7 Lessons from Award-Winning B2B Campaigns in 2025
- catlinpuhkan
- Jan 5
- 4 min read
The UK’s B2B Marketing Awards 2025 is an annual celebration recognising excellence in business-to-business marketing, spotlighting campaigns and teams that deliver both creativity and measurable commercial results.
Here are the key highlights and practical lessons from the award-winning campaigns.
1. Use Creativity to Drive Growth
The strongest signal from the 2025 winners is that creativity is no longer an aesthetic layer on top of strategy. It is the strategy.
As Lina Vaz, Senior Editor at Propolis, writes in the introduction to the Winners Report:
“The best marketers today aren’t just outstanding storytellers or brand custodians — they’re growth architects, shaping the future of their organisations with creativity, precision and accountability.”
This is visible in campaigns like Multiverse’s omnichannel programme, which used surreal, humorous visuals to challenge AI scepticism, or Ericsson’s ‘Make it Memorable’, which humanised 5G infrastructure through humour and spectacle.
Lesson for B2B marketers:
Creativity must carry meaning, not just look distinctive.
Example: Ericsson
Following the initial excitement and strong uptake of 5G, Ericsson began to experience a slowdown in network investment from its Communications Service Providers (CSPs), despite the technology’s vast potential for further monetisation. In 2024, the year of the Olympics and the Euros, they launched a Make it Memorable campaign designed to showcase future use cases on a global stage.
Example: Multiverse
Multiverse’s quirky creative purposely adopted playful, ‘misunderstood’ visuals (for example, a fish wearing a robotic fin to signify ‘fin-tech’) to highlight the dangers of poorly directed AI. This meant we could present Multiverse to FS organisations as the antidote to vague, intangible AI talk.
2. Design the Buyer Journey, Not Just a Media Plan
Award-winning campaigns consistently treated omnichannel as a connected experience, not a checklist of channels.
In the Gold-winning Multiverse campaign, the B2B Marketing Awards Judging Panel commented:
“The strategy was unconventional and differentiated, using omnichannel not simply to communicate, but to create a dynamic, responsive experience that adapted to the audience.”
OOH outside financial services HQs triggered digital retargeting, which fed personalised content hubs and sales outreach. Each step was intentional, sequential, and measurable.
Lesson for B2B marketers:
Stop planning channels in isolation. Every touchpoint should answer one question: what should the buyer understand, feel, or do next?
3. Use AI To Tell Stories
AI featured heavily in the 2025 winners — but the strongest work didn’t talk about AI. It demonstrated it.
KPMG’s Gold-winning “It’s Time for AI-X” campaign impressed the judges precisely because of this. The Judging Panel noted:
“This campaign is a sophisticated, well-targeted digital experience that showcases KPMG’s leadership in AI-powered customer experience.”
Instead of publishing another AI thought leadership piece, KPMG sent AI-generated, fully personalised videos to named decision-makers — each video built from the recipient’s own CX data.
Lesson for B2B marketers:
Use the technology inside the experience itself, not just inside the messaging.
KPMG used cutting-edge AI tools to create a bespoke campaign designed to engage 50 key stakeholders with personalised videos that bring the 2024 CEE report to life. Stakeholders were also invited to The AI-X Hour, exclusive one-hour sessions with KPMG experts where they could dig into tailored insights that would unlock high-value opportunities to enhance their CX strategy.
4. Use content to build relationships
The most commercially powerful content initiatives were relationship builders.
Capgemini’s Cloud Realities, Real Relationships podcast barely mentions Capgemini at all. Instead, it creates space for senior leaders to speak about cloud, AI and leadership.
According to the B2B Marketing Awards Judging Panel:
“This campaign demonstrates strong alignment with business goals through its innovative approach of using a client-focused podcast as a relationship-building platform.”
Lesson for B2B marketers:
If your content exists primarily to talk about you, it will struggle. Award-winning content creates social gravity: pulling the right people into conversations that sales teams can continue.
5. Build Campaigns on Deep Customer Insight
grenke’s “New Lease of Life” campaign started with a nationwide SME survey that exposed distrust, confusion and emotional resistance to leasing.
The Judging Panel highlighted this clearly:
“Data played a central role, informing a strategic reset, credible audience segmentation and clearly defined objectives based on robust external research.”
Lesson for B2B marketers:
Insight is not a slide in the deck. It’s an operating system. When insight shapes product language, sales enablement, and onboarding, marketing becomes a core business function, not merely a promotional activity.
6. Emotional Approach Works Even in ‘Serious’ B2B
From biometric experiments measuring emotional attachment to mobile phones, to the Hi-Vis Stress Vest highlighting mental health in construction, emotional clarity ran through many winning campaigns.
Reflecting on SquareTrade’s PR-winning campaign, the Judging Panel said:
“The use of a world-first biometric experiment transformed the typically ‘boring’ perception of insurance into something engaging and emotionally resonant.”
This campaign made complexity human.
Example: Square Trade
This campaign wasn’t a traditional product ad. Instead, it used biometric research to reveal people’s emotional connection to their devices — how smartphones and tablets are emotionally valued like heirlooms or personal artefacts, not just tech hardware.
Example: Hi-Vis Stress Vest
St John Ambulance has launched the Hi Vis Stress Vest to encourage a more open conversation about mental health at work. Nearly a third of construction workers we surveyed describe their current state as “struggling”, “overwhelmed” or “suicidal”, while 82% say they’ve suffered with a mental health challenge at some point in their career in the trade.
Lesson for B2B marketers:
Your buyers are not rational machines. They are humans making high-risk decisions under pressure. Emotional clarity — not emotional excess — is what cuts through.
7. Conclusion: Commercial Impact Is Now Part of the Creative Brief
The clearest signal from the 2025 winners is this: commercial impact is no longer a downstream KPI.
As Lina Vaz, Senior Editor at Propolis, concludes in the report:
“Commercial growth is no longer just the outcome of great B2B marketing — it’s an integral part of the creative brief.”
