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Your ad should be about them, not you
The best B2B ads are about the viewer’s problem, not the advertiser’s product. Research from CEB and Google found buyers are about 50% more likely to buy when they see personal value in a brand — roughly twice the effect of business value. Emotion builds memory. Feature lists don’t. Video Brothers writes every ad from the buyer’s side of the desk.
Why shouldn’t our ad be about our product?
Because nobody has the problem “I don’t own your product.”
They have a real problem. Churn they can’t explain. A quota that got raised again. A vendor who locked them in and stopped answering the phone. Your product is one possible ending to that story. It is not the story.
Most B2B ads get this backwards. They open on the logo, tour the features, close on a tagline about empowering teams. The company talks about itself for thirty seconds and calls it advertising. The viewer, who was never mentioned, forgets it by lunch.
An awareness ad has one job: make the buyer feel seen. Why awareness comes first
Does emotional advertising really work on business buyers?
Business buyers are people. The data on this is old, consistent, and still ignored.
Back in 2013, CEB (now part of Gartner) ran a study with Google and Motista across thousands of B2B buyers. The findings: buyers who saw personal value in a brand were about 50% more likely to buy. Personal value had twice the impact of business value. Buyers who felt a personal connection were far more likely to purchase — 71% versus 22.6% for those who didn’t.
Yes, the study is over a decade old. The direction has been confirmed over and over since. System1’s research keeps finding the same mechanism: positive emotion is the biggest driver of an ad’s commercial success, and an ad that makes you feel nothing builds no memory at all. Nothing felt, nothing stored, nothing recalled when the buyer finally goes shopping.
And when LinkedIn and MAGNA tested creative, emotionally engaging B2B ads against standard ones in 2024, the creative ads drove 12% higher purchase consideration and 9% higher brand favorability. (LinkedIn commissioned it, so salt to taste. It agrees with everything above.)
Here’s the punchline: your buyer spends all day being rational. The ads that win aren’t the ones that out-argue the competition. They’re the ones that get remembered. It’s not your media company. It’s your content
How do you actually write an ad about the viewer?
We have a filter for it. We call it the Friday night test.
It’s Friday night. Your prospect has had a long week and a couple drinks, and they’re telling a good friend or their spouse what’s actually been hard at work lately. Not the version in the board deck. The real version, in plain words.
Whatever they say in that conversation — the words they use, the way they frame it — that’s what the ad connects with. If they’d say “I spend half my week chasing data across nine tools,” the ad is about that. It is never about your ingestion pipeline.
Every script Video Brothers writes has to pass this test before it goes anywhere near a camera. The character on screen is living the prospect’s Friday-night problem, usually funnier and slightly worse. The viewer’s reaction we’re chasing is “that’s me.” Your brand shows up as the one that gets it. That’s the whole trick.
Most companies put themselves first in their own ads. At the awareness layer, you go viewer-first or you’re wallpaper.
So where do the features go?
Mid-funnel, where they belong.
Once a buyer knows you get their problem, features start mattering: demos, product videos, comparison pages. That content works harder because the buyer arrives already trusting that you understand them. What features don’t do is build memory with the 95% who aren’t shopping yet.
This is also why our clients’ ads stay fresh for years. Problems are evergreen. Feature sets go stale on your next release. An ad about their problem never expires.
freeB2Bads.com exists to make this kind of creative and put media behind it — Video Brothers writes the ads, Elite Media Group gets them in front of your exact buyers, and the creative is funded by the media budget you already have. See how one roof works Why the creative is free
Frequently asked questions
Does emotional advertising work in B2B?
Yes. CEB and Google found B2B buyers are ~50% more likely to buy when they see personal value in a brand — about twice the effect of business value. System1’s research shows positive emotion is the biggest driver of an ad’s commercial success, because emotion is what builds memory.
What does “personal value” mean in B2B?
How the purchase affects the buyer as a person — their stress, their standing, their career risk, their Friday night. Business value is the ROI slide. Personal value is “this makes my job suck less.” The second one moves deals more.
What is the Friday night test?
Video Brothers’ creative filter. Imagine your prospect on a Friday night telling a friend what’s actually hard at work, in their own words. The ad has to connect with that conversation — not with your feature list. If it doesn’t, we rewrite it.
Won’t buyers be confused if our ad doesn’t explain the product?
An awareness ad’s job is to be remembered next to a problem, not to explain. Explaining is mid-funnel work — demos, product videos, your site. Buyers who saw themselves in your ad arrive at those already leaning in.