There is a certain kind of marketing white paper that exists primarily to be downloaded and never read, its 40 pages serving mainly as proof that someone, somewhere, filled out a form.
This is the world of business-to-business marketing as it has long been practiced — a realm of stock photography featuring professionals in navy blazers pointing at whiteboards, of headlines promising to "streamline end-to-end enterprise synergy," of content so aggressively forgettable that forgetting it feels like an act of self-preservation.
Now, according to a growing chorus of marketers and at least one LinkedIn report, the industry is discovering what might charitably be called an insight: the executives signing off on six-figure software contracts are the same people who watch comedy videos on their phones at lunch.
The response has been a migration toward what the industry now calls "B2B creator marketing" — essentially, hiring the kinds of independent video makers and newsletter writers who built audiences by being entertaining or useful, and asking them to do the same for enterprise software.
The numbers suggest this is no longer a fringe experiment. LinkedIn reports that 59 percent of business buyers consume creator content on its platform, and the company has documented a 60 percent increase in active creators since 2024. According to a survey by the Billion Dollar Boy Group, one in five marketers invested in B2B creator marketing this year (which would be 2026, for those keeping track of time's passage).
"Creators have transformed consumer advertising," said Brendan Gahan, who co-founded the B2B influencer agency Creator Authority and now serves as senior vice president of B2B at BDB Group. "We believed B2B was next."
The tactics are familiar to anyone who has watched consumer marketing over the past decade. Canva, the design software company, partnered with the comedian Daniel Foxx on a satirical sketch involving an onboarding deck for a fictional zombie apocalypse compound — a premise that demonstrated the product's ease of use more effectively, the company argues, than any feature walkthrough.
Hootsuite, the social media management platform, filmed its own executives reading harsh customer feedback about a dashboard redesign, leaning into what academics call the "pratfall effect" (humans tend to trust people who admit to imperfection, a finding that has apparently now reached the marketing department).
Whether this represents a genuine transformation or simply the discovery that business buyers have the same limbic systems as everyone else remains to be seen. But for an industry that has spent decades producing content designed to be trapped behind data-capture forms, the acknowledgment that entertainment might be more effective than a 40-page PDF counts, in its way, as progress.
Original story published in Marketing Week: "It's time to throw away the B2B playbook and embrace creators"