Author: Sara de Velasco

Pull up five websites in your category and cover the logos. Can you tell them apart? If you are honest, probably not. That uncomfortable little test, posed by the research firm Wynter, captures the single biggest problem in B2B marketing today. An industry that prides itself on innovation, and somehow almost everything in it sounds the same.

The numbers are sobering. In the research with marketing leaders at 50 million dollar plus B2B SaaS companies, 94% admitted their brand messaging barely stands out, and only 6% believed they were truly distinctive. As Wynter’s founder Peep Laja puts it, “sameness is the default for most companies today.” The question is not really why this happens. It is why an sector with companies in completely different industry verticals keeps choosing to be forgettable, and what the brands that escape actually do differently.

Features stopped being a moat a long time ago

The first hard truth is that you can no longer win on features. This is something that David Cancel said out loud all the way back in 2017. Any feature that is meaningful and popular gets copied, usually within months. As soon as a something resonates with audiences, competitors build it too, and the category drifts back towards a grey middle. Laja is blunt about where that leaves most companies: only one or two per cent can realistically win on innovation. Everyone else is playing the “X plus one feature” game and wondering why nobody notices.

Because software is now so easy to build and deploy, Cancel argues, any market with serious demand fills up fast with products touting near identical features. His conclusion is unambiguous: “to win, you need to win on brand.” The market leaders will be the ones customers know, like and trust, precisely because the functional differences have all but disappeared.

This is why brand is no longer the soft, unmeasurable cousin of “real” marketing. It is the defence against being ignored or forgotten. Things have finite value, but the meaning and trust we attach to them compound over time. A strong brand is the one asset your competitors cannot copy.

The trap: when everything is measurable, everything converges

Here is the part that should give every performance marketer pause. The relentless drive to measure has quietly made the sameness worse. We have A/B tested ourselves into identical headlines, optimised the personality out of our brands, and data-driven our way to invisibility.

Cancel recently spoke about how he deliberately invests in things that are harder to measure but where attention is genuinely building. And he warns of the deeper danger of decision by dashboard: “If everything you do is based on consensus, then you will create junk, because you naturally go towards the mean and you will create something that’s average.”

Average is the enemy. In a sea of sameness, different is not the risky choice. Sounding like everyone else is.

Where traditional media comes in

Here is the connection that too many B2B marketers miss. Building a distinctive, trusted brand is exactly the kind of work that is hard to measure click by click, and traditional media is exactly where that work has always been done best.

Think about what print offers a B2B brand. It offers borrowed authority, because appearing inside a title people already respect lends credibility and implicitly signals trust. And it offers the slower, compounding kind of attention that builds memory and trust.

This matters even more in B2B, where buyers are cautious and the purchase is considered. People want to buy from names they recognise and sources they trust. Traditional media earns both.

Out of home belongs in exactly the same conversation. A well-placed poster cuts through. A taxi wrap is eye-catching. Tube advertising has the potential to be the longest dwelling time ad. The skill lies in precision rather than blanket coverage, planning around the movement patterns, commuter routes, working days and industry events of the people you actually want to reach, so the message lands at the right moment.

Used this way, out of home becomes a surprisingly sharp account-based tool.SaaS companies Mutiny and Ramp turned a single decision-maker’s LinkedIn post into a billboard in Times Square to win the attention of one target account, Snowflake, and to The Trade Desk reaching agency staff on their commute. Creativity in OOH is an evergreen LinkesIn conversation topic.

Bauer Media Outdoor makes a complementary point closer to home. Out of home delivers high visibility in business districts, near corporate offices and outside the very conferences buyers attend, and it reaches professionals when they are most receptive, thinking about work but not buried in a task. Their B2B examples show the brand-building job in action, from Lloyds using social proof, the reassuring “1 million businesses”, to win the confidence of small business owners, to Hiscox using large-format storytelling to dramatise a fear every decision-maker recognises. That is trust and memory being built in public, the same compounding asset that print delivers, simply on a different canvas.

How Hurst Media helps B2B brands escape the sea of sameness

This is the work we are built for. At Hurst Media, we place branded content, double-page spreads and advertorials inside trusted national titles such as The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and we extend that presence into out of home, from billboards near business districts to placements on the commuter routes and at the industry events your buyers attend. Both place brands in environments that confer authority rather than asking to manufacture it from scratch. That is borrowed trust, working in your favour.

Hurst Media Labs then makes sure the work is distinctive rather than average. As an extension of your team across design, copy and marketing.

If your category has started to sound like one long echo, the most valuable question you can ask is:with your logo removed, would anyone still know it was you? If you would like help making the answer a confident yes, we would love to talk.

Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediacompany.co.uk and we’ll be happy to make it work you.

Sources:

Wynter: Differentiation strategy
Wynter: Why your B2B SaaS brand sounds like everyone else (and how to fix it)
Codementor: The CEO of Drift on why SaaS companies can’t win on features, and must win on brand
Bauer Media Outdoor: Successful B2B advertising examples and lessons from leading brands

The headline number, and the more useful one beneath it

UK retail media is forecast to reach £7.88bn in 2026, up from £3.8bn last year, with three quarters (74%) of IAB UK members expecting it to take even more spend in the months ahead. Retail media has now grown for six straight years, from £1.32bn in 2019 to nearly £8bn this year, and is one of the engines pushing total UK ad spend past £45bn.

That headline is enough to put retail media on every marketing director’s agenda. But the more useful number sits one layer down. Online retail media alone accounted for £1.5bn in the first half of 2025, with industry sentiment driven by something simpler than novelty. Budgets are flowing towards channels that can prove three things in the same breath: trust, intent and outcome.

Retail media wins on all three. So does the wider buy that should sit around it.

Three things retail media is genuinely good at

When you strip away the hype, retail media’s pull comes down to a clean set of advantages.

Closed loop measurement. Brands can see the round trip from impression to till, often in the same week, often inside the same data environment. That’s a level of accountability that programmatic open exchange has been quietly chasing for a decade.

High intent audiences. A shopper inside a Tesco app, on a Sainsbury’s page or walking the Boots beauty aisle is meaningfully closer to a purchase decision than the same person scrolling a social feed.

Point of purchase context. Bauer Media’s supermarket DOOH network alone now spans 1,500 screens across Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, delivering a 20% fortnightly reach of UK adults. Add Bauer’s new Morrison’s contract for 300 in-store screens and you have a network that meets shoppers physically inches from the shelf.

So far, so attractive. The risk, though, is that brands treat retail media as a self-contained tactic, when the audience treats it as the final scene in a much longer story.

In-retail and proximity: better together

We’ve seen this play out for our clients across both sides of the moment.

In-retail campaigns convert the high intent shopper already inside the store or app, where the decision is being made.

Proximity campaigns, on commuter routes, supermarket forecourts, transport hubs, the high street, warm the shopper on the way in, so that in-store impression isn’t the first they’ve seen. It acts as a final decision catalyst rather than a cold introduction.

Run together, the lift is meaningfully bigger than running either in isolation. Both act as brand preference amplifiers, each priming the other.

For brands to get this right, there shouldn’t be a retail media line item simply added to the wider plan. As with other channels, it needs to be treated as one of the shelves in a much wider shop.

What this means for media planning in 2026

Three planning questions are worth bringing to the next quarterly review.

Is your retail media buy connected to the journey that precedes it? If it sits in isolation, you’re paying for the easiest part of the conversion and missing the part that earns it. Consumers need to havethat built in preference before encountering the brand physically.

Is your buy thought through for the right share of moments? In-retail and proximity each do a different job. The strongest plans give both a clear role rather than overweighting either.

Is your creative earning the environment? A DOOH frame on the route to Sainsbury’s, a press feature ahead of a category launch and a national newspaper spread before a peak season are all “point of purchase” in their own way, but only if the creative respects the moment.

How Hurst Media Agency plans retail media

At Hurst Media Agency we help clients place their brands in the right environments so that they can be the preferred choice of consumers, whether the shopper is in-store, in-app or on their journey.

We plan retail alongside print, digital, out of home, radio and TV in a single brief. That way each channel earns the moment only it can: print and national news for credibility, digital for retargeting and reach, OOH and proximity for path-to-purchase, retail media for closing the loop.

If retail media is on your 2026 plan, or about to be, we’d love to help you map it against the wider buy.

Book a free planning consultation with the Hurst Media Agency team

Drop us an email to buying@hurstmediaagency.com or call us at 020 3478 6017.

Sources

• IAB UK, Retail Media and TV+ take centre stage as UK ad spend forecast to hit £45 billion by 2026
• Press Gazette (citing AA/WARC), UK ad spend to exceed £50bn in 2026
• Bauer Media Outdoor, Supermarket advertising 2026
• Retail Media Age, IAB UK’s Adspend report spotlights retail media momentum

68% of Google searches in early 2026 ended without a single click to any website.

That is according to research from SparkToro and Similarweb, and it represents the fastest acceleration of this trend in a decade. Just two years ago, the figure stood at 60.45%. Ten years ago, it was around 45%.

Bain & Company puts the wider picture in even sharper relief: 80% of consumers now rely on AI-generated summaries in at least 40% of their searches. Google referral traffic to publishers fell by a third between 2024 and 2025. At People Inc., referrals from Google have dropped 63% in two years.

For brands and media owners who built their marketing strategies around clicks and cost-per-click, measuring what happened before and after arriving with that click, building attribution models that tried to understand behaviour around it, this is not a blip. It is a structural unravelling of the model.

And yet, many marketing conversations still orbit the same metrics: CTRs, CPCs, paid and organic traffic volumes. We are measuring a world that is changing beneath our feet.

The uncomfortable reality is that clicks were never really proof of anything commercial. They were a proxy. A convenient shorthand that worked while Google (and later Meta) reliably funnelled audiences through to publisher content. That deal is deteriorating, and brands that cling to click-centric KPIs risk optimising for a vanishing signal while missing the audiences that actually matter.

What zero-click is forcing, perhaps usefully, is a question every marketer should have been asking anyway: what does this activity actually do for our business?

Commerce media is pointing to one compelling answer. The metric that matters is not the click. It is the customer.

As Toby Espinosa explained, a CMO becomes a more powerful figure, not a weaker one, when marketing is directly accountable to commercial outcomes: revenue, acquisition, brand consideration. This is territory that trusted media has always understood.

When Hurst places a brand’s message in a high quality environment, the objective has never been to generate a click through an algorithm. It is to build confidence, authority and purchase intent where engaged readers choose to spend time in.

National press, radio, OOH and retail audiences are not stumbling across content through a search model that is rapidly being disrupted. They are going about their daily lives experiencing relevant messages in a context they trust.

The WoodWing/MediaVoices report is direct about where the opportunity lies: brands and publishers alike need to “cure their click addiction” and refocus on the value they actually deliver to audiences. That means owned channels, direct audience relationships, first-party data and genuine commercial accountability.

SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin makes a similar point from the other side of the equation. His advice to brands is to stop treating website traffic as the goal and start building influence and recognition in the places audiences already spend their time, even when that doesn’t lead directly back to a website. Traffic can fall while revenue rises.

This means a 180 degree shift from chasing clicks to building a presence and a reputation that travels with the audience, wherever they happen to be.

The old model is not coming back. But the brands that understand what was always really working – credible messages, in trusted environments, in front of the right audiences – will have a load with which to climb this new mountain.

Especially when they have the right partners by their side… Chat?

Get in touch with us to help your brand gain the authority it deserves in this new era: buying@hurstmediaagency.com
or at 020 3478 6017.

Sources:
– The Zero-Click Content Shift, WoodWing/MediaVoices, 2026 (PDF report)
– In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click, SparkToro – https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/
– Google zero-click searches hit 68% in early 2026: Study, Search Engine Land – https://searchengineland.com/google-zero-click-searches-2026-study-479717
– Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing, Bain & Company – https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/
– The CMO will only become more powerful, The Drum – https://www.thedrum.com/news/the-cmo-will-only-become-more-powerful-how-doordash-is-delivering-on-commerce-media-s-promise-as-marketing-s-growth-engine