Blue jeans, big titles: Why B2B needs to remember we’re human

When I first started my career, I did everything I could to separate who I was at work from who I was outside of it.

Blue jeans created a very clear line.

They belonged to weekends — the fun, middle-of-the-dance-floor version of me. Not the version sitting at a desk trying to look like I belonged in finance.

That illusion didn’t last long. During my first internship, I pulled the institutional marketing team away from their desktops to learn the steps to a Britney Spears hit.

So much for separation.

Looking back, it’s obvious my “work self” and my “real self” were never actually separate. I just thought they were. Thankfully, I found a career in marketing — a field that makes a little more room for who you actually are, jeans and all.

And B2B marketing now has the same opportunity — realizing the person at work is not different from the person at home. It’s the same human. And the more data we have, the clearer that becomes.

Human-first storytelling

It’s never been harder to be a marketer.

We’re operating in a world of AI overload, infinite content and collapsing attention spans. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, thousands of new pieces of content were published. Consider this: 6% of content on the internet published in the last 60 minutes, 26% was published today, 41% was published this week.

In this environment, “reach” isn’t the goal anymore. Attention is.

And amid all this noise, catching someone’s attention can mean recognizing something much simpler: The audience you’re trying to reach at work is the exact same person they are at home.

We like to imagine that B2B audiences are more rational in the workplace. Sensible, buttoned-up, perhaps. But that VP you’re targeting is also watching TV, skipping anything that feels boring or irrelevant, responding to what captures their attention.

Marketers know that better than anyone — because we’re those people. We aren’t just curators of content; we’re the most ruthless consumers too.

At my house, we don’t just watch ads, we dissect them. In between commercial breaks on The Bachelor, I pick them apart with my 13-year-old, talking about what works, what doesn’t and why.  As my colleague Shana Hale put it, emotional appeal wins every time.

We don’t become different people when we log on to LinkedIn. We just open a different tab.

And the industry is finally catching up. As SAP’s Tim Hoppin argued in a recent conversation, B2B marketing is having a renaissance. The best work recognizes the importance of human storytelling.

And that’s the opportunity.

At The Trade Desk, we finalized our alpha test with LinkedIn’s CTV Ads, which allows us to target LinkedIn audiences on premium CTV inventory. With professional insights from LinkedIn’s 1.3 billion members, this approach combines the scale of its data with precise targeting across the shows and movies that people actually choose to spend time with. For us, it’s not just helping us reach more business audiences — it’s helping us reach the right ones.

So far, we’re seeing much higher on target reach — at least three times that of our baseline CTV campaigns using other third-party audience data. That translates to an audience that’s not only larger, but far more stable and consistent. According to our reporting via LinkedIn nearly 90% of delivery was against our Enterprise accounts. In other words, the platform is connecting us with the right people at the right time without the need for overly complex targeting strategies.

Because at the end of the day, we’re all humans first. The same marketers crafting creative campaigns to cut through AI-driven noise are the ones at home discussing the ads that worked — and the ones that didn’t.

This partnership allows us to meet professionals as people — at moments when they’re relaxed, receptive and paying attention. Early results show stronger consistency, better, more precise delivery into the accounts that matter and efficiency that holds even as campaigns scale.

Because no matter how sophisticated our targeting becomes, it won’t matter if we forget something simple: Our audience was never two different people to begin with. It’s the same VP who still knows the words to an early-noughties dance hit. They were just wearing different clothes. And these days, sometimes even blue jeans to the office.

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.