Why Marketing Has Changed for Good
What senior B2B marketers are saying, doing, and worrying about in 2026
In late April 2026, a group of senior B2B marketing leaders met at Dentsu B2B’s Grand Central offices in New York. The brief was blunt: marketing has changed for good. The question on the table was what that actually means, and what to do about it.
The half-day session, hosted by Propolis and Dentsu B2B, brought together a panel featuring Michael Barber (CMO, StarTech) and Georgia Bradley (SVP Strategy, Dentsu Creative), followed by two facilitated roundtables under Chatham House rules. The same themes kept surfacing, sometimes from very different angles.
This report captures what was said.
What’s inside the report
Brand is back, and AI is the reason
For years, B2B marketing has been dominated by performance metrics. That pendulum is shifting. CEOs and CFOs are now watching how brands surface inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and asking, unprompted, how much the business should be investing in brand. That’s a structural change, not a trend.
The CMO squeeze is real
Buyers won’t talk to sales until they’ve already decided. Sales wants more leads. The CMO is caught between the two. Leaders at the roundtable shared how they’re navigating that tension, including how to have honest conversations with boards about what growth actually costs.
AI as thinking partner, not content factory
The room was clear: don’t let an LLM write the first draft. Models pattern-match toward the middle, and if you let them lead, everything looks the same. The winning approach is human origination, AI refinement. Several leaders also shared how they’re building agent networks and moving from content volume to content visibility.
What the Elevation Awards entries reveal about 2026
The report also draws on this year’s Elevation Awards submissions to show what great B2B marketing looks like right now. From precision ABM reaching 45,000 decision-makers in three weeks, to a 60x ROI on a lean budget, to gamified partner programs driving a 93% increase in training completion, the data is clear about what’s working.
Key takeaways from the roundtable
These are the five things the room agreed you should act on:
- Have the brand investment conversation now, while the C-suite is already asking
- Add LLM share of voice to your brand tracking this quarter
- Audit your content for visibility, not just volume
- Make human-first content origination an explicit team principle
- Earn a seat in commercial conversations beyond the marketing dashboard
Download the full report
The full report is free to download. No form, no gate. Just the conversation, as it happened. Download it via the button on the right.
About this report
Why Marketing Has Changed for Good was produced by Propolis, the expert-led intelligence community for senior B2B marketers, in partnership with Dentsu B2B. It draws on a half-day roundtable held in New York in April 2026, supplemented by findings from this year’s Elevation Awards entries.
Propolis brings together B2B marketing leaders through research, peer community, and expert-led content. Find out more at b2bmarketing.net/propolis.
