“I define marketing as an epic battle for mind space, period, end of story. And you’re competing against everything. Magazines are the same, right? We’re all competing for a little tiny place in a brain.” Drew Neisser

“There is a disturbing trend in B2B marketing that is threatening the long-term success of marketers and their businesses,” according to a recent research fielded by CMO Huddles.  “The study shows an over-reliance on Demand Gen (The process of increasing awareness and demand for your product or service) and “this over-reliance on it is creating a ‘death spiral.’”

The December 2024 survey of several hundred B2B marketers found that “more than half of marketers plan to allocate more budget to Demand Gen in 2025, even though many reported lackluster outcomes from similar investments in 2024.”

The data also shows:

· “Nearly one quarter plan to increase spending on brand and reputation-building, a critical area for fostering trust and differentiation.

· Almost one third are currently hiring for demand gen roles, perpetuating a cycle of reliance on short-term tactics.

· However, investments in innovative skills like generative AI and data analytics remain very limited.”

To learn more about this study and the firm responsible for it, CMO Huddles, I reached out to its founder & Penguin in Chief, Drew Neisser, and I asked him about his title, CMO Huddles, and the recent study that CMO Huddles has fielded.

What follows is my conversation with Drew Neisser, Penguin in Chief, CMO Huddles.  But first the soundbites:

On his title Penguin in Chief: “It turns out that a group of penguins is called a huddle. And that was a perfect mascot for our community, given the commonalities between penguins and CMOs.”

On CMO Huddles: “It’s a community of 450 or so marketing leaders all in business to business groups spread across primarily the U.S.”

On the business in transition: “The last two years have been about doing more with less overall, right? That has been the big theme. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to change.”

On why there will be an increase in Demand Gen although it is not working: “I only have one word for it. It’s insanity. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doubling down on the thing that didn’t work and hoping that it’s going to have better results.”

On the importance of awareness in marketing: “It’s everything. Think about it. We know anywhere between 60 to 70% of a B2B journey happens before they contact the brand.”

On how the study applies to magazines: . “I think that what consumers want increasingly are experiences.  To the extent that magazines can deliver both a physical and a digital experience.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Helping marketers overcome a malaise that’s out there. And this research kind of showed it.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Drew Neisser, Penguin in Chief, CMO Huddles:

Samir Husni: You’re the Penguin in Chief of CMO Huddles.

Tell me a little bit about CMO Huddles and (laughing) about your title Penguin in Chief?

Drew Neisser: It turns out that a group of penguins is called a huddle. And that was a perfect mascot for our community, given the commonalities between penguins and CMOs. I mean both live in a harsh environment. They really work together successfully. They’re good communicators or good problem solvers. So this parallel was.

The reason it’s funny because I think of myself as the Penguin in Chief is actually I think of myself as, “I’m bringing these people (CMOs) together and helping them succeed.” That’s sort of my mission in life is just to help CMOs inspire B2B greatness, to get them in. It’s been a very difficult time in the last couple of years for them.

Samir Husni: Tell me a little bit about CMO Huddles before we talk about the survey that you just did.

Drew Neisser: Sure. It’s a community of 450 or so marketing leaders all in business to business groups spread across primarily the U.S., although we do have some members in Europe. We gather in small group conversations, which we call Peer Huddles.

We’ve got three Peer Huddles. We also have bonus huddles and where we bring in bestselling authors like Michael Watkins, who wrote The First 90 Days, and other authors  of bestselling books and so many other big time marketing folks. So part one is the network building, and part two is the PR that we help them get. We have all sorts of exclusive properties that support their personal brands. And then we also help the folks who are in transition.

We have a small transition team of about 20 CMOs who were members then found themselves on the bench and we helped them through that.

Samir Husni: The whole business is in transition. You just did the study on Demand Gen, where do you see the marketing heading? As we move toward 2025, is the emphasis going to be on ink on paper, digital, or word of mouth? Is it online or offline or both?

Drew Neisser: So here are some things. This is, you know, my crystal ball isn’t any better than yours or anybody else’s, but I can tell you some things that I see and things that I know.

The last two years have been about doing more with less overall, right? That has been the big theme. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to change. And the forces behind that are often PI and VC firms that finance a lot of the B2B companies.

And because they’re not building businesses to last, but they’re building businesses to sell. They have created sort of this artificial marketing scenarios, right? They’re not building companies per se. So that’s not going to go away for a certain sector.

Then there’s the rest of the world, which is companies that are trying to build, establish their reputations and get pricing power. I think we’re going to see that competitive advantage is going to be to the companies in B2B that market better. If you were to look at what happened this year, more dollars went in Demand, more dollars went into digital.

It wasn’t more effective. But that’s where they went. So I think what you’re going to see is a few brands will be brave and say that shift needs back to reputation building, back to other things.

I had a conversation recently with the CMO of Gusto, who dramatically increased spending on television. Wait, what? B2B television, good old fashioned. Now, a lot of it’s linear TV and YouTube TV.

But nonetheless, they’re on sports and they’re doing what we would have called traditional media. And it’s working really, really well.

Samir Husni: Your study shows that there will be an increase on the Demand Gen, but in the same token, the results (of Demand Gen) were not that great this year.

Drew Neisser: I only have one word for it. It’s insanity. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doubling down on the thing that didn’t work and hoping that it’s going to have better results. I think these are artificial scenarios, often imposed.

So there’s what I think will happen and then what I hope will happen. What I think will happen is more companies will spend more on Demand, more on digital, more on measurable, quote, measurable things, and they’ll see diminishing returns. I expect that to happen.

And then a small group, 10 percent, 20 percent, will say, no, that’s not working. It didn’t work last year. Why do we expect? We’ll spend money differently.

There are a lot of options available for them. There’s community-led marketing, which Sixth Sense has done unbelievably well. You know, there is rising influencer marketing and B2B. I don’t want to say thought leadership because I think that’s a shallow and overused term, but there is an opportunity for a lot of brands to make the case, the business case, that they’re better at, that they can be essential parts of the purchase process for whoever they’re selling to. And that’s a key thing. What happened in 2024 was if you weren’t essential, you didn’t get to sell.

So people weren’t losing. B2B wasn’t losing to a competitor. They were losing to no decision.

Samir Husni: As a chief marketing officer, how do you ensure that your product is essential in 2025?

Drew Neisser: Well these are new things, Samir. First of all, you do it by talking to your customers and figuring out what is it that, why did they buy you? Why did they choose you? How are they getting value out of it? And you quantify that. So you can line up your customers and who will say, we’re using this and we’re getting 5x return, right? Now, very few brands can actually do that, but that’s a lot of it’s because they’re not taking the time.

If they do that work and they find they aren’t delivering that kind of value, then they have things they have to do on the product side and the service side, right?

Samir Husni: You mentioned, Gusto that invested in television?

Drew Neisser: Yes.

Samir Husni: Do you see more of those companies investing in what we call legacy media or traditional media and print?

Drew Neisser: Well, I want to caveat there because while they’re spending more on video content, again, a lot of it’s linear TV. A lot of it is YouTube. I don’t know if we call that, that’s not quite the same as buying an ad on CBS, right? I wish more brands were doing that because it works for certain types of brands. And I think it’s important B2B2C or like Gusto sells payroll services, right? And surrounding that.

Well, payroll touches everybody and they’re targeting a broad group of small businesses, which is a lot of people. When you’re targeting small businesses, you tend to see broader advertising. And so I expect that those folks with that, we’ll see, read about Gusto.

They’ll read about other brands that are having success via those channels and they go, oh, we need to do that. So yes, you still have a lot of software service brands that are going to keep trying to optimize every digital channel they can until they’ve sort of run out. Because it feels like you could measure it and it feels like a dollar in is a dollar out.

That’s the way folks want to believe. And I’m afraid a lot of CMOs have drunk the Kool-Aid of that too. You know, you’ll see that in their titles. It’ll say data-driven.

Samir Husni:  So if the Demand Gen is to increase the awareness, not necessarily increase the response or increase the revenue; how important is increasing that awareness for any product?

Drew Neisser:  It’s everything. Think about it. We know anywhere between 60 to 70% of a B2B journey happens before they contact the brand, which means when they finally contact the brand, they only do that if they were aware of you, that they discovered you and they have a short list where they’re coming to you now and they want to talk to, ironically, they want to talk to a product expert, not a salesperson.

So if they’re doing 60, 70% of their research on their own and you’re not out there covered by the analysts, if you’re not out there written about broadly, if you haven’t, and by the way, broadly is 10 to 15 different individuals in that company.  It’s not just the one buyer. You’re not going to get on the short list. So reputation, and I’m going to use reputation as the summary of awareness and trust built over time.

Reputation is everything and great marketers find a way to get in the brain to occupy some space. And if you can occupy some space and it’s time for someone to buy whatever it is, that space you’re at, you’re going to get on the list.

Samir Husni: You know, most of my audience are magazine publishers and editor, so how can we take this Demand Gen from the B2B world and from the survey that you just did, how can we apply some of that to the consumer magazine world?

Drew Neisser: It’s so interesting. I think that what consumers want increasingly are experiences.  To the extent that magazines can deliver both a physical and a digital experience that goes beyond what I see in my Apple news feed or on my Facebook feed.

Let’s face it, it’s a hard business because the younger generation did not grow up reading magazines. So I would be, if I were in the magazine business, I would be thinking about how do you resample. In the old days when you sampled a product, you would go out and it was a food product and you would put it in front of people. You’d hand it to people, say, try this.

Magazines need to reintroduce themselves to the world, to a younger generation who has no idea what that is and the joy of actually turning the page. I think that’s an interesting opportunity for them.

There are places where you still see people reading magazines in airports and in lounges and in doctor’s offices and so forth, but expanding that and then connecting the experience of reading the magazine to the digital thing. It’s so funny because barcodes initially were used by magazines to try to do that and it was a failure, but now they’re back. So there’s got to be a way for them to create a connected experience that has ongoing value. I think AI is going to play a role in this too.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical last two questions is there anything you would like to add or anything I should have asked you?

Drew Neisser:  At this very second, I think probably the thing for me in 2025 is the rallying cry that I want to get out there is not more with less, but more with more.

Because the notion of more with less is saying, well, whatever you did last year, you weren’t that efficient. You could be more efficient. That’s not what we need to do.

We need to be, in order to own mind space, to get in the brain, I define marketing as an epic battle for mind space, period, end of story. And you’re competing against everything. Magazines are the same, right? We’re all competing for a little tiny place in a brain.

Without it, you have no pricing power. And without it, you have no loyalty. Without it, you don’t have, you do not get recurring revenue.

So more with more says, how are you going to get more mind space? I think you’re going to do it. I think in your industry, you’re going to do it by creating new experiences that bridge physical and digital. And I know it’s been talked about for years and tried, but I think it’s going to be better.

Just imagine any magazine, they take 20 years worth of their data and create the GPT of that magazine. And then we say, I know a little bit about you, Samir. And you’re really into certain things.

I can look back at the pictures and the art and the family and so forth. I create a new digital experience for you with my GPT when you come arrive that gives you five things that you would find fascinating because it just know you based on some other things. And it could pull all that information from a massive database we already have.

Anyway, I think it’s going to be there’s some exciting opportunities for longtime publishers that they may be terrified about. I think magazines are going to end up finding that digital sales reps, that gen AI powered bots are going to play a role in marketing and conversion. Again, I go to a website now, I expect to see a bot.

But what I don’t expect to see is one that’s really, really intelligent and can actually interact with me in a way that is helpful.

Samir Husni:  My typical last questions, if I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing, reading a book, watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?

Drew Neisser:  Let’s see. Well, it depends on exactly the time that you arrive. If it’s about between 4:30 and six o’clock, it’s me walking with my wife and our dog in Central Park. Then we come back from that. This is the Friday routine.

We then go to a wine tasting nearby. We then we catch up on the week, watch the news, kind of an old fashioned thing. And then, you know, one hour of television of some show.

That’s our main evenings. I probably listen to 20 books a year. So I do that. I probably only read, physically read 12.

Samir Husni: And what keeps Drew up at night these days?

Drew Neisser:  Helping marketers overcome a malaise that’s out there. And this research kind of showed it.

The CEO of Kickstarter said, CMOs are going to have to do more with less. And that, I just I had a visceral reaction. So why are you saying that? Are you saying that’s a product? Are you saying that? And so that’s what’s keeping me up at night is how do we elevate marketing again to a place where it’s not this cost center that can be cut all the time?

Samir Husni: Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time.