Each of our Problemotional Advertising articles are written in a sequence. We strongly recommend reading them from Article 1 to the most recently published. This will ensure you understand everything you need to create a profitable and scalable B2B advertising campaign and avoid wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Disclaimer: If you believe that B2B should be mind-numbingly boring and painful, you will experience extreme discomfort by reading the following article. Continue at your own risk.

B2B Advertising Has a Massive Problem

Dear CMO… B2B advertising has a massive problem. And if the problem is left unsolved in your advertising campaign, you’ll face Ad Budget Waste — spending money on ads that aren’t maximizing the ROI. At the ad level, it results in lower click-through rate, higher cost per impression, and higher cost per click. At the campaign level, it results in fewer high-intent and qualified inbound calls, lower win rate, and longer sales cycles. All of which leads to higher customer acquisition costs and Ad Budget Waste.

These are all very common symptoms of the problem. This problem is why your ‘leads’ (if you can call them that) don’t have any intent to buy. It’s why you’re seen as just another of the same thing in your category. It’s why buyers feel no urgency and reschedule sales calls. It’s why sales teams close on average 1 out of 1,000 “leads” from a LinkedIn lead gen campaign. It’s why only 11% of B2B organizations are satisfied with their current PR and marketing agencies.

So, what’s the problem? Most B2B companies use Attention Repellent Ads in their Top of Funnel, causing their campaigns to be ignored. And because most of the could-be buyers ignore your ads, you end up with Ad Budget Waste.

What’s an Attention Repellent Ad (AR Ad)? Exactly what the word says. An advertisement that not only doesn’t attract attention — it actually repels it. It sends people in the opposite direction. People aren’t just indifferent to your ads. They actually perceive them and your company negatively. Your ads are like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. And when your ads don’t attract attention nor keep it, it doesn’t matter how valuable your service is, how amazing your offer is, or that you’ve invented something completely new and groundbreaking.

That’s because in marketing, the reality doesn’t matter — only the perceived reality matters. Attention is the first step to changing someone’s perception, initiating their buying journey. Attention is the first step that can’t be skipped. Advertising is a battle for perception. But perception can’t be changed if no one is paying attention.

Welcome to Ignoredville: the #1 destination for advertisements that no one sees or remembers. The town square is packed with flyers and posters, fluttering in the breeze, each one a desperate plea for attention that never comes. The digital screens flash and dance, but they’re just background noise to the bustling crowds.

The way that Attention Repellent Ads get you sent to Ignoredville happens in 2 ways: your ads are too mind-numbingly emotionless to be consumed (and remembered), or your ads market the ‘solution’ before marketing the problem.

The reason AR Ads are problematic is that they’re missing Buying Journey Alignment. From our research on the B2B buying journey, the first message buyers should see is about the problem and it should be communicated in an emotional way. Later on in the journey, it should become more solution-focused and communicated in a rational way. The ad message changes along with buyers’ awareness: from problem-focused to solution-focused. The ad medium changes along with buyers’ decision-making: from emotional to rational.

To be clear: ads that market the solution in a rational way are not the problem itself. It only becomes problematic when these types of ads are used in the Top of Funnel (ToFu). ToFu ads need to market the problem in an emotional way.

Before I explain what Attention Repellent Ads look like, how they’ll waste you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and how they’ll get you fired from your CMO position — you first have to understand why advertising of 2024 is nothing like advertising of the past.

Modern Buyers Suffer from Ad Overload

Let’s rewind to 1980. The godfathers of positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, published their book called Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind. They studied hundreds of businesses and their products, why some succeeded and most failed. Through their studies, they recognized a new phenomenon in the 70s that didn’t exist in the 50s and 60s.

Thanks to technological advancements, people were being bombarded with more advertisements than ever. They had new access to huge amounts of information. Thousands of new businesses were popping up, all making the same promises. This was a change they recognized in 1980 — that’s 44 years ago, before the immense amounts of information, ads, and choices that we now suffer from thanks to social media and the internet.

In 2007, the average American was seeing 5,000 ads a day. Today, we’re seeing 10,000 ads a day. The number is growing. Social ads, content, Google Ads, signs, emails — all fighting for our attention. There are so many different options of products and services that it is impossible for the human mind to distinguish the differences between them. And as a result, the human brain does 2 things: ignores the high majority, and clumps the rest together into categories where the brands are seen as Interchangeable — which are then also ignored.

In other words, an extremely miniscule number of ads are consumed, remembered, and influence buying behavior. So unless your B2B ad campaign is adapted to Ad Overload, it will fail. And you’ll lose your company thousands of dollars. Have fun explaining that to your CFO.

So how do you create a B2B ad campaign adapted to Ad Overload and ensure it achieves Buying Journey Alignment? You avoid the following 2 traps that result in Attention Repellent Ads.

The Professional Image Trap

The first root cause of Attention Repellent Ads is from most B2B companies attempting to maintain a Professional Image in everything they do. They believe that failing to do so will result in buyers no longer trusting them. After all, people don’t buy without trust. Especially in B2B.

The intention of this way of thinking is good. But the end result is not. Your company wants a Professional Image because you want to show that you take things seriously; you care about what you do and you care about your customers. The problem, however, is that when you prioritize your Professional Image in Advertising, it often becomes the fastest way to being Ignored.

It’s not that having a Professional Image is wrong. It’s that this often translates to: 1) doing emotionless boring content and 2) making it about you, not the buyers. You start with the intention of caring for your customers but end up only caring about yourself. “We need to communicate that we stand for quality, excellence, and greatness. Because when buyers see that in everything we do, they trust us.” As if there are companies that stand for defectiveness, inferiority, and insignificance…

It’s why the images on B2B ads are all stock photos of people in suits drinking coffee, smiling, and shaking hands having a “jolly good time.” It’s why companies use professional language that means absolute jack-shit (“cutting-edge,” “state-of-the-art,” “world-class” — blah blah blah).

Slap your logo on this bad boy and you’ll look like any other B2B company’s ads. Cheers to fitting in and getting ignored!

The obsession with a Professional Image has resulted in everything becoming emotionless. Your boring ads are scrolled past. Your webinars are mind-numbing. Your ebooks send people to the eye doctor. Your website and landing pages have a bounce rate higher than a bouncy house. Without emotion, your ads will not be consumed, remembered, nor influential in buying behavior.

Whether we like it or not, B2B buyers are emotional human beings. Our advertising message will make zero impact if it is not communicated with emotions in mind. In an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content. Emotional content generated 23% more shares on social media compared to purely rational content. Highly emotive ads are 3x more likely to be remembered than ads with a weak emotional response.

“This sounds good and all. But surely you can’t sell a $500k service with purely emotional content.” If this thought crossed your mind, you’re absolutely right. The buying journey starts emotionally and gradually becomes more rational. Emotion captures attention and creates memory. Logic completes the buying decision.

Conclusion: To avoid the Professional Image Trap, you must use ToF ads that communicate the message in an emotional way. But here’s the thing — you could score a 10/10 in emotional communication for your ads. Consumed and remembered forever. But if the message that you’re communicating isn’t right, the rest of the entire funnel results in huge Ad Budget Waste. That’s because the message is the main factor in changing perception and influencing buying behavior. The high majority of B2B Top of Funnel ads has the wrong message.

The Solution Promotion Trap

The second root cause of Attention Repellent Ads is by making your ‘solution’ the main message of your Top of Funnel Ads, before making buyers problem aware and/or the problem highly visible.

There’s a large number of businesspeople that believe people buy brands. They give credit to ‘the brand’ for huge business success. They say consumers buy Google because of the Google brand. Volkswagen because of the Volkswagen brand. Red Bull because of the Red Bull brand. But if this was the case, why was Google+ such a huge failure? Why were Volkswagen Vanagon and Sirocco failures? Why was Red Bull Cola a failure?These are all some of the ‘strongest’ brands in the world — and they all resulted in billions of wasted dollars.

Christopher Lochhead (the godfather of Category Design) calls this misled obsession the Big Brand Lie. Al Ries and Jack Trout call it the Line Extension Trap. B2B marketers that make the brand or service the focus of their Top of Funnel message fall into what we call the Solution Promotion Trap. These marketers have overlooked one cold hard piece of economic truth: people don’t buy solutions without first having a problem.

Buyers don’t care about us. They care about themselves and their problems. Brands and services are about us. Problems are about them. When we say “We’re the best cybersecurity platform!” or “We care about you. Buy our service!” — no one believes it and no one cares. Because they think you’re just trying to sell to them. When we make the message about their painful problem, we show them we care and that we want to help them. And consequently, they care too.

Falling into the Solution Promotion Trap is why you aren’t trusted (“You just want my money”), why your service is perceived as Interchangeable (“There are 100 similar services that all make the same generic promises”), and why your service is perceived as a Nice-To-Have, not a Need-To-Have (“I can see how that might help. But I have more pressing matters”).

Conclusion: To avoid the Solution Promotion Trap, you must use ToF ads that focus on the painful problem as the message. Your brand is simply the name they remember in relation to the problem. You didn’t buy Slack because it shoved its logo in your face. You bought it because it was the brand that made you aware of the problem: your company’s communication was fragmented. You didn’t buy Salesforce because it was “top of mind.” You bought it because it was the brand that made everyone aware of the problem: on-premise CRM is a huge hassle, inflexible, and expensive. You didn’t buy Loom because it was a video tool. You bought it because it was the brand that made you aware of the problem: communicating through meetings wastes enormous amounts of time.

When you own the problem in the buyer’s mind, you become perceived as the Irreplaceable Need-To-Have solution. This is the reason Problemotional Advertising exists: B2B advertising that markets the painful problem in an emotional way at the beginning of the buyer journey. Advertising that isn’t sent to Ignoredville. Advertising based on psychology. Advertising that gets your brand remembered in relation to the problem. Advertising that achieves Buyer Journey Alignment. Advertising that makes buyers say, “I need that.”

If you have fallen into the Professional Image Trap and the Solution Promotion Trap, you likely have Attention Repellent Ads. In Article 2, we analyze various examples of both types of ads to help you identify what to avoid if you’re currently in Ignoredville, experiencing Ad Budget Waste.