How B2B CMOs are rethinking brand discovery, beyond search and white papers

The mainstream B2B marketing playbook — one based on search, white papers and conferences — is quickly changing, and in several places at once no less.

Don McGuire, CMO at Qualcomm, knows the shift away from search is real. And it’s not just because Qualcomm itself is one of the key players in the age of AI, producing many of the chips that run AI applications on personal devices.

“When my 89-year-old mother calls ChatGPT her boyfriend, the shift has happened,” he said at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last week. “And so we’ve got to move.”

He’s not the only one moving. Two years ago, Gartner predicted that traditional search volume would fall 25% by this year. Now, research has found that 48% of CMOs surveyed are already allocating a “high” percentage (between 10% and 20%) of their marketing budget to generative engine optimization (GEO) efforts.

McGuire said he is weighing whether to shift portions of Qualcomm’s search budget toward ensuring the brand surfaces correctly in large language models (LLMs) like Perplexity and ChatGPT. An audit of how Qualcomm appeared across LLMs prompted the rethink. “Before we start paying attention to this, it wasn’t pretty,” he said.

Consistency over content churn

Neelam Sandhu, CMO at Vonage, sat on the same panel as McGuire and took aim at another tenet of the B2B marketing bible: white papers.

“The number of white papers, I don’t even have time to read them, as the CMO. So I don’t know who is going to take these things in,” she said.

Her damning verdict on white papers will likely make any B2B marketer uncomfortable. But it’s also further proof that B2B discovery is changing quickly, not just in the medium (LLMs instead of search) but also in the content required to be effective.

“Quantity of content is no longer the answer. There is so much content out there, and nobody can ingest it anymore,” Sandhu said. “It’s about getting a trustworthy and consistent message out there and repeating that, because that is actually how the human brain works.”

Interestingly, Sandhu said she won’t let her team use AI for content creation: “With AI, I think content becomes a lot more vanilla, and it loses its personality.”

McGuire, meanwhile, takes the opposite approach. He claimed that relying on an AI writing software saved his team a collective 2,400 hours a month. But using AI to write is not about enabling marketers to produce more content. “It’s about establishing consistency and tone of voice, because as we move from an SEO world to a GEO world, consistency is going to become so important for how you show up in the world. Because people are getting their information from an LLM, not from Google Search,” he said.

So even as one B2B CMO keeps AI out of content and the other has made it central, both have arrived at the same conclusion: When you can’t control how your content gets consumed or reassembled by an LLM, ensuring consistency is the only sure bet.

The business buyer is the consumer

B2B buyers aren’t just searching with different tools and responding to different content — they’re now reachable in different contexts too.

Research from PA Consulting and The Trade Desk Intelligence presented at MWC found that half of B2B decision-makers research during personal time and that premium media like CTV and podcasts is 1.3 times more effective at driving purchase intent compared to less premium media.

Reaching B2B buyers today requires acknowledging that the same consumers making purchase decisions on million-dollar multiyear contracts during the workweek are likely the same people shopping for running shoes on the weekend — and their media consumption habits are converging.

Today’s B2B buyer is likely on the sofa at 10 p.m., asking an LLM instead of opening Google, skipping the white papers that were supposed to pull them into a nurture sequence. The CMOs who’ve understood this are already shifting their media strategies and spend, while reorganizing around content written with a consistent, distinctly human voice.

But not everyone has. One conference attendee, The Current spoke to at MWC, who works at a company selling hospitality software, said their CMO still doesn’t really believe in spending money on digital media.

In fact, for all of MWC’s undeniable buzz, today’s B2B buyer is just as likely to be reached scrolling on their sofa as walking an exhibition floor.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc. This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.