ABM has never been more advanced. Or more forgettable. As programmes become increasingly automated, many are quietly losing the one thing that makes them work: creativity. In this article, Caroline Lotinga, MD at Radish, explores why and how ABM has been optimized into irrelevance.
Account-based marketing (ABM) has transformed in the last couple of years. It’s no longer just a way to run targeted campaigns, but the thing that shapes how revenue teams organize around customers. How they prioritize accounts, align sales and marketing, and decide what ‘good’ actually looks like. Put another way, ABM isn’t a tactic anymore: it’s an operating system.
But like any operating system, an ABM campaign can’t do its job properly without all of the fundamentals in place, and the sad but increasingly clear evidence is this: B2B marketers are running their operating system without the creativity installed.
While 82% of B2B companies are running ABM programmes, the proportion that struggle for ROI has risen to 47%. As ABM has become more operational, more data-driven, and more automated, it’s also become more uniform. Less surprising, less human, and, in some cases, weirdly empty.
Which is a major problem, because ABM only really works when it feels personal.
So why is this happening? And how can you make sure you keep that creative edge to your campaigns?
When ABM arrived, it was all about clarity: fewer accounts and more focus, leading to better, more fruitful conversations. Over time, that focus expanded into something bigger: coordination. Shared dashboards and metrics, with accountability spread across marketing, sales, and customer teams. That’s the operating system in action, and it’s one that was designed to replace vague, ‘hit-and-hope’ messaging with sharper, more engaging thinking that actually matters to targets.
Yet while the data has become more personal, it can seem like creativity has gone the other way. Treated as a layer you add at the end, rather than something that shapes the thinking from the start. This leads to a lack of distinction – with just 12% of B2B customers, according to Gartner, actually changing their mind about a vendor based on their digital experience.
The evidence is everywhere: Perfectly timed outreach that says nothing new. Personalization that’s technically correct and emotionally flat. AI-generated content that looks finished but leaves no impression. In a world where everyone’s optimized, somehow hardly anyone’s memorable. So how have we reached this situation, and how can ABM-ers optimize our way out of it?
The first answer is the oldest in the B2B book. B2B buying may be rational on paper, but in reality, it’s messy and human. Some 92% of B2B buyers, according to Forrester, start their formal evaluation with at least one preferred vendor already in mind. This means ‘optimizing’ during the intent phase is often too late; you have to win the creative battle for their minds much earlier.
People make decisions based on trust, internal politics, and gut feel – especially when the stakes are high. Data can tell you who to talk to and when, but it can’t tell you how to matter. That’s what creativity does. It turns insight into relevance. It helps brands show they actually understand what’s going on inside an account – not just that they’ve spotted an intent signal.
AI plays a role here, too. Not because it’s the enemy of creativity – in fact, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for creative collaboration – but because it makes it very easy to produce things that look ‘good enough.’ According to a Root Digital survey, 40% of B2B marketers identified the ‘lack of humanity’ in AI-generated content as its single biggest drawback. When everyone uses the same tools, trained on the same data, prompted in similar ways, outputs start to blur together. You get efficiency at scale, but lose every ounce of distinction.
The ABM programmes that stand out don’t reject AI or data. They just refuse to let automation do the actual thinking. AI accelerates the work, but it should be humans who decide what actually matters: what would surprise this account? What would they remember? What would feel genuinely relevant to them right now?
Those aren’t system questions. They’re creative ones. And they can lead to some powerfully unexpected answers.
As ABM becomes more embedded as an operating system, it starts shaping behavior. What gets measured gets valued, and what becomes automated gets repeated. Over time, that can create a bias toward what’s gone before. Safe ideas win, and predictable messages feel sensible.
But the big deals aren’t won on these kinds of messages. They’re won on belief. On whether people trust you, understand you, and can imagine a future with you in it. Because when everyone has access to the same data, the same platforms, and the same playbooks, the only real advantage left is how you interpret them.
Luckily for us marketers, that interpretation isn’t up to our operating system or the latest AI tool. It’s up to us. By investing in creative thinking, so choosing to stand out instead of blur into the background, we can make campaigns that truly matter.
