I’ve never bought a Super Bowl ad.
Like most B2B CMOs, I’ve always seen them as flashy, expensive, and hard to justify to a CFO. Millions of dollars for 30 seconds of attention feels reckless when you live in a venture capital or private equity-backed world where major investments need to be backed by pipeline forecasts and ROI spreadsheets.
But here’s the uncomfortable confession: I’ve approved something far riskier, year after year, without fully realizing the cost and without blinking: Invisible waste.
Putting the Waste in Perspective
B2B marketing prides itself on funnels, attribution models, and intent data. We build elaborate systems to track every click, download, and engagement score.
While this classic B2B marketing setup gives us comfort that we can grow sales and increase retention using tried-and-true tools and tactics, the data tells a different story. In a recent survey of 750 B2B marketing leaders, respondents reported that roughly 25% of B2B marketing spend fails to translate into measurable pipeline or revenue impact.
Doing the Math
In the U.S. alone, B2B marketing spend is over $100 billion annually. At 25% waste, that’s around $25 billion a year in activity that doesn’t move the business.
Thinking about tens of billions of dollars in B2B marketing waste every year is impossible to grasp. In the spirit of the Super Bowl, let’s put these numbers in context: A 30-second Super Bowl ad in 2026 costs roughly $8 million. A single game runs at least 60 nationally televised ads, many of which cost more and run longer than 30 seconds.
Take $25 billion in wasted B2B marketing spend and divide it by one $8 million Super Bowl ad. You get about 3,125 30-second spots. Divide by roughly 60 ads per game, and you end up with 52 Super Bowls. As a B2B marketing industry, how did we get comfortable losing the equivalent of more than 50 years’ worth of Super Bowl advertising every year?
CMOs are trained to justify budgets by showing activity, scale, and efficiency. But the longer I’ve done this job, the more I’ve come to believe one of our most important responsibilities is asking harder questions about campaign effectiveness. Optimizing activity is easy. Optimizing outcomes is hard. And hard is what matters. Every dollar we “optimize” toward a signal that doesn’t drive revenue is a risk we’ve normalized.
What Marketers Can Do About It
The fix isn’t more tools or better dashboards. It’s a shift in what we optimize for.
Before approving any campaign, I ask one question: Does this drive measurable pipeline, or does it just create impressive activity metrics? Most CMOs already know the answer. We’re just not comfortable acting on it.
Start with who you’re targeting. A lot of waste happens because teams chase accounts that they can’t win. This might include prospects using entrenched competitors on long-term contracts, companies outside your real ICP, or accounts showing clicks masquerading as “intent signals” but lacking any actual buying trigger. Better visibility into who can realistically buy, and when, helps you focus on winnable accounts, not just active ones.
Better attribution helps expose waste, but only if you understand the difference between programs that fail to drive outcomes and programs that don’t get credit for the outcomes they enable. Brand, upper-funnel awareness, and channels like display or paid social often fall into the latter category. You need to kill the former without starving the latter.
Don’t be Afraid to Go Big
Waste compounds when your martech stack doesn’t operate as a system. Most teams don’t just have too many tools, they have tools that don’t talk to each other. Content lives in one place, signals in another, activation somewhere else. Each layer optimizes its own data and metrics, and no one owns the outcome. Add a few shiny GenAI tools to the mix and the complexity only grows. When those layers align around measurable pipeline instead of isolated dashboards, waste becomes obvious and easier to eliminate.
When pipeline needs a boost, don’t just spend more on paid digital, more GenAI-generated content, or new activation channels with the same inefficiencies you were putting through the old channels. Solve the waste and inefficiency problem first so you can confidently scale what actually works. After that, consider placing bigger bets, the kind your finance team will question, campaigns that can’t be justified with incremental lift spreadsheets.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: B2B marketing isn’t failing because we take too many risks. We’re failing because we’ve optimized for safety. We’ve built systems that reward activity over outcomes, busyness over impact. We all need to be more courageous with our bets.
If you’re going to spend like it’s the Super Bowl, at least make it count.
Bill Hobbib is Chief Marketing Officer at DemandScience. He has led marketing at multiple PE and venture-backed B2B companies, played leadership roles in six unicorns, and helped drive three exits at 10x+ revenue valuations.
