ADWEEK's B2B Innovation Awards: Honoring Standout People, Brands and Campaigns in the Growing Space

ADWEEK’s second annual B2B Innovation Awards celebrate the people and companies driving this growth. Since ADWEEK’s B2B Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Jill Kramer, joined Accenture in early 2016, for example, the brand value of the global professional services company has climbed to $21.3 billion. ADWEEK B2B Brand of the Year Salesforce, meanwhile, has spent a decade as the world’s top CRM software provider and has seen revenue increase from $10.5 billion in its 2018 fiscal year to $34.9 billion in its most recent annual report.

Clever campaigns, inventive use of technology, even old-school marketing methods like direct mail—it’s all in here.

Tom McGovern
Tech Innovator Award

Tom McGovern is the founder of Optimum Sports, and he has taken the company from a startup in 2003 to the in-house sports marketing agency within Omnicom Media Group. As an industry leader in the space for 30 years, McGovern has now upped the ante on measurement in sports sponsorship. With a continued shift from traditional broadcast viewership to digital, the industry had to modernize measurement as well. Seeing that need to keep at the forefront of sports marketing, McGovern chose Relo Metrics’ Relo Census sports intelligence platform, which has given Optimum additional visibility and efficiency. The tool is able to analyze brand exposure in near-real time, letting the agency see how much value its sponsorship deals are delivering from moment to moment on every channel. With this tool, McGovern gained access to the most comprehensive set of sponsorship data about every team, brand and asset across all major U.S. sports leagues, providing overarching visibility to decision-makers. —Kyle O’Brien

Bayer TriVolt ‘ChatGTG’
Campaign of the Year

Farmers talking to farmers proved to be a better option than AI chatbots or other modern communication methods for the promotion of TriVolt, Bayer’s herbicide for corn. With “ChatGTG” (grower-to-grower), done in tandem with BBDO Atlanta, Bayer Crop Protection was able to put farmers directly in touch with other farmers who had already used TriVolt to answer questions on how effective the product was for their fields. The mode of communication: good old-fashioned phone conversations. ChatGTG rolled out at the 2023 Farm Progress Show, the largest agricultural trade show, then continued through a live call event held over five days during harvest. The ChatGTG phone number was published in social, print, direct mail and digital executions, resulting in 720 minutes of conversation across 18 states and 35 area codes, and in leads on 64 million potential new TriVolt acres—two-thirds of the corn acreage in the U.S. —Kyle O’Brien

Esquire Bank/Park & Battery
Campaign of the Year

A brand doesn’t have to choose between data- and tech-driven performance marketing and creative brand-building: A good campaign can include both. Creative agency Park & Battery built its work for attorney-focused financial firm Esquire Bank on a foundation of marketing technology and data from Salesforce, ZoomInfo and Dun & Bradstreet and used it to target marketing by law firm size, specialty, geographic location and more. Esquire also launched a campaign mimicking law firm ad campaigns and turning Esquire co-founder Ari Kornhaber into a Saul Goodman-style pitchman with ads featuring the catchphrase “Don’t Be Sorry, Call Ari.” The multiplatform ads helped Esquire land over 50% of its lending clients from marketing efforts, generated a response to digital ads that was more than double the industry average, and received feedback from streaming audio that was more than five times baseline. Thanks to this success, Esquire had to revamp its sales process to handle the incoming volume. The campaign expanded to multiple cities in Florida, as well as new Esquire markets in Chicago, Atlanta and Houston. “What we discovered through all of this is that attorneys appreciate that they feel like they’re being spoken to by people who truly understand them,” Park & Battery co-founder Michael Ruby said. —Jason Notte

Eric Wilder
ABM Innovator Award

Eric Wilder, co-founder of Florida-based 81 & Sunny Digital Media Investments, has heard clients express frustration over the same problems time and time again. The percentage of won accounts is too low. The sales cycle is too long. Lost accounts are not being reengaged.

To overcome these hurdles, the media professional with 15 years of digital advertising experience developed the Pipeline Acceleration Program, an account-based marketing strategy that uses social and programmatic platforms to target key decision-makers. And it does so consistently throughout the entire customer journey—which can be long in the B2B tech space—keeping a client’s name top of mind.

The multichannel approach has proven its worth. Wilder reports that clients who’ve embraced the system have seen a bump in won accounts, along with a 1.5 times faster sales cycle.

The method is also cost-effective, requiring only 5% of a company’s media budget. This allows clients to invest more dollars toward driving sales instead of paying a plethora of burdensome third-party software fees. —Paul Hiebert

Park & Battery
Agency of the Year

Ted Kohnen and Michael Ruby have been friends and professional partners for 15 years but founded Oakland’s Park & Battery in 2022. Now operating with 40 employees in California, New York, Salt Lake City, Miami and the United Kingdom, the agency uses a combination of creative design and AI-driven technology to humanize its B2B marketing. It gave Esquire Bank—a financial institution for attorneys—a voice with a Better Call Saul-inspired campaign and an emphasis on attorneys’ social justice work. It used TikTok and Instagram to drive visitors to The International Beauty Show, redesigned cannabis marketplace LeafLink’s website and rebranded Truepic to address concerns about digital content authenticity in online photos and videos used by generative AI. For Children’s Music Fund, the agency pressed health care and insurance companies to recognize the impact of music therapy through films and digital experiences. “When external audiences see this work and connect with us, without us saying a word, it allows us to tell a prospective client who we are, how we think and what we can bring,” Kohnen said. “There’s a sea of sameness out there, and with every client engagement, we look to go in the opposite direction of that sameness with a focus on business value.” —Jason Notte

Esquire Bank/Park & Battery
Thought Leadership Content Award

The same Park & Battery technology that tells Esquire Bank where to send its email marketing and the content it should contain is helping make the financial firm’s LawyerIQ content hub unique for each reader. Esquire was already creating multiple articles, videos and case studies from single webinars featuring Esquire experts and industry thought leaders. Creative agency Park & Battery collected them in LawyerIQ, drove traffic to its landing page and had visitors register and create profiles that allowed the agency’s marketing AI to personalize content and email campaigns based on each visitor’s interests. Where a cold call from Esquire’s team resulted in a sale 1% of the time, a lead generated from marketing has proven eight times more effective. When marketing actually gets visitors to click “Contact Us” or “Request a Consultation,” the company said it’s 46 times better than a call out of nowhere. “Thought leadership for Esquire is about helping to empower attorneys to be better at their jobs and be better in their work,” Park & Battery co-founder Michael Ruby said. “The core of that content work in LawyerIQ and in all the work that’s powering [Esquire campaign] ‘Don’t Be Sorry…’ is about celebrating and empowering attorneys who oftentimes are overlooked and underresourced.” —Jason Notte

Jill Kramer
Lifetime Achievement Award

Jill Kramer isn’t a fan of doing the same thing twice.

Throughout her career in marketing, which includes holding senior leadership positions at creative agencies DDB and BBDO, Kramer’s learned the power of avoiding repetition.

“The best question to ask yourself is some version of, ‘Why are we doing this and what if we didn’t?” she said. “If you find yourself using the word ‘always,’ stop immediately and ask yourself what would really be worthy of ‘always.’”

This eagerness to leave the past behind has propelled Kramer to take on bigger, more ambitious projects. In 2020, for example, she spearheaded Accenture’s “Let There Be Change” campaign—the company’s biggest brand push in more than a decade.

A year later, Kramer became Accenture’s chief marketing and communications officer, overseeing a team of around 2,000 professionals dedicated to everything from advertising and analytics to corporate and financial communications.

Under Kramer’s leadership, business has been good. The global professional services company generated $64.1 billion in revenue during its 2023 fiscal year—a 4% climb compared to the prior 12-month period.

Indeed, since Kramer joined Accenture in early 2016, the company’s brand value has spiked from $12 billion to $21.3 billion, according to Omnicom’s brand consultancy Interbrand. Overall, Accenture ranks 30th on Interbrand’s list of the world’s top brands, just behind American Express and Ikea, yet ahead of household names such as Hyundai, Gucci and Pepsi.

As the world keeps changing, Kramer’s advice to marketers is to remain open to new things. As she put it: “Never be the one in the room who is reluctant to embrace something, whether that is an idea, technology or source of insight.” —Paul Hiebert

Salesforce
Brand of the Year

Salesforce has been the top customer relationship management software provider worldwide for the past decade. During its past fiscal year, it produced $34.9 billion in revenue—11% more than the year before and triple the $10.5 billion it generated six years earlier.

It’s so effective at producing B2B marketing results that it’s made believers out of traditional B2C businesses. Southwest Airlines built the referral program for its Southwest Business branch with help from Salesforce’s Account Engagement automation platform. Grammarly started building Grammarly Business in 2018, but with Salesforce’s help, it doubled in size during the past two years, using Account Engagement to identify and target prospects and Salesforce’s Einstein and B2B Marketing Analytics tools to score accounts based on their likelihood of signing up.

Adhering to the 95-5 rule that only 5% of B2B customers are ready to buy at any given time, Salesforce has dedicated considerable energy to brand-building. It’s partnered with Formula 1 and McLaren Racing, turned Albert Einstein into an animated mascot in its “Now Everyone’s an Einstein” campaign and brought in Matthew McConaughey as a brand advisor to help demystify the technology behind its newly launched Einstein Copilot—and to call Salesforce global marketing executive vice president Colin Fleming about once a week.

“That 95% doesn’t mean that they’re dead to us,” said Fleming. “We have to build relationships and audience and trust with them and make sure that we’re top of mind with those potential customers.”

Through events like its Connections marketing conference in Chicago and its Bay Area Dreamforce conference, Salesforce makes its strongest pitch by letting its customers tell their own stories about its products.

“Stories are what drive human change,” Fleming said. —Jason Notte

Kinjil Mathur
Visionary of the Year

In the past three years, Squarespace aired Super Bowl spots about a friendly alien invasion, Adam Driver defying the laws of physics and Zendaya selling seashells by the seashore.

Viewers might’ve wondered what any of these things had to do with the nuts and bolts of Squarespace’s product, but that wasn’t the point. Its chief marketer, Kinjil Mathur, oversees a marketing culture that unapologetically leans into big ideas—never mind if they’re a bit … out there. The secret to Squarespace’s success is “pretty simple. We operate like a B2C,” Mathur said.

Given it’s a website that helps business owners build websites, Squarespace is a bit meta. With that context, its playful style feels appropriate. In the work, Mathur capitalizes on cultural moments: Celebrity spots are on the table, as is engagement with influencers—many of whom are Squarespace customers.

As the driving force behind the brand’s go-to-market success and global expansion, Mathur began a global marketing push last year that dovetailed with the brand’s 20-year anniversary.

After launching Squarespace Collection—templates that customers can use to build websites—Squarespace debuted campaigns featuring Icelandic artist Björk, renowned photographers at Magnum Photos and music producer Rick Rubin. The brand aired its first French campaigns and inked global partnerships with Vogue France; Hypebeast Flea, a London-based flea market that showcases emerging U.K. businesses; and Forward Festival for a creative tutorial at its Berlin event.

Before joining Squarespace in 2017, Mathur had already cut her teeth at retailers Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

Amid Squarespace’s goal to go global, Mathur is balancing her marketing mix with data-informed strategies that never come at the expense of creative intuition. —Olivia Morley