Ditch small thinking, stop shrinking account-based marketing (ABM) down to a tactical acronym and start treating it as a powerful driver of modern growth, urged Publicis Pro’s chief executive officer Jon Lonsdale.
His rallying cry of “bin off the acronym and keep up with the ambition” summed up the tone for a conversation about why brand and ABM are so much better together than they are apart.
For years, ABM has been treated like a niche tactic: something functional, hyper-targeted and largely separate from brand-building. But that narrow definition has ended up boxing B2B into short-termism, over-reliance on sales, fragmented teams and a lack of ambition.
It’s understandable, then, that Lonsdale has “a love–hate relationship with the acronym” and instead welcomes the fact that marketers are “reclaiming the marketing bit of ABM.” The panelists were clear: when ABM is treated as a set of tactics rather than a strategic discipline, teams get trapped in pilots, not progress.
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Picking up that thread, StackAdapt’s vice-president of enterprise, Giuseppe La Rocca, explained what modern ABM really looks like – and why the acronym so often sends teams down the wrong path. “We need to move from ‘how do I use ABM as a target?’ to how can ABM help move our customers and orchestrate the journey for our customers?” he said.
And that shift calls for intent signals, creative, data and media working as one unified execution system rather than a series of siloed motions. But that takes courage, La Rocca advised: “It’s a leap of faith to go and work with a partner that says, we want to bridge these things that seem separate, but are really the same thing… but you can do unified buying in B2B.”
And with that leap comes a new definition of effectiveness. B2B doesn’t need more impressions – it needs velocity.
Ledger Bennett’s chief executive officer Andrea Glenn tackled the knock-on effect of silo-ed thinking. When ABM is viewed as a bolt-on channel, she warned, chaos follows. “If you start putting silos in marketing, they add extra layers of complexity,” she said. “And then all of those specialisms just become dumbed down.”
The answer? Elevate the perspective. And be more customer-centric. “It doesn't matter what people do in your team… always get them…to think around the audience first. What’s the audience experience?” Glenn advised.
By the end, the panel had made one thing obvious: the acronym is too small for what modern B2B now requires. Brand and ABM aren’t two separate worlds – they’re a single strategic system. And with technology finally capable of connecting the dots, B2B marketers can stop defending definitions and start accelerating growth.
Watch the full video on The Drum TV now.
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StackAdapt is a multi-channel programmatic advertising platform used by the most exceptional digital marketers. This state-of-the-art platform is where some of the...