Don't do ABM | E104 with Marta George

Why does “ABM” so often become a logo-swap landing page and a prayer? In this episode, Emma and Ruta sit down with Marta George (ex-Head of ABM, now Field & Channel Marketing) to get brutally honest about what real ABM takes—and when you shouldn’t do it at all.

We get into:
 ✅ Why “ABM Lite” isn’t real (and why it keeps getting sold anyway)
 ✅ The village ABM needs: sales, SDRs, CS, product marketing, brand, design
 ✅ Account selection done right (data > opinions, relationships matter)
 ✅ Start small: 2–4 accounts, bottom-of-funnel first, then scale
 ✅ Timelines & expectations: quarters to years—not weeks—and what to report
 ✅ What to track (and why MQLs are the wrong question for ABM)
 ✅ When to skip ABM and do personalised demand gen instead
 ✅ Tools & AI: faster personalisation ≠ ABM
 ✅ Spicy take: why growth teams deserve bonuses/commission

We’re Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. 

If you’re in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we’re here for it.

Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let’s get this show on the road.

Transcript

0:00

Well, hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Blame It On Marketing. It's 2026 and we're very excited to talk about ABM, account-based marketing. If you're not on the train, I guess you wouldn't be watching that then, maybe. If you're a diehard fan, I don't know, maybe. We've got a wonderful guest with us today, Marta, which I will introduce herself. thanks for having me first of all. Marta George, I am a Senior Field and Channel Marketing Manager for UKI, Nordics and Benelux at Cribble but you probably wondered why the hell she's gonna talk about marketing if she's in Field and Channel. I was doing ABM for just over two years really at Pink Identity. My previous role was head of ABM at Pink Identity. Awesome. So she's an expert. She knows all about it. The good, the bad and the ugly. That's what we're to talk about. out. So before we get into it, Marta, tell us your marketing confession or a career confession, something that you've royally fucked up. We're getting straight away. My biggest marketing fuck-up. I mean maybe not the biggest one but the recent one it's probably taking the ABM role. ha! Shocker! Let me unpack this that's not it's not that bad because I'm get literally some legal letters coming to me in a minute. Taking the ABM role without really knowing if the company and everything else around it is set up, you know, because taking their title is great, it sounds fantastic, but fucking takes a village. It's not really just, you know, one person having a title and doing ABN. Yeah, I think taking it without realising that it really takes a whole village. So you've got a great taster for the rest of this episode, I guess. So we spoke in our kind of pre-chat about how you got there. So you were doing kind of more field and other marketing, and then it came up the availability to kind of do the ABM role. So do you feel like it was like a moment of like, let's just do ABM as a company, or do you think that it made sense, but, you know, it wasn't necessarily then resourced the way it should have been? Yeah, it was a little bit of you know two companies merged together I ran few pilots in field and it was a little bit of a moment of like okay Well, we should probably do AVM more. Let's just do it and for the last few years AVM had this moment of Golden goose laying golden eggs, you know, oh my gosh, whoever's gonna do AVM It's gonna be a millionaire instantly and just company's gonna just be fantastic And yeah, ABM is great, don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing it, but I think it was a little bit of like, let's just slap it out on someone, let's just do it and let that person deal with it without really making sure that it's not just that person's job, it's not just that person dealing with sales, it's not just the sales and marketing alignment, know, the most important alignment that everyone talks about, bullshit, it's an alignment of... everything, know, design. Do I actually have someone who understands account-based marketing from a design perspective and brand perspective? Is there enough support from product marketing or product in general to support and help with that personalised strategic content writing? Is there enough understanding in field marketing how to connect that, how to connect channel and ABM, how to connect the corporate marketing and ABM? Yeah, it was a little bit like, let's just do it because it's important and we want to do it because we want to make a lot of money. Great. That's how it was. It's that, it's that like, let's do it because we feel like we've tried loads of other things. And I think a lot of the time it gets thrown into the mix, doesn't it? Because it's like, we want to go after either a larger like ICP. So in the thing that I've seen people make the mistake of doing is going after like enterprise when it's not really their ICP and they think ABM is the way to do that. I mean, in theory, yes it is. but it is like you say, Marta, yeah, it's the, you've got to have the budget. You've got to have the resource. You've got to have people who have probably done it before as well. No shade, Marta. I'm sure you did a bang up job, but it does help when you've done it before, doesn't it? hell yeah, absolutely. You know what, I think the understanding was, know, we as a company were going only for large enterprises and enterprises and well, let's do ABM because that's what we can do. So it's amazing. Let's just go for it. And it was kind of thrown together as, well, these are the most important accounts. We just need to win with them. Let's just do ABM. Let's just figure it out and kind of come up with a global strategy for it. Great. And yeah, of course I did not do it before. I've done a pilot on some kind of mostly deal-based marketing at field and this is that kind of low-hanging fruit that helps you and then everyone got excited. my gosh, yeah, it works, great. But then moving into extreme amount of accounts, first of all, extreme amount of accounts in the first year, because I've been thrown with like 87 accounts. me one person, 87 accounts, let's just do ABM to them. Fuck my life, that's just not going to work. First of all, I'm one person. Second of all, zero support in terms of creatives, writing, know. I ended up sitting and writing email ledgers on my own or sitting in Canva and creating assets. That takes extreme amount of time, first of all. And trying to churn through, literally churn through assets doesn't really make me Stop for a second and think of what the results actually are and the campaigns that maybe go live Treating it in general as just campaign, you know, let's just do an ABM campaign. ABM is not campaign It's a full commercial strategy that company should really if we wanted to invest in it We're investing a lot of money a lot of time in it Not just throwing a campaign and hoping it's just going to bring millions within the first three weeks I think that's what was the most annoying part of that so let's let's talk about that then what's the difference between real abm and what most teams are actually doing I have literally sat in meetings where people are like, let's do abm light Like are you fucking kidding? the fuck is that? What is ABM Lite? I just want to know like I want to know a description what the fuck is ABM Lite because nothing in ABM is Lite. it's basically terrible crap personalisation. it's not even not even like.. it's not.. i wouldn't even call it personalisation. it's like you paid attention to the industry they're in. that's literally probably about as far as it goes. yeah. we made a video about this vertical. let's put it on a landing page and send them an ad. abm light! great, ABM Lite. my gosh, I love that, I love that. That definitely works. Within three days, you're basically hitting all your KPIs. That's, yeah, for sure. What is the big difference? First of all, there's no such thing as ABM Lite, as I said. Nothing in ABM is Lite. I see real ABM and it might be completely my opinion but I spoke with a couple of people who are much more intelligent and much more experienced in ABM than me. It's like, you know, when you're running a field marketing, I'm going to start from that. When you're a field marketer and you're looking at your region as your total kind of go-to-market, you know, all the nuances about this field, you know exactly what hits, how you speak to that specific region, you do lo- you localise everything for the specific region and I'm not just talking about translating it into a correct language. It's just everything around it. I see ABM program and the strategy as looking into specific account if you're doing a one-to-one or the cohort of accounts if you're going one-to-few as that this is your field everything needs to be done specifically for that account the language the colors the design the way they speak what actually they care about from any perspective are they do they care about sustainability and I don't know local environment, anything else, everything is really tightly connected with this specific account of our cohort. You treat every single program as a separate field and that's how you go for it. This is the full ABM and it takes extreme amount of time to prepare to make sure that you're relevant to that specific account. It takes time, it takes a lot of people to just do it. It's not just one person coming and bringing some ideas to the table. It's 20 or more people getting into it and actually making sure that whatever you're coming up with, that strategy is relevant. So yeah, it's definitely not light, isn't it? That is not light, no. a buttload of research just to even like begin to, yeah. well it's also.. it's also.. i feel like one of the things that really irritates me about this sort of like mantra that people have which is just do it is that it completely disregards the relationship that you need to build with that business and the people in the business because that's the thing.. that's the clincher right? isn't it? it's like have you actually through your marketing efforts and your sales efforts managed to build decent relationships with these people and if you haven't you've not done abm You done marketing! You've just spent a lot of time making Canva images. Yeah. stick to the manager and seriously just stick to what you're doing guys otherwise. I think you know a lot of people and I started exactly the same way as well don't get me wrong I was ambitious like that's not something that was given to me and I've been put under the wall you have to do it or we're gonna fire you. No I wanted to do it it was my decision that I wanted to pursue that kind of part of marketing and a lot of people start from customers and it It makes sense because you already know those people. You have some kind of relationship built. You're starting a little bit easier because you know a lot about your customers, but you only know what you know. You have no clue what's there uncovered yet. So that preparation and that research and really digging deep into the needs of that customer or of that account takes time. And it takes probably about... three months to prep the campaign, at least the first campaign in your program, to get it live. And that's what a lot of people forget about because they think let's just do ABM, let's start from the 1st of January because you know everyone wants to start from early where the fiscal year starts and they expect results by the end of this month. How many MQLs we've got? Fuck's sake if someone asked me again how many MQLs we got from an ABM program I would literally throw myself out of a window. fundamentally flawed question. One in about a year. in about a year. That's great. Thank you guys. Yeah. Yeah. another topic for a podcast, think. The death of MQLs forever. But yeah, and I think that is the problem. And it's not necessarily a problem of the ABM or of the marketing or the people that want to do it. It's the problem of every, I think, B2B company at the moment, the pressure of time. Everything needs to be delivered now. quickly, the results needs to be yesterday, the money that we're spending needs to be nearly zero, so let's just do everything for free and have fantastic results from it. Well, ABM is a completely different type of marketing. It's expensive as hell because everything costs a lot of money. it's giving that trust to a marketing as well from the board, from the leadership, trusting in marketing that we're investing a lot of money in you. And we probably won't see any results for a year, two, maybe even more in ABM to be honest. You won't see anything, but you trust that this work because ABM is not something new. It's been in the market and it's been done for many, many years. We know it works. You just need to give it time. And that time is what companies and leadership just don't want to give. That's the problem. yeah, and I think I actually think it's a, it goes back to me, for me, it goes back to this whole problem that companies have, which is that they are very, nearsighted. Like they are like short term wins, what are the quick wins? Let's just do stuff is a really like reactionary like thing to be saying to people in your company anyway. But the companies that do actually have like a two year, three, five year strategy, you guys can do ABM. you're not.. you're not.. you're thinking about the growth of the business in the long term. but if you are.. if you're in a business where you're like.. i only know what next quarter's goals are.. you are not.. you are not set up for abm success. i mean in fact you're not actually really set up for many long-term marketing campaigns to be honest with you. most marketing is longer than.. longer than a quarter. yeah. So if you were to go back before you started your OBM role, what are some of the key things you would be talking to, you know, internal teams, but also your senior leaders about, what would you be setting expectations on? First of all, I probably wouldn't just jump into it without thinking. I would sit down and actually ask the relevant questions. Like, okay, great, you're giving it to me from the strategy perspective and kind of execution perspective. Who's actually going to support me with that? Who's going to do my designs? Who's going to help me write the content? Who's going to help me with the research? Who's going to actually be in my team? Because I think that... would really answer a lot of dramas that happen and avoid the know the mental breakdowns that I had throughout the first year. Who's going to be the salesperson? Who? Oh, fucks. Yeah, who's going to... how is the arms going to you know approach the ABM lead and even simple things like how are we going to... measure the leads that are know, everyone fucking measures MQLs. We can't escape that and we always going to measure them and we always going to have the scoring system and make them from leads to MQL. Okay, how are we actually going to approach the ABM accounts leads that come? Because if we are investing so much money into it, do we really have to wait until they hit the correct? point scoring system, whatever, until they get to MQL, who's going to follow up with them? Is it a specific ABM SDR or are we going, what the hell is the whole structure of this ABM center of excellence? I think I would ask for that center of excellence being built first instead of just jumping and all, just spin up some ABM campaigns. it's the fact that you need to have a, you need to be able to validate that it's something that's worthwhile doing. So like, you could be like, you could absolutely be like, yeah, okay, so these are all the things you need to think about. Are we gonna do that? But actually, can I validate it as well? Can I go out to our customers? Can I learn about how they bought from us? Can I figure out if this is actually right? As well as that center of excellence because, and I feel like that is actually something that I've clocked quite a lot. more recently is people not spending time validating. Can we just start from like three pounds? Can we just test it, know, can we do three accounts at the beginning and see how it works? Not how it works from the results perspective because we're gonna see them, how it works internally. Do we actually, can we manage it on the small cohorts of two or three accounts originally? Because if we can, then we can scale it up later on. What's the point of dumping nearly 100 accounts and just trying to run it? Because what happened after a year, after the first year of me doing it, I cut those accounts in half. I went from 87 to 35 in the second year and I said absolutely I can't do it for 87 accounts. No one fucking can. Everyone I speak, even now when I speak with people and I say yeah I've got 36 accounts under me they were like what do mean 36 accounts? For one ABM are you mental? We've got five and that's already enough. Per ABM. m Exactly that. So I think I would push for that starting from start small if they are giant accounts No one does ABM to a tiny account that can give you 10k. Let's be completely honest They are accounts of expectation and and potential of a seven-figure deal Let's try from three or two and then see if we can manage it internally and if we can't then we can't scale it up Simple as that you also think that maybe marketers have been slightly the problem here, right? Because what happens is, I'm like, um I? Because I think some of us have set the wrong expectations around account-based marketing. Because even though I know we get frustrated by this, all these things that we've been saying. think a lot of us do this thing where we're like i really actually.. what i actually want to do is not account-based marketing but what i want to do is more personalised tailored campaigns to small niche industry groups or verticals or whatever it might be and yet we s.. we articulate that as abm so we're like are we actually part of the problem? we fucked it. we kind of took it as you know it was just this shiny thing that everyone was talking about and we all want to do it and then actually actually not many of us actually do it I think being on a lot of know ABM conferences and listening to people talking about their ABM campaigns and programs I started to question it is it actually an ABM? Because I don't think so we actually doing ABM. I think we're doing a lot of strategic kind of vertical plays and maybe use case kind of plays, depends on how people segment them. But is it really an ABM? Because a lot of, I see a lot of those done, you know, it's a landing page, few assets, LinkedIn campaign, and maybe an email send. And here we are, that's an ABM campaign. Is it an ABM campaign really? Probably not. For me, like, ABM is like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've literally done it we've literally done the same. Like, so we're holding our hands up here. But I think for me, like in the truest sense, what it is, is literally being like, I mean, okay, let's actually talk through this. Let's talk through the process of where you would start and let's see where we all get to. Where would you start, Marta? where would I start? From definitely a decent account selection. So first of all, and it's not my choice as well. I think a lot of people just choose accounts because of the choose accounts. It's not sales choice as well. Let's not give it then the power of choosing accounts because they, my gosh, I've done it the first year. nominate the accounts. Seriously, it's a shit show that comes to me. So that account selection. looking into every single aspect from that perspective as well, not just what sales wants to do, not just what marketing thinks is done, but what the numbers actually telling us. What's the data? Because if you don't have the data, you have no clue what you're actually doing. You can have fantastic program and strategy built, but if you can't back it up with the data, never going to work. So look into that. So I would start from this, that's for sure. Once obviously the company is sold on the idea of starting slow and not jumping the guns crazy. So that would be my first thing and then start with having a very clear communication with everyone. involved in that process and in creating that program and that strategy from sales to customer success, renewals, SEs, brands, design, corporate campaign, absolutely everyone, product, SDRs, very clear communication back and forth, not just help me guys come up with a value proposition for this account or whatever, but also set expectation what is expected from them. Afterwards because you can come up with a campaign and then SDS have no clue how to follow up Sales have no clue what's happening Product corporate they just don't know what to do after so set expectations what they need to give you and if they don't sign up this Federal document or whatever you want to call it that they are happy to support you and help you You can't do it on your own if they are not in it with you, you're just not going to do it. So that kind of back and forth expectations I think is very important. That's how I would start. Yeah. I also think it's like when it comes to finding the people who should be the accounts that you go after, I think so the one time that I have been involved in account based marketing that has gone relatively well was that basically we were, we looked at the cross section of clients that we have. We looked who we actually have data points for as in like real tangible data points that say this person did this thing and this is what the result was so that we've got some data, not just a use case where they go, we had a great time, we loved it, that's not enough. And then we also then worked with the account managers and we also had some external consultants who did, there was like a connection point between these external consultants and us and looked at who had good relationships with the clients but also who had pre-existing relationships into some of the accounts that we would want to target. now i know that feels a little bit old school, bit black book but the reality is like the first activity we did off the back of that so we obviously filled down the list we had like four accounts that we wanted to go after and we said to ourselves if we go after those four accounts can we get those four accounts in a room with the four clients that we have that marry up and do and have dinner or whatever it was a dinner actually a dinner where we just get everyone in the room to start with. Like that's the.. that was our starting point. And can we do that? Yes we can because we've got the relationships. We've got a great we've got a great person who's a great advocate for what we do so we can get everyone in the room. We can start with dinner. The next layer on from that was okay so we've now done the dinner and those relationships keep fostering because the CEO's involved. Guess what? The CEO's the one keeping the relationships with the other CEO's. no. salesperson. and then what happened next was we decided we would do a workshop for the people who were the level down in that organization. so the HR.. in this case the HRDs. HRDs have a workshop. then the next layer down was going to be like okay we're going to do webinars for all the HRBPs in those organizations. so we start with like top, middle, bottom and that is a lot of people. and that is just four accounts. and that is like.. and that is like.. wrong way if you think about it. even.. i can't even think how many people it was that were like across those four accounts but it was at least managing 50 relationships from top to bottom and it was like that is how detailed it was and it was basically like those original three activities were across six months and then there's stuff in between as well there was all the there were the linkedin ads there were the pages there were the con you know there was all that was the only time i think i've ever been involved where i've been like wow and they were really.. and like the organization involved were really brought into this idea. and the reason they were brought into the idea was because there were data points that actually proved that when these organizations were involved with us there was real benefit. so like the starting point was like actually this is going to help them rather than like how can we make money. And you know why I love this? my gosh, there's so many things that I would probably do differently now as well. A lot of people start ABM campaigns in general looking exactly the same through that kind of perspective of a normal marketing. You start from top of the funnel, then you go to the middle of the funnel, you go to the bottom of the funnel. What you just described was completely the other way around. You started from the bottom, you've started from the top, the relationship, from the bottom of the funnel, the C level relationships. love it. Yeah, you always do some kind of noise around it, the digital campaigns and everything, but starting ABM from just digital and then you run that digital for five or six months and then you try to incorporate some kind of face-to-face or engagement or that relationship, it just doesn't, I would do it completely differently and you can do it the other way around when you can really focus on the account because you've got four and you know exactly what you're doing. If you have 87 split across 16 different cohorts it's impossible to actually look at that cohort and say okay we've got five accounts in this they are very similar have very similar issues and challenges let's just do no you just you use abm as that kind of oh you have a blueprint you copy and paste the strategy Yeah, doesn't work like that. No and it didn't work for me at all and that's why I'm you know angry at myself at some point of like because you don't have time because you've got so much accounts and you're losing moment to actually sit down and come up with a strategy and you're doing it first for the first cohort or for the first you know one account and then you just copy and paste it to the other because you don't have time. to sit down and come up with a completely different strategy for those. You're just utilising it as a blueprint and I hate that because I think ABM just doesn't have a blueprint. also like i think again blueprint totally just undermines what abm is supposed to be because we are talking about relationships so you cannot have a blueprint for building a relationship with a person like you just can't and also what i also was going to just say about how we selected the four accounts so obviously the other thing is it's like it wasn't even like it wasn't even like uk transport companies it was literally the train companies that run out of London, that's how specific it was. It was so, so specific. These are the accounts we want to go after because we know we have these customers who are the same and like we've got this data. so it's like that. so i feel like that's another thing that people get wrong is they go.. also go.. especially when like say all select the accounts they'll go like let's go after amazon, let's go after netflix, let's go after google. i'm like have you.. have you got any idea about how long that.. how much money that would take to do that? I love that. always go to... it's the biggest one, so let's go for it. How many... what actually... who actually do we know from that account? No one. Great! Amazing, fantastic candidate for ABM. data like i think that's another thing here as well with intent data like if you've got something like six cents that's uh but it's gonna but it is gonna help you because you'd be able to go to people well you want to go after google well no one from google's ever even been on our website so like they don't even know they don't even know we fucking exist so why would we invest half a million into a campaign with Google. Yeah, amazing. Great idea. But they don't even know who the fuck you are. So what do you think, I mean again, like for a lot of companies lots of people will be trying to dabble with ABM in 2026 because again it's just been another really hard slog for people. Do you think there is a version, should we just call it campaigns and like personalisation versus I think, you what, think, and specifically now, we have some, my gosh, I just went through the exercise not long ago of watching million demos of ABM tools, the landing page tools and those kinds of, know, the beauties of ABM world, basically. With the amount of tools that we have and with the amount of... AI at the moment that is there and helping us with that. We need to throw AI somewhere. I think ABM in 2026 will start not being ABM anymore because people think that basically utilising AI and throwing a logo and doing those landing, this is basically just doing ABM. But it's not really, isn't it? It's just... It's just good marketing and it's great that it's personalized and it's fantastic that we have those tools to help us do it utilizing intent, first party, third party intent, whatever, utilizing AI to rewrite a content so it's really aligned and personalized to the specific account or a specific industry using that knowledge. Great. I love the fact that we can do it now because it can speed up the process and really dig a little bit deeper. into specifically our messaging and the value proposition and get it a little bit more aligned to whoever we're going after. But this is not ABM. And I think what we're gonna see is that mass push and the waves of everyone's doing ABM, where actually we're improving in our standard demand gen and marketing practices. I think that's how it's going to go. Yeah, the other thing actually that just kept sprung to mind about the client that I think is where we did the really good ABM play is that the organization was not struggling for revenue. And I think that's also really important to say because they've got three and a half thousand clients. They've got a steady flow of clients that renew. They renew their clients for I think it's 10 years. So they're not worried. code. They're not worried about whether this goes wrong or not. And they can also afford to play the long game. So I think again, that's just a really another extra thing to say to people. Yeah, if your company is focusing on... Growing a business, know, 40, 50 % year on year and your main focus is net new logos and gaining new customers. Just fucking wait. Don't jump into ABM yet because ABM's not going to help you with net new logos. Like, oh my gosh, I love that. We're gonna do ABM to a completely green field, companies that we've never even spoke with, but we're gonna invest shit tons of money and run ABM to them. Well, that's not going to work. So just wait a second. Do a very good personalised strategy in your marketing in general. Don't jump into ABM or whatever you want to do and call it ABM because it's a joke. That's what it is. think the other thing for me is ABM, because it's so tied to specific deals and accounts, I think it needs commission for everyone. 100%. just saying it's different. I think marketers should get commissioned anyway but ABM is like a whole other area. yeah yeah now pizza friday don't come on because pizza friday's yeah literally the whole problem with lack of commission for marketing and Bonuses, it's yeah my pet peeve as well. I bonuses are, I feel like they're starting to come a little bit more now because I can see this happening that more companies give marketing bonuses not just for the director level. I think that was the most annoying one. Directors and above get bonus, but the actual people who fucking churn through the job and do and execute every single campaign, did nothing. Great, you just get a basic salary. But I can see the bonus is actually creeping up now. Commission. I don't think so it's ever going to happen. I just doubt it. It'd be great though, but... My little wish list. definitely be a way of bringing the marketing and sales team and CS and everybody, because CS also should be getting commission, I think in my head. It would be bringing us actually together as a growth team in the right way, incentivising the right behaviour. Guys, if I ever work in house again and get to build my own like growth team, I promise you everyone's getting commission. Yeah, I will. I will do that. Yeah. genuinely love it if I ever get to the level of you know CMO or something I would fight for it genuinely fight for it. It just motivates people like it Sad as it I mean sad if you're targeting people on revenue, then bitch, reward them on revenue. Yeah, exactly. and also it's like actually if you want people to care about the numbers if you want marketers to care about the numbers and like give a shit about doing this stuff properly then let's get some money um you under deliver or over deliver, no cares, you get paid exactly the same. So why would I want to over deliver? You know what mean? Why would I want to go above my job description and do something extra and hit 150 % of my quota if I get paid exactly the same if I hit 80 %? Yep. Make sense. we need to give marketers commission in 2026. We also need to draw a very clear distinction between ABM and just good marketing. Before we let you go, Marta, have you got any marketing gossip for us to have a bitch and a moan about? Anything good or bad that you want to moan about with us? Hmm Yeah, a few what I and I mean, it's kind of good and kind of bad so what I what really fucking annoys me in B2B specifically marketing and the companies in general is When you look up their creatives design, you know ads on LinkedIn or whatever. It's coming out You can literally cover the logo and use the same design for any company. They are so boring, stuck up, using exactly the same stock images. Story, real story from us. Some, our competitor, not... I'm talking to my previous jobs and our competition used exactly the same stock images in they linked in ads campaign that we were using it was the same person you know a happy woman holding a phone they are just so freaking boring and when I compare it with B2C brands when they actually using using humor and jokes and then just making something I don't know, different. Something that actually wants you to look at those ads because I fucking hate it. The same stock images, the same tacky, you know, lines on those ads. And then you literally can reuse it, copy paste for any company that you go around regardless, especially in like tech and cyber. It's not pet peeve. I hate it and I really hope it's going to finally change and we start treating The campaigns and the digital creatives as we should like end of the day we showing them to people not to robots Why we still Yet, yeah, at least at this moment. We still trying to build some trust and a relationship with a person So why are we talking to them? Like they are not people Speaking of stock images and adverts, HubSpot has been doing a lot of print advertising in last 12 months that I've noticed because I'm a HubSpot girlie. But you know the tunnel from St. Pancras to King's Cross Station? There's the underground and there's ads all the way down. It's a stock image of a person doing something and it says HubSpot. That's it. It's like someone drinking a coffee, HubSpot. Someone doing something, HubSpot. And I was like... How? What is that relevant? And then you cover that, cover that Hubsbutt and put Microsoft on it or Google. it doesn't even make sense like it doesn't even on its own like make sense at least if you've got budget to burn, like hubspot clearly do, do something.. do something that's photographeable and make it like at least social media worthy. like it's boring shit anyway. yeah. being frustrated that their laptop or something like at least like a little you know connection but it's literally someone drinking a coffee helps what and I'm like what's happening here guys? I remember, that's a good gossip as well. Campaign, trying to do a campaign and I remember that too. I think Automotive Industry that was focusing, know, an ABM campaign, focusing on Automotive Industry doing a PDF, some kind of executive summary white paper, whatever. And... the creatives giving me the asset and on the first fucking page is a guy like holding a phone like this and the title that is completely irrelevant very relevant to automotive industry but that image with that was like why what how did you choose that image because it's our they are our brand images fuck's sake, seriously? So what that they are brand images? What is the relevance between that person who's holding the phone to what you're talking about identity in automotive industry in cars? Just put a fucking car on it. Like use your brain a little bit. Fuck's sake. That what annoys me like brand, you know, lot of companies have these are our brand images. This is the standards that we need to keep. Really do we need to keep it because it doesn't make any sense. Like, come on. it just doesn't, like you say, it just doesn't resonate with people anymore. Like we live in a world where we're so, we're so bombarded with shit. If it doesn't, if it doesn't catch your eye, I mean just, I always like to say that it should punch you in the face, not give you a cuddle. Yeah. have any clue about what you do... Why? Like, I don't get it. Anyway. Yeah. I see a lot, I still click on lot of websites where I go what the fuck do you do? If I don't understand what you're doing the hero, you've lost me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. lots of companies to see as well. I look onto their websites, it's like, what? at that point, you're just saying things. Yeah. Yeah. then we know what you do. yeah, yeah, the waffling, the waffling about we do absolutely everything and I'm kind of like but what does it what does it actually mean? Yeah, yeah. call us and I'm like, I'm not calling you guys. I've got better things to do. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Marta. uh I hope anyone going into ABM... I was gonna say, don't think this is a super negative episode, but it isn't. This is what the reality of it is. So be aware of what that is and make sure you're setting yourself up for success. because if you're the person doing ABM and it doesn't go well, you're probably going to be on the line for it. So make sure you do everything to have those odds in your favour, not against you. But also you know what try it lots of marketers going to a BM like I did from field or from digital from something Try and see if it actually brings you joy as well because if you're not happy and if you actually don't like doing it after you know three four five months six months a year you realize you know what it's not for me you're never going to be good at this because it doesn't give you that buzz so just just see Excellent, excellent way to end. If it doesn't give you joy, don't do Keep yeah. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And to everyone watching, we'll see you in the next episode.