78% of marketers say they try their best to be creative, but find it hard.

And honestly? That's not surprising.

In a world where everyone has access to the same AI tools, the same content templates, and the same distribution channels, standing out has never been more difficult. B2B marketing is drowning in noise and most of it sounds exactly the same.

So we asked a different question: what are the CMOs who are breaking through actually doing?

To find out, Mavuus hosted a Coffee Chat with three marketing leaders who came ready to share real campaigns with real results:

• Malina Johnson – Global marketing executive who pioneered the first AI brand and GTM strategy at Microsoft, including the world's first AI mobile app and a Super Bowl campaign that drove $21B+ in annual revenue.
• Martin Pietrzak – CEO of Pinch Marketing and strategic marketing executive with 20+ years in B2B tech, SaaS, and startups, helping North American firms grow through innovative, data-driven strategies.
• Holly Enneking – Senior marketing leader with deep expertise in brand awareness, digital experiences, ABM, and partner/channel marketing, known for creative work that actually delivers results.

Each speaker brought real examples, campaigns they personally ran, why they made the creative bet they did, how they executed, and what happened. The result was one of the most idea-dense sessions we've hosted.

Here's everything we covered.

Table of Contents:

1. The State of B2B Creativity (Spoiler: It's Not Great)
2. Five Campaign Ideas That Actually Worked
3. Building a Culture of Creative Thinking
4. How to Sell Unconventional Ideas to Your Exec Team
   

The State of B2B Creativity (Spoiler: It's Not Great)

Before diving into the campaigns, we ran a quick poll at the start of the session. The results were telling:

• 0% said they innovate every month
• 78% said they try their best, but find it hard
• 11% said they struggle to find inspiration
• 11% said they need new ideas

Nobody in the room felt like they had it figured out.

But why is creativity so hard right now? The group had a lot to say about that.

AI has made content volume explode, and quality tank

Martin put it plainly: B2B marketing is less creative than ever. His reasoning? The numbers speak for themselves. 94% of marketers are using AI for content in 2026. Non-AI blogs have dropped from 65% to just 5% of all corporate content published. That means 95% of what's out there is AI-generated.

The result is a sea of sameness. Every blog post, every LinkedIn update, every thought leadership piece sounds polished, optimized and completely interchangeable. Martin compared it to the dot-com era, when every company slapped ".com" on their brand and forgot what made them unique in the first place.

We're in the same moment now, just with AI.

The plot twist nobody expected

Here's where it gets interesting though. Malina shared something from Cannes Lions that reframes the whole conversation: the brands that are actually standing out in B2B right now are using less AI – not more.

Cannes Lions recently introduced a dedicated Creative B2B category, and the work being recognized there has something in common: it's human, it's specific, and it's rooted in real customer insight. Meanwhile, the companies leaning hardest into AI content are the ones blending into the background.

Malina's prediction is bold but hard to argue with: just like companies eventually dropped ".com" from everything, we're going to see brands quietly drop "AI-powered" from their messaging too. Because audiences have tuned it out. It doesn't mean anything anymore.

What this means for B2B marketers

The opportunity hiding inside all of this noise is actually a return to fundamentals. People are still people. B2B buyers still run from fear or toward pleasure. They still want to feel understood, entertained, and seen, whether they're a procurement manager or a CTO.

As Martin put it, the buyers themselves are changing too. More and more, they're using AI tools to find information and skipping the traditional seller funnels entirely. That means the window to make an impression is getting shorter. Whatever creative you put in front of them has to land fast and it has to feel different from everything else in their feed.

The brands that figure that out won't be the ones generating the most content. They'll be the ones willing to take a creative bet.

Five Campaign Ideas That Actually Worked

This is the part everyone showed up for. Each speaker walked through real campaigns — the thinking behind them, how they were executed, and what actually happened.

Here they are.

Campaign 1: Renting the Moment – Microsoft's Super Bowl AI Campaign‍

Shared by Malina Johnson

Goal: Launch the world's first AI mobile app with maximum reach and a clear download CTA.

Idea: Rent a cultural moment — the Super Bowl — to put the app in front of a massive audience in a single shot.

Execution: Ran a Super Bowl campaign with a direct CTA to download the app. It hit #1 in the iPhone App Store. But within seven days, users were dropping off, downloading once and never coming back. So Malina's team went to their idea bank and pulled a concept from nine months earlier: a March Madness campaign using AI image generation to let users show off their favorite team. Data from their engineering team showed that users who engaged with image generation stayed seven days longer and tried the product 40% more. The campaign ran entirely on social, powered by ten B2B creators on TikTok and Instagram.

Results: 400x higher ROI than the Super Bowl campaign.

Key takeaway: The big splash gets attention. The follow-up creative — the one that solves for behavior, not just awareness — drives real results. And having an idea bank meant they could move fast when it mattered.

Campaign 2: Using Humor to Break Through – The Open Ticket Show‍

Shared by Martin Pietrzak

Goal: Build brand awareness and thought leadership for a cybersecurity IT client in a crowded, serious space.

Idea: What if we made people laugh? Create a content series that mixes short comedic sketches with real expert interviews, rooted in the daily frustrations of IT professionals.

Execution: Produced a show called Open Ticket with real actors and internal team members. One sketch featured an IT team debating whether a pizza promotion email was a phishing attack. Started with longer 10-minute videos, then shifted to 30-40 second YouTube Shorts after finding that short-form dramatically outperformed.

Results: 800+ subscribers, some videos hitting 20,000 views. Comedic content outperformed the serious expert interviews.

Key takeaway: Comedy outperformed expertise in a space where nobody expected it. The audience felt seen and that's what made it work.

Campaign 3: All You Need Is Lev – A Punny Partner Marketing Campaign‍

Shared by Holly Enneking

Goal: Stand out inside the crowded Salesforce partner ecosystem and get sellers to think of Lev first when recommending implementation partners.

Idea: A punny email series with song-inspired titles, making educational content so memorable it was impossible to ignore.

Execution: Sent a series of emails to Salesforce sellers with titles like Lev's Story, Love as an Open Door, and We Will Always Love You. Each covered something sellers needed to know about Lev. Backed it up with a branded Bluetooth speaker and a Spotify playlist of all the songs referenced. Small team, low budget, built entirely in-house.

Results: 70-80% open rates. 20%+ clickthrough rates. And when Holly's CEO introduced himself at the Salesforce New York office, the response was: "Oh, all you need is Lev." They knew the campaign.

Key takeaway: Specificity and personality beat polish every time, especially in a space where everyone else is playing it safe.

Campaign 4: Turning Customer Insight Into an Industry Index‍

Shared by Malina Johnson

Goal: Build long-term thought leadership and earn media attention without a big campaign budget.

Idea: Survey your customers about what they're worried about for the year ahead. Compile the insights. Publish them. Repeat every year until it becomes the industry benchmark.

Execution: Started with 200 survey respondents and one early-career team member's idea. Compiled the findings into a report, did a small PR push, and repeated it annually. Over time it became the Workplace Trends Index, the go-to benchmark for the IT industry. Reporters now call ahead of the release asking when it's dropping. Customers ask to be named in it for co-branding value. The report spawns short-form videos, city dinners, PR placements, and year-round content.

Results: Industry-defining benchmark with ongoing earned media, inbound press requests, and content that feeds every channel for an entire year. As a bonus: AI loves proprietary study data – original, peer-sourced content is exactly what LLMs prioritize.

Key takeaway: It doesn't have to start big. It just has to start.

Campaign 5: The Return Path Arcade – Gamifying B2B Engagement‍

Shared by Holly Enneking

Goal: Generate leads for Return Path, an email deliverability company, in a category that's hard to make exciting.

Idea: Build a branded arcade, a series of video games that let email marketers engage with the brand in a way that was actually fun.

Execution: Built an escape room and a retro Mario-style game called Path to the Inbox, where players collected emails across levels. Originally designed for lead gen. The customer success team started sharing the games as a casual touchpoint with existing accounts and quiet or at-risk accounts started re-engaging. What began as a demand gen play quietly became a retention tool. Martin ran a similar escape room for a Veeva internal product launch using AI, cutting production from months to a couple of weeks.

Results: Strong lead gen results, plus unexpected customer retention impact. Martin's version for Veeva hit 15,000+ views, more than the company had employees.

Key takeaway: Creative campaigns often surprise you with where they deliver value. Build something good and stay open to where it takes you.

Building a Culture of Creative Thinking

The campaigns in the previous chapter didn't come from a single stroke of genius. They came from teams that had built habits, frameworks, and systems around creative thinking. That's the part that doesn't get talked about enough.

Here's what the speakers shared about how they actually keep creativity alive inside their organizations.

Start an idea bank

This one came up multiple times across the session, and for good reason. Malina's team had been building an idea bank for months before the March Madness campaign ever ran. When they needed to move fast after the Super Bowl launch, the idea was already there, documented, thought through, ready to activate.

The concept is simple: a shared document where ideas get captured as they come, so they don't disappear into the noise of day-to-day execution. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It just has to exist.

The payoff comes when a cultural moment arrives, a budget opens up, or a campaign needs a fast pivot. Instead of starting from scratch, your team goes to the bank.

Make creativity a weekly ritual

Malina recommended setting aside 30 minutes every Monday morning, when people are fresh, for a creative think tank. No agenda, no deliverables. Just ideas going into the bank.

The reason Monday matters: it builds a muscle. Creativity isn't a switch you flip when a campaign brief lands. It's a habit. The more consistently you practice it, the more naturally it shows up in your work.

Understand how buyers are finding you and adapt

Martin raised something that reframes the entire creative conversation: buyers are changing how they find information. They're increasingly skipping traditional seller funnels and going straight to AI tools for answers. Martin called it the zero-click reality, people are getting what they need from AI chatbots without ever landing on your website or seeing your content in the usual places.

What this means practically is that the creative bar is higher than ever. You have a very short window to make an impression. And the brands that will get picked up by AI-powered search are the ones producing original, substantive, authoritative content, not the ones generating the most AI-polished noise.

This is also where Martin introduced the MAYA framework, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, a concept from legendary product designer Raymond Loewy. The idea is simple but powerful: the best ideas push forward into something new while staying anchored in something familiar. Go too far and people don't follow. Stay too safe and nobody notices.

For B2B marketers, MAYA is a useful creative filter. It's not about being the most innovative in the room. It's about finding the edge of what your audience is ready for, and landing just there.

Go back to marketing fundamentals

This was perhaps the most unexpected theme of the session. In a conversation about creativity and AI, the speakers kept coming back to something much older: the basics of human psychology.

People, even B2B buyers, even CTOs, even IT managers, run from a pain or toward a pleasure. They want to feel understood. They respond to humor, surprise, and emotional resonance. They remember what made them feel something.

Malina pointed to the dot-com era as the closest historical parallel to where we are now. Every company slapped ".com" on their brand and forgot what made them distinctive. Then the bubble burst, and the brands that survived were the ones that had never stopped being specific, human, and real.

Her prediction for AI is the same: the companies that quietly drop "AI-powered" from everything and go back to leading with genuine customer insight, clear value, and memorable creative, those are the ones that will pull ahead.

As she put it: TikTok uses AI in almost everything they do. They never talk about it. Because the goal was never to showcase the tool. The goal was always the insight, the moment, the feeling that makes someone want to share something with a friend.

That's still the goal. It always was.

How to Sell Unconventional Ideas to Your Exec Team

Coming up with a creative idea is one thing. Getting a room full of executives to say yes to it is another challenge entirely. The speakers have all been there and they've each developed approaches that actually work.

Here's what they shared.

Start with the status quo problem

Martin's first move is never to pitch the idea. It's to establish that what's currently happening isn't working.

Show the data. The gated PDF that used to convert at X is now converting at Y. Organic reach is down. The campaigns that worked two years ago are flatlining. Whatever the evidence is in your specific context, lead with it. Because the moment leadership agrees that the status quo isn't delivering, the conversation shifts from "why would we try something new" to "okay, what do we do instead."

That's the opening you need.

Pitch the risk math, not the idea

Once you've established that something needs to change, resist the urge to go big on the creative pitch. Instead, as Martin put it, pitch the risk math.

What does that look like in practice?

• Small, capped experiment
• Controlled audience
• Clear KPIs agreed upfront, across finance, product, and marketing
• A kill date: if it doesn't work by X, we stop

The creative bet feels a lot less scary when the downside is clearly defined and small. You're not asking for a Super Bowl budget. You're asking for permission to test something with limited exposure and a clear exit if it doesn't land.

Think through reversible vs. irreversible doors

Malina added a framing that resonates particularly well with senior leaders: before going into the room, categorize the risk. Is this a reversible decision or an irreversible one?

Almost every creative marketing bet is reversible. You can pull a campaign. You can kill a video series. You can pivot the messaging. When you walk in and can clearly articulate that – yes, we're taking a creative risk, and here's exactly how we unwind it if needed, leadership relaxes.

The irreversible doors are the ones that need deeper scrutiny. Most creative ideas aren't behind those doors.

Cover the ethical impacts end to end

This one came from Malina and it's often overlooked. Before the meeting, map out everything that could go wrong. Not just the campaign failing, but the unintended consequences. An image that generates six fingers. A message that lands differently than intended in a specific market. A joke that doesn't translate.

Then go one step further: pre-align with your comms team on how you'd respond if any of those scenarios played out. Walk into the room with that thinking already done.

What happens when you do this is the executives in the room start nodding, not because they love the idea yet, but because they can see you've thought it through. They start engaging with the plan rather than poking holes in it. And sometimes they even add their own tweaks, which means they're already invested.

Use AI to show, not just tell

Here's a shift that's genuinely new and genuinely powerful. Malina pointed out that you can now use AI video and image tools to mock up what a campaign might actually look like, before a single dollar is spent on production.

What used to be a tissue session with rough sketches on a wall is now a 60-second AI-generated video that gives leadership a real feel for the idea. When Malina showed the March Madness concept with a rough visual and a piece of music in the background, her CEO smiled. The head of engineering pointed to the music and said "you're using Queen, we'll need a different song, but I get it." They were already inside the idea.

That's the moment you want. And AI makes it dramatically easier to get there.

Make creative risk part of the operating system

Holly's approach is perhaps the most sustainable of all: don't make unconventional ideas a surprise. Build them into your strategy from the start.

Her teams operate on a simple principle: 80% of marketing activity goes toward what's proven to work. The other 20% is explicitly reserved for trying something new, a channel they haven't used, a format they haven't tested, a campaign type they've never run. That 20% is stated, documented, and shared with the CEO and CFO at the beginning of every quarter.

The result is that when Holly comes to leadership with an unconventional idea, it's never out of nowhere. They've already bought in, not to the specific idea, but to the principle that innovation is part of how the marketing team operates. The creative bet just has to fit inside the 20% bucket they've already approved.

As Holly put it: it means she's committed to it, and leadership is already on board, before they even know what the idea is.

Final Thoughts

The campaigns shared in this session couldn't be more different from each other, a Super Bowl activation, a punny email series, a cybersecurity comedy show, an industry benchmark report, a branded arcade. But they all have something in common: a human behind them who was willing to think differently, take a calculated risk, and back it up with a clear strategy.

That's what creativity in B2B actually looks like. Not random. Not reckless. Just thoughtful, specific, and a little braver than the default.

The good news is that the bar for standing out has never been lower, because most brands aren't even trying. They're generating content, not ideas. And there's a real opportunity in that gap for the marketers who are.

These are exactly the kinds of conversations that happen inside the Mavuus community every month – senior marketing leaders sharing what's actually working, what failed, and what they'd do differently. No vendor pitches. No polished keynotes. Just real practitioners being honest with each other.

If that sounds like the room you want to be in, we'd love to have you.

Join the Mavuus community today.