B2B’s big moment: Unlocking the future together

When people talk about innovation in advertising, they still point to the consumer giants — Nike, Walmart, P&G — brands that have mastered programmatic precision and creative agility. For decades, business-to-consumer marketing (B2C) has been the benchmark for targeting, optimization and accountability.

But the next great wave of innovation belongs to business-to-business (B2B).

The global business-to-business market — valued at roughly $20 trillion, is four to five times larger than the consumer market, yet the digital advertising infrastructure supporting it has lagged behind. B2B has been hampered by issues of visibility, accountability and transparency, which are amplified due to the length and complexity of the sales journey relative to B2C. That’s finally changing, as more of us align around a simple idea: Progress in B2B will come from collaboration, not competition. The question now isn’t whether B2B can catch up to B2C sophistication but rather how quickly we will surpass it.

B2B marketing and advertising: A unique beast

B2B marketers operate in a fundamentally different world than their B2C counterparts — one where visibility is low and the stakes are high.

The B2B buying journey isn’t one or two clicks and then complete. Advertising audiences are not created on clicks or likes. In B2B, a sales cycle is typically months long. At any moment, there may be only a few companies in-market for a solution. Discovery and decision-making often involve more than a dozen stakeholders across different functions and levels in a company. Missing the right moment can mean millions in lost revenue and potentially company-defining consequences.

For years, advertisers have struggled to link and justify advertising investments made months before an ultimate sale. Often, they have chased lead forms, an easily measurable metric that only captures active inquiries.

Unlocking the opportunity

To unlock the full potential of the B2B opportunity, advertisers and the companies that support them need to do things differently. Instead of promising answers from a single platform, building walls or hoarding buying signals, we must focus on connecting the ecosystem by maximizing the shared utility of our data, insights and capabilities.

Three pillars will define this next phase of progress: 1) harnessing diverse, high-fidelity data signals; 2) enabling transparent meaningful measurement; and 3) fostering open partnerships that turn individual innovation into collective advancement. Together, these pillars form a virtuous cycle. Partnerships create the infrastructure for richer data; measurement fuels optimization and innovation; and transparency builds the trust that keeps the ecosystem growing.

Harnessing diverse, high-fidelity data signals

B2B marketers once considered intent and identity as simple, one-dimensional concepts — often relying on a single source like bidstream data or one identifier like the third-party cookie. Catalyzed by factors like privacy concerns, new digital channels and the uncertain future of the cookie, we have all learned that narrow signals limit accuracy and reach.

Today, it is imperative to use a wider variety of verified, consent-based signals that strengthen intent insights, sharpen identity resolution and make both tools more reliable and flexible. We also understand that a single player can only “know” so much. A rich, aggregated understanding of an account and the individuals it employs requires sharing across the ecosystem.

Bombora has been capturing, curating and combining diverse datasets from across the B2B ecosystem through its data cooperative, which continues to grow by hundreds of publishers and sites each year. We’ve partnered with a wide range of organizations, including those others might view as competitors, because we believe the highest return comes from unifying data signals wherever marketers want to use them. Recently, we launched a new capability that allows B2B advertisers to activate proprietary data from other providers by translating those signals into addressable audiences. This approach increases the utility of that data across the open internet. We believe the entire ecosystem benefits, including Bombora, when high-quality signals are made widely available and interoperable.

Enabling transparent measurement

Impact measurement has always been one of the great visibility challenges in B2B advertising — tracking actions and outcomes across multiple stakeholders over a long, nonlinear sales cycle and reliably linking those changes to media exposure. But now, the rise of AI is intensifying that challenge. Verified site traffic and lead-form conversions, once trusted indicators of advertising effectiveness, are being disrupted by AI-driven search and discovery. To navigate this shift, marketers must evolve their KPIs — stitching together first- and third-party signals from digital and nondigital channels to understand purchase intent throughout the buyer’s journey. Connecting log-level exposure and engagement data with verified intent insights creates the clear, connected view of impact that B2B marketing has always needed. Achieving that level of visibility requires durable, cross-platform identity graphs enriched with signals from across the ecosystem. Robust, transparent, cross-platform measurement is the only way B2B advertisers can invest intelligently and sustain trust in their results — and it can only happen if the players in our ecosystem share their pieces of the journey.

So what about AI?

As AI reshapes the marketing landscape, its ability to structure and analyze massive, disparate datasets is unlocking new possibilities — especially in a more open B2B ecosystem. But we also know that AI is only as strong as the data it learns from. In B2B, this means running models on verified, ethically obtained data that reflects real business intent — eschewing out-of-context, unverified or privacy-murky data that can distort insights and misdirect investment. It means making data-collection methodologies transparent, establishing consistent baselines and embedding privacy into every stage of analysis. It also requires clear frameworks for how AI is used and open communication about results. Responsible, transparent application of AI isn’t just a best practice — it’s essential to preserve the transparency and trust required between ecosystem partners to unlock the B2B advertising opportunity.

An open ecosystem, not a garden

The future of B2B is through collaboration. It won’t be defined by proprietary walls or closed data loops but by an interconnected network of trusted partners. The next generation of leaders won’t just buy data; they’ll contribute to it. They won’t just measure results; they’ll share the frameworks that make everyone smarter. They won’t activate their data from a single tool; they will move it with agility across their technology stack.

That’s the mindset Bombora has built around our data cooperative and transparent measurement investments, and it’s why we’re so committed to collaborating across the ecosystem with companies like Crunchbase, G2, Definitive Healthcare, HG Insights, The Trade Desk, Reddit, OpenX and so many more.

Because when we work in the open, everyone wins — advertisers, partners and the audiences we serve. That’s not just the future of B2B marketing; it’s the foundation for its next great leap.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.