Top Highlights of the Year for ANA’s B2B Practice

1. Dean Aragón: In October 2025, Dean Aragón succeeded Marc Pritchard as Chair of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Aragón also leads Shell Brands International. He’s a true champion of B2B, seeking to help us unlock untapped commercial opportunity, and a marketer working for all members of the ANA. His belief (and ours) is that whether it’s B2B or B2C or B2B2C, it’s really all B2Humans.

2. B2B Influencer Marketing as a Strategic Growth Driver: The end of the year saw the Practice take a fresh look with the B2B Influencer Marketing Strategies for Authentic Reach and Measurable Impact members-only conference. This event illuminated how B2B influencer marketing has evolved from a niche tactic to a strategic growth driver. It featured cases from Unilever, which boosted its Hellman’s Mayonnaise brand by leveraging chef and actor Matty Matheson from The Bear, to IDEAL Industries, which shared how an audience of electricians enthusiastically shared product highlights via photos and demos and resulted in instant sell-outs.

3. ANA’s B2 Best in Show: Within a highly competitive landscape, the Best in Show Award stands apart as the highest honor, selected by an esteemed top jury of cross-industry ANA member CMOs to recognize the single most outstanding campaign of the year. FactSet earned Best in Show for its “Not Just the Facts” campaign, a bold brand activation that challenged the notion that B2B marketing must be technical or dry. Using humor and creative storytelling to highlight a clear strategic insight — that data alone lacks value without context and expertise — the campaign reimagined how financial intelligence could be communicated.

4. The Confident B2B Marketer: In 2025, surveying 200 senior marketers, The Confident B2B Marketer Study revealed that Confident Marketers achieve:

• Stronger data foundation, AI readiness, and better buyer group buy-in
• Higher channel marketing effectiveness at regional and account levels
• More advanced measurement and attribution capabilities

More results, and how to become a “Confident B2B Marketer” yourself, can be found at www.ana.net/b2b.

5. B2B Brand/Demand Maturity Study: This study found broad agreement that unifying brand and demand is essential to maximizing marketing effectiveness and efficiency. However, brand-to-demand integration remains incomplete for many organizations: Four out of five organizations are under-investing in brand or remain trapped in siloed brand and demand structures.

6. Bonus Highlight: First AI Ad-athon: Two client-side marketers, EY and Plante Moran, and four AI-first partners designed and created end-to-end AI-powered marketing campaigns in under 72 hours live at the 2025 ANA Masters of B2B Conference. This condensed a traditionally months-long process to days. The clients briefed Evidenza, a synthetic research company drilling for unique customer insight, then improved Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) with Brandlight LLC, and developed their creative with Waymark AI. Less than 48 hours from official kickoff, Spectrum Reach aired the new television commercials through addressable television. This unprecedented experiment demonstrated human-powered, ethical AI can dramatically accelerate campaign development.

ANA B2B Is Elevating B2B.

These top highlights are co-written with Debbie Schildkraut, ANA B2B VP, and represent team contributions from VP Sonia David, Senior Manager David Morgan, and Manager Joey DeFeo. For more information, and to access the above work, visit www.ana.net/b2b.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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