You all may have noticed last week that there’s a new sponsor for the newsletter (Primer). As I’ve gone out on my own now, I’m being incredibly mindful of what brands I partner with (whether as a sponsor or one I write content about).
When Keith Putnam-Delaney (Co-Founder + CEO of Primer) reached out about working together + one of the first things he said was, “Ideally we're interested in something that adds value to your followers and feels organic, less like a promotion,” I knew the match for us was there. So this week Keith + I recorded a ~1 hr convo that hit on everything from rising LinkedIn Ads costs + attribution degradation, why B2B measurement is perpetually behind B2C, audience matching as a moat, budget shifts we’re seeing across channels, brand differentiation in 2026+, and even some “human” bits 100% unrelated to marketing but things we’ve all struggled with.
Sharing all of that because:
1) Today’s newsletter expands on one specific part of our conversation (audience + brand moats)
2) I’ll have the full convo edited + ready to share hopefully next week (#one-person-team-probz 🤷♂️)
3) We’re working on a longer-term collab where I’ll be able to start using Primer myself so I can share real findings + tips as time goes on
Alrightyyyyyy then - onto today’s topic: the 2 best moats in B2B today…
Sponsor: Primer
Bet you didn’t see that coming after that intro 😉
Outbound is broken + LinkedIn somehow keeps getting more expensive. Now what?
Every B2B marketer is paying premium prices for the same shrinking pool of attention on the same two channels (LinkedIn + Google).
Meanwhile, channels like Meta, YouTube, + display cost a fraction of LinkedIn…but most B2B teams can’t use them. Standard account lists match at 15%, AKA audiences are too small to learn + too noisy to convert.
Primer fixes the match rate problem. They turn your ICP, target accounts, and net-new prospects into 45-85% matched audiences across every major ad platform. Now the efficient channels we couldn’t use before due to low match rates are suddenly usable.
Get started with a free account + 30-day trial of paid plans today!
Fun fact: Rippling credits them for their $145M Series B success.
“The only moat your competitors can’t copy is targeting”
This was one of Keith’s main points in a conversation he had a few months ago with Sophie Buonassisi on The GTMnow Podcast. So when I dug into that more with him, here was what he had to say:
“You can see the ads your competitors run. You can look at their website and you can see their messaging...
What you can't do is figure out what did they input into their ad platform, what lists are they working off of.
You could see that they're running Google search ads, but you can't know if they're using a massive suppression audience to weed out the chaff...that's what I mean by it can be a really big differentiator."
We geeked out on this for a bit + when I asked him what some of the top 1% marketers were doing here, he shared a few examples:
Using contact-matched audiences on LinkedIn because LinkedIn doesn't 100% respect job title filters natively (IYKYK) - they almost always expand your audience or don’t have clean ways of bucketing titles so you get random people pulled in.
Some marketers use matched audiences as a signal in a PMAX (Google Ads) + then having a massive suppression audience as well. So they’re effectively saying, “hey, algorithm, work your magic, find people like this, but whatever you do, don't serve ads over here."
A handful of marketers are going after their target accounts via household IP addresses + trying to upload those into CTV platforms so they can run ads to them through the big screens
A friend of mine worked at a company that even had matching technology where once it knew IP addresses or a single device ID from tracking, they’d run their systems overnight at those locations to see all of the device IDs sharing that same IP address or location to then hit them on every device they could map to.
And while I loved riffing through these with Keith, it ultimately led me to asking him a larger question I’ve been thinking about lately…
How do we leverage brand as a moat?
This is one of those questions where on the surface, we’re like, “oh it’s easy, just have a POV, show personality, make your market want to associate with you, etc.,” but when we think about getting that into practice, we realize it’s one of those “much easier said than done” things.
B2C does an incredible job here but B2B…not so much.
We struggle to say + show what our brand stands for. Startups usually do a much better job of this than larger/established companies because that's ultimately how they differentiate. But as companies grow, as they go public, take on investment, get more customers, etc., everything gets watered down.
So I asked Keith about this. I mean, he is leading a startup as we speak, so I’d say a good subject to run this hypothesis by. Here’s what he had to say:
“I do think there are [other moats beyond targeting]. And I think brand can definitely be one of them. It can be a huge differentiator and create this cult like following.
I think it's actually harder than ever and more important than ever to do this because of the AI slop that exists. There's so much content, and then it’s how do you stand out in that sea of content?
I don't know if we've done a great job of it, personally...it is something I've been thinking about more lately, which is how do we create standout content that kind of breaks through the noise?
Here’s my theory:
Like Keith said, the rise of AI slop flooding our feeds + inboxes has us tuning things out more quickly (or slopdusting, as I’ve more recently termed the act of dumping a pile of unreviewed AI slop/lazy AI content on someone + walking away, leaving them to figure out what it even means)
The fear of pissing off 0.01% of the market + having your brand put on blast by a very tiny, but very loud, minority as a result
The rate of change in today’s market is so fast that there’s always a new technological advance you have to jump on (AKA every “AI-native” company right now…) or trend you want to speak to in order to capture the attention companies so desperately need
…while also balancing the fact that repetition is one of the most persuasive things you can do as a marketer, so if you’re constantly changing your positioning, value prop, taglines, etc., you’re actively making it harder for your audience to remember you
So how do we reconcile all of this?
Dual POVs: the durable POV + the adaptive POV
This is something I was struggling with for a while + it finally clicked for me a few weeks ago. How do we stay relevant as a company with market expectations (the “are you AI-native?”) while not losing our true roots + what makes us unique.
As every company jumps to say they’re AI-native, while that checks one box for the market of, “I need the software to be AI,” all that’s really been done is that the prospect has added another checkbox to their criteria list that 9/10 companies check. So you’re left there in what’s still a large pool of competitors + competing on features, price, etc. AKA, the commodity rat race.
But when I think about the brands I’m loyal to (and this list is almost entirely B2C), it goes to brands like Apple, Free Fly, Nike, YETI, etc. because I know exactly what I’m going to get from them AND what their message/brand says about me via association is what leads me to buying/staying with them.
Name a B2B company that has a strong point of view, truly unique values, and a position they willingly stand behind despite knowing it means a good chunk of their precious “TAM” will never buy from them. I’ll wait…….
Stumped? Me too.
Anyway - where this led me was thinking about how this looks from a long-term state. Talking 5-10 years here (and yes, that even accounts for today’s pace of change mentioned earlier).
BUT, while thinking about a 5-10 year window, how do we also make sure we’re staying relevant today or have the agility to act quickly when needed?
A lot of B2B companies are all of a sudden AI this, AI that, AI-powered, AI-native, etc. + that over-indexing is completely overriding a lot of their historical POV and value prop.
Where I’ve come to reconcile this is where I call the long-term POV the durable point of view. This is the POV/belief that everything is anchored on. It's memorable, it's short, it's easy to repeat, + it can survive marketplace changes well - hence, durable.
Then you have what I call the adaptive point of view, which is how you’re able to tie in what's relevant right now, so with the continued AI example, how we’re able to marry that in with our positioning.
Cool theory Sam, but what the heck does this look like in practice?
Durable POV:
Think about Nike + their infamous “Just do it” tagline. This is the belief Nike positions everything on. No matter what’s going on at the world stage, whether it’s the World Cup, Olympics, NBA Finals, etc., you’ll see this tagline being explicitly used or feel the emotion the tagline carries as part of the language used + story told.
Why this works as a durable POV:
The message is built for scale. It’s short, but the meaning is clear + visceral, especially after being repeated a number of times with various scenes taking place alongside it.
The message doesn’t hinge on any trending words or items so it can withstand the test of time
Adaptive POV:
For the 2026 World Cup, Nike ran their “Rip the Script” campaign. While “Just do it” wasn’t mentioned in the video, you can still feel the ethos of it in the content that came from the campaign.
Further, in true “adaptive POV” form, they tied in what’s trending now through the use of the most popular soccer players today (Mbappe, Haaland, Vini Jr., etc.) + cameos from individuals in culture today like LeBron James, Travis Scott, Kim Kardashian, Ted Lasso, Channing Tatum, etc.
When I was at Loxo, one of the adaptive POVs I was playing around with came from an ad set I pushed that said, “AI can never get a coffee with a candidate,” because our market’s fear was that AI was going to replace recruiters.
So how do you take this trending market concern + marry it with our more durable POV of empowering recruiters to make the very best hires possible for both the hiring company + candidate was the bridge I wanted to make there.
Why B2B struggles with this
I’ll cut right to it - lack of founder involvement.
The companies that truly nail the durable + adaptive POV balance share the singular trait of the founder being personally + non-negotiably involved in the brand.
Steve Jobs had a weekly meeting with Lee Clow (Chiat/Day) every week until he passed away. He was incredibly involved in all of their advertising.
Similarly, Phil Knight (Nike) worked closely with Dan Wieden (Wieden+Kennedy) on all of their marketing + brand efforts.
It’s a zero percent surprise to me that both of these companies have as strong + enduring brands as they do. And it’s no surprise because it started with the founder. This is the person who has the most conviction inside of a company. Often, the company is a physical manifestation of their personal beliefs + values. Whether you agree or disagree, love them or hate them, they’re going to share + carry themselves in the way that is most aligned to those.
These founders (and resultingly, brands), had very distinct POVs that they were also ruthlessly consistent with.
This is the hardest part for founders + companies today. The POVs get softened over time and/or they lose consistency by accidentally confusing their Durable POV with their Adaptive POV.
Write these down
What’s your company’s Durable POV?
What’s your company’s Adaptive POV right now?
If you don’t know these OR if they’re the same thing, that’s why growth may be struggling right now.
Figure these two out + everything cascades from there:
Who your POV will resonate best with
How to tie in what’s relevant today
How to stand out despite all of the noise
etc.
Stay tuned next week as I’ll pull out what we covered around budget shifts across channels we’re seeing in B2B and thoughts on how to set up an experiment to see what’s working 👀
See you next week,
Sam