Walk into pretty much any B2B marketing department or eavesdrop on any team call (like the nosey parker you are) and you’ll likely hear and see similar things.
Decks packed with granular data, campaign journeys, multi-touch attribution models, CPC insights and breakdowns of “lead generation success”. (Hopefully. I don’t know how advanced things are where you’re eavesdropping. It could just be pictures of stickmen and memes)
When (and if) creative is discussed though, it’s usually as an afterthought.
Some stock photography variations for a LinkedIn sponsored ad. A 24-page “thought leadership” piece containing zero thought but a fetching blue gradient cover. Product-led copy crammed with acronyms.
We rationalise it by saying “This is rational”.
Because B2B purchases involve large buying committees, long procurement cycles, chunky contracts, and more than a smidge of risk. Surely, logic and targeting must rule the roost?
Then comes along a piece of research that shatters this rational illusion.
(Thankfully! Could you imagine if we wrote a blog backing rationality?! Lol).
Published in partnership with Effie Worldwide, System1’s landmark report and book, The Creative Dividend combines viewer responses to over 100,000 actual, real-life ads with documented commercial results from the Effie global effectiveness database.
It gives rigorous, data-backed proof of something brand builders and creatives have felt and known for years but B2B brands seem to wilfully ignore: Creativity is not decoration. It’s the ultimate profit multiplier.
Sure, the report primarily focuses on broader advertising effectiveness, but its implications hit the world of B2B like a low flying frisbee between the eyes.
Here’s why The Creative Dividend is essential reading for every B2B marketer, senior leader and/or anyone with an eye on growth - and how you can translate its 4 core findings into competitive advantage.
Other than brand size (which can’t just be doubled overnight with some cheeky “growth hacks”, whatever they are?), the quality of creative is the single largest controllable profit multiplier.
How big a multiplier? The findings point to creativity being capable of increasing campaign profitability by up to 12x.
By contrast, hyper-targeting (which has become somewhat of an unhealthy obsession in some circles of B2B) delivers an estimated multiplier of just 1.1x.
But what’s worrying is that many marketers aren’t tuned into this in the slightest. When System1 and Effie surveyed global marketers, they found that:
Over 60% of marketers rank targeting as more influential on profitability than creative quality.
41% state that creativity is viewed internally as a commercial risk.
And in B2B, this dynamic is amplified even further.
Marketers can end up spending thousands of pounds on marketing platforms/tools, intent data, and CRM enrichments to deliver an ad with absolute laser precision… that then serves up a creative asset so bland it never even registers with an actual human.
Sure, targeting ensures your message reaches an IT director or a CFO.
But creative quality directly dictates whether they actually care, remember you, or instantly scroll past. The best targeted campaign in the world can’t rescue creative that’s as dull as dishwater.
System1 defines the "cost of dull" pretty clearly.
Ads that generate high levels of neutrality (aka. those that evoke no emotional response) deliver campaign ROI roughly 40% lower than work that hits people right in the feelings.
In the dataset, the dullest campaigns averaged an ROI of $4.40. The least dull averaged $7.10.
Now, take a quick gander at your own LinkedIn feed.
B2B advertising is famously, aggressively, almost offensively neutral.
It’s an ocean of corporate blue banners, generic stock photography handshakes, nondescript glass skyscrapers, circuit board graphics representing "AI-driven solutions", and headlines like "Seamlessly Optimize Your End-to-End Enterprise Workflow." YAWN.
Because B2B deals are viewed as more logical and rational, marketers falsely equate professionalism with having to have an “emotionectomy”.
In reality, B2B purchasing IS inherently emotional. (It involves people, so of course it is!)
As the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the LinkedIn B2B Institute and any B2B marketer worth their salt will frequently remind you, roughly 95% of your target market isn’t in-market to buy today.
When they finally are in-market, which they all will be at some point, they don’t download six whitepapers, watch a bunch of webinars, and construct a matrix of potential solutions from scratch.
They recall the two or three brands that sit top-of-mind. Those that they have positive associations with. Those with clear mental availability.
Dull creative fails to build that mental availability.
When you produce safe, corporate wallpaper, you’re effectively paying a 40% "boredom tax" on your media budget.
In the report and book, System1 introduces the concept of “The Creativity Stack”.
It’s a four-level framework for building ads, campaigns, and creative that reliably (and predictably) compound into commercial profit.
When it’s adapted for B2B, it provides a practical roadmap for moving away from generic marketing:
Layer 1: Emotion (the anchor. Creating feelings that drive recall)
Layer 2: Distinctiveness (how instantly relatable it is to your brand and ONLY your brand)
Layer 3: Showmanship (production, pacing, wit, tension, humour, etc)
Layer 4: Consistency (how you sustain and build narratives over time – not just a single quarter!)
Neuroscience, System1's testing, and our general experience of being actual humans, confirm that our memories are tied directly to emotional intensity. Think of some of your fondest or most impactful memories – falling in love, a family member dying, getting the last Malteser in the packet, etc.
It’s 100% certain these memories will all be driven by underlying, intense emotion.
In B2B, emotion doesn’t mean trying to shoehorn sentimentality or consumer-style melodrama into things. It means tapping into real workplace truths and experiences:
The dread of an audit or compliance breach.
The frustration of legacy software slowing down your team.
The quiet pride of delivering a transformational project ahead of deadline.
And one emotion that often gets forgotten about in B2B is Humour. It’s everywhere in B2C but criminally underused in B2B. If you can unlock and weaponise humour properly, especially when others are focusing on more negative emotions, you’ll start coming up trumps.
Because remember; If your audience feels nothing, they store nothing.
The Creative Dividend uncovers quite a fascinating nuance when it comes to creativity.
Distinctiveness alone doesn’t predict profit. However, distinctiveness combined with positive emotion does.
Even at modest spend levels, campaigns strong in both are 7x more likely to deliver incremental profit than those weak in both.
System1 measures this via its “Fluency Rating”, which measures how rapidly and accurately a viewer knows who is speaking.
In B2C, this is achieved through Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs): characters, audio cues, and recurring visual devices.
In B2B, distinctiveness is usually abandoned.
Logos get tucked in the bottom right corner, typography is standardised, and tone of voice is uniformly corporate. If you removed your logo from your latest case study, digital ad, or hero video, would an industry buyer instantly know it was yours?
If the answer’s “no”, you’re probably funding category awareness for your rivals.
B2B marketers and decision makers often view production value as vanity. It’s probably because budgets are tight and we’re all being challenged to do more with less. Why pay for a camera crew to shoot something when the intern’s got an iPhone 17 in their pocket?
But an investment in higher production and higher value creative assets is a wise one.
System1’s data indicates that high showmanship and narrative engagement increase audience trust by up to 50%.
A cinematic, sharply written piece of storytelling commands attention and cuts through in a feed filled with low-effort infographics and generic text posts.
To quote Einstein (we think, sources are a bit woolly on this one): “Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world”.
And what’s true in the world of finance is also true in the world of marketing and creative campaigns.
The Creative Dividend proves that brand consistency has an exponential impact on business results. Yet brands have become 25% less consistent over the last decade as teams constantly pivot strategies, rebrand, and jump to new channels.
In B2B, CMO tenure averages roughly 24 to 28 months. Every new marketing leader wants their own tagline, visual identity, and positioning statement.
Just as an asset begins to become memorable in prospective buyers' minds, the company changes creative agencies and wipes the slate clean.
Unlocking the full potential of the creative dividend needs (or should we say demands) running your distinct assets and campaigns long after your internal marketing team has grown sick of seeing them.
One of the hardest-hitting findings in The Creative Dividend is that marketing’s biggest hurdle with all this isn’t actually a lack of belief in creativity. It’s a lack of confidence.
Marketers know great work matters, but without empirical testing and commercial frameworks, they struggle to defend taking a creative risk to a sceptical CFO or Sales Director.
That means low-confidence teams retreat into what’s easily measured: short-term leads, cost-per-click, and MQL volumes. We all know that story, right?
Whereas confident marketing teams are able to align creative effectiveness directly with long-term commercial metrics: pricing power, market penetration, and pipeline velocity.
In B2B, the pressure to demonstrate pipeline tomorrow morning (or yesterday afternoon as is often the case!) has turned marketing departments into short-term lead harvesting machines.
But you can’t harvest a crop you haven’t planted.
When you present a CFO with a hyper-safe, super-dull campaign, it feels low-risk because nobody gets fired for a stock-photo banner ad, right?
But System1’s data proves the exact opposite: safe, forgettable work is actually the highest-risk commercial decision you can make. You’re spending 100% of the media budget to achieve a fraction of the market impact.
To stop subsidising dullness and start driving real commercial advantage, B2B marketers need to shift away from “legacy thinking” and towards capturing your own creative dividend.
That looks like:
Legacy Thinking = 80% effort on target. 20% effort on creative (if you’re lucky)
Creative Dividend Thinking = Equal weighting with creativity treated as that 12x profit multiplier
Legacy Thinking = Product features and functions are the heroes
Creative Dividend Thinking = Use emotional tension and workplace reality as the hooks
Legacy Thinking = Reinventing campaigns every 3-6 months (because it’s a new quarter)
Creative Dividend Thinking = Building distinct, permanent, and consistent DBAs
Legacy Thinking = Reporting on clicks, downloads and MQLs
Creative Dividend Thinking = Measuring mental availability, buying audience engagement and long-term commercial growth
B2B buyers don’t shed their human psychology when they walk into office or log on at 9:00 AM.
They don’t turn into emotionless data-processing droids (as far as we’re aware, we don’t know EVERYONE in B2B) simply because they hold a corporate credit card.
System1 and Effie have gifted our industry the empirical evidence we’ve needed for years.
They’ve proved that creativity is not an artistic indulgence; it is a commercial imperative.
In a B2B landscape drowning in identical messaging, the biggest risk isn’t standing out and saying something memorable. It’s blending into the background so smoothly that nobody notices you were there at all.