Forget the single decision-maker. That person hasn't existed in B2B for years, and if your advertising strategy still pretends otherwise, you're essentially running a very expensive awareness campaign for people who can't actually sign the contract.
The average B2B buying committee now includes six to ten stakeholders, each arriving with their own research, their own priorities, and their own veto power. Marketing to one of them is like proposing marriage to someone's cousin and hoping word gets around. It doesn't work that way.
This is the reality Stephanie McArthur, Senior Principal GTM Expert at Demandbase, addressed during the August 2026 B2B Advertising Friday Forum hosted by MarketingProfs. The session tackled a question that keeps CMOs up at night: how do you actually advertise to a buying group, not just a persona, and tie it all back to pipeline?
I've been following McArthur's work for a while now. She's one of those practitioners who cuts through the ABM jargon and gets to the operational reality of what it takes to make account-based advertising work. Her answers during the Q&A session are worth unpacking.
The Refresh Rate Question Nobody Asks Correctly
One of the first questions from the audience was deceptively simple: how often should we refresh ads?
McArthur's answer reveals a lot about how most teams get this wrong. For one-to-many campaigns, she suggests watching engagement metrics and rotating creative only when performance drops.
When I started seeing engagement drop from those ads, it was time for me to rotate things out.
Stephanie McArthur
But here's where it gets interesting. For one-to-one campaigns, the cadence tightens dramatically. "You're probably in more of a traditional three-month sprint because it's so specific to that account."
The implication is clear: if you're running truly personalized account-based advertising, you can't set it and forget it. The investment in customization demands active management. And that's precisely why McArthur emphasizes doing this for "a handful" of accounts rather than hundreds. The math doesn't work otherwise.
This is the part where most ABM programs quietly fall apart. Teams get excited about personalization, build campaigns for 200 accounts, and then wonder why engagement flatlines. You can't run a one-to-one program with one-to-many resources.
Buying Groups Are Not Just Personas With a Different Name
The distinction between targeting a persona and targeting a buying group sounds academic until you try to report on it. McArthur's explanation cuts through the confusion.
Persona is part of it. We have two end users in Demandbase. So in that case, I would have two different end user campaigns running: one going after the seller, one going after a marketer.
Stephanie McArthur
But the buying group layer sits above personas. It's about understanding influence levels and ensuring you're reaching the right accounts with the right coverage. The reporting benefit is real: you can group different personas under a buying group role and simplify your dashboards without losing the granularity that matters.
This matters because B2B buyers spend roughly 80% of their journey researching independently before engaging a vendor. If your advertising only reaches the champion who brought you into the conversation, you're missing the CFO who controls the budget, the IT lead who evaluates security, and the end users who will quietly kill the deal if they don't see value.
The 2026 ABM Benchmark Survey found that 56% of respondents now use ABM primarily for new account acquisition, with another 28% focused on expansion. That's 84% of ABM programs aimed at revenue outcomes, not brand awareness. You can't hit those targets by advertising to one person per account.
Always-On Versus Signal-Triggered Channels
McArthur's framework for channel selection is refreshingly practical. She thinks about it as a matrix: what are the goals at each stage, and which channels help achieve them?
Some channels stay always-on. "Advertising, for me, is always on. We're dynamically progressing forward and telling the story." Paid search falls into the same bucket, though she suggests prioritizing keywords based on intent signals from target accounts.
Content syndication, on the other hand, gets activated by signals.
Now I can use Demandbase to show the account list and the account showing intent right now; they're actively starting research. That's who I'm going to send over to my content syndication provider.
Stephanie McArthur
This is the operational reality of intent-driven content syndication. You're not blasting assets to everyone who might fit your ICP. You're identifying accounts that are actively researching relevant topics and meeting them with content precisely when they're looking for it.
The distinction matters for budget allocation. Always-on channels build awareness and keep your brand in the consideration set. Signal-triggered channels capture demand when it surfaces. Running both without coordination is how marketing teams burn budget while sales complains about lead quality.
The Pipeline-First Mindset
What struck me most about McArthur's session was the consistent focus on pipeline, not impressions, not engagement scores, not MQLs. Pipeline.
This aligns with what Demandbase has been pushing in their buying group operationalization work: the shift from lead-based models to engagement-based scoring across the entire buying group. It's not about whether one person downloaded a whitepaper. It's about whether the account is showing collective buying signals that warrant sales attention.
The B2BMX Summer Camp session McArthur led in July focused on separating proven AI use cases in ABM from overhyped promises. The same skepticism applies to advertising metrics. Vanity metrics feel good in quarterly reviews. Pipeline metrics determine whether you keep your job.
What This Means for Your Advertising Strategy
If you're running account-based advertising in 2026, McArthur's framework suggests a few immediate actions.
First, audit your buying group coverage. Are you reaching multiple roles within target accounts, or are you over-indexed on one persona? The data exists to answer this question. If you're not looking at it, you're flying blind.
Second, match your refresh cadence to your campaign type. One-to-many campaigns can run longer. One-to-one campaigns need active management. If you're treating both the same way, you're either over-investing in broad campaigns or under-investing in personalized ones.
Third, build your channel matrix. Know which channels stay always-on and which get triggered by intent signals. Content syndication, in particular, becomes far more effective when you're sending assets to accounts that are actively researching, not just accounts that fit your firmographic criteria.
Finally, tie everything back to pipeline. Engagement is a leading indicator, but pipeline is the outcome that matters. If your advertising can't show influence on pipeline creation and acceleration, you're running a brand campaign and calling it ABM.
Marketing is like dating, as I've said before. You don't propose on the first ad impression. But you also don't keep sending flowers to someone who's already married to a competitor. The buying group approach ensures you're courting the right people, at the right accounts, with the right message. And that's how advertising actually drives revenue.
