consumer-scale budget.
FAQ
How much worse is business-to-business creative than consumer creative?
In System1's testing with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, 77% of business-to-business ads received the minimum one-star rating against 53% of consumer ads — a 24-point gap. A one-star rating in that system means the ad is predicted to generate essentially no long-term brand growth. Consumer advertising is not a triumph at 53% either; it is simply less bad.
Why is it rated so poorly?
LinkedIn's Creative Labs ran a machine-learning analysis over more than 13,000 business-to-business video ads, covering more than 550,000 frames across 70-plus dimensions, and found that 7% show any human emotion at all. Not "not enough emotion" — 93% contain none that a model can detect.
Aren't business buyers rational, though?
The research says the opposite, and has since 2013. Google's work with CEB and Motista surveyed 3,000 business-to-business buyers across 36 brands and seven categories. Consumer brands typically achieve an emotional connection with 10 to 40% of consumers; seven of the nine business-to-business brands studied cleared 50%. Personal value made buyers around 50% more likely to buy and eight times more likely to pay a premium, while only 14% saw enough difference between suppliers to pay more on business value alone. The mechanism is obvious once stated: a consumer buying the wrong shampoo has wasted a few dollars, while a procurement lead buying the wrong platform has staked their professional credibility on it. That study is from 2013 and should be labelled as such when you cite it.
Does emotional B2B mean dropping the rational claim?
No. It means keeping the claim and translating it. Business-to-business marketing defaults to four promises — easier, faster, cheaper, more revenue — and each has a human consequence one step behind it. Time saved becomes being home for dinner. Fewer errors becomes not being the person who has to explain the error. The rational claim earns the click; the translation is what gets remembered and retold. Most business-to-business creative ships only the first.
Sources on this page
- System1 with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, "Cashing in on Creativity", 2023, via The Drum. Methodology behind a registration wall.
- LinkedIn Creative Labs, "The Art and Science of Video", 2025. 13,000-plus B2B video ads, 550,000-plus frames, 70-plus dimensions.
- Google, CEB and Motista, "From Promotion to Emotion", 2013. 3,000 B2B buyers, 36 brands, seven categories. Vintage 2013 — label it when you cite it.
- WARC with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, "The B2B Effectiveness Code", 2023, analysis by James Hurman, via The Drum. 435 case studies over ten years. WARC original is paywalled; wording confirmed through secondary coverage.
- Ipsos with Jones Knowles Ritchie, "Be Distinctive. Everywhere.", 2023. 5,046 assets, 523 brands, 33 categories, 26,000-plus respondents, 25 countries. Not read first-hand from here.
