Five Takeaways for B2B Marketers From OX9

1. AI will amplify your strengths, but it will also expose your gaps.

In her session, “The Next Era of Advertiser Demand: How We Got Here and What AI Changes Next,” Rebecca Kitchens, former president of Informa TechTarget, compared the current AI moment to the early internet era. The opportunity is enormous, but so is the disruption — as the adage goes, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” 

While AI can certainly make content creation, segmentation, personalization and buyer education faster, it can also make weak data architecture, inconsistent taxonomies, shallow audience understanding and generic content even more obvious. If the underlying data is fragmented, if users are not correctly mapped to accounts, if content is not tagged meaningfully, AI will not magically fix the problem. It will scale the confusion.

Kitchens emphasized the importance of backend data investments as a commercial advantage, including a single view of the user and account (necessary to establish a strong foundation for ABM), standardized fields across brands, user-to-company mapping, content taxonomies and performance metrics tied to behavior and monetization. 

Before asking what AI can automate, ask what your data can actually support. AI rewards organizations with clean, connected, contextual audience intelligence, but everyone else risks building faster workflows on shaky ground.

2. Trusted content is becoming more valuable, not less.

One of the most interesting tensions at OX9 was the decline of traditional site traffic versus the rising value of trusted content. This is a tension that modern B2B marketers are all too familiar with.

Bobit Business Media VP of Product Zainub Sareea explained how her company built Ask BiBi, an AI assistant trained on 65 years of Bobit content. As Sareea stressed, the point was not to bolt AI onto the business, but to turn decades of human-written editorial expertise into a knowledge product that could answer audience questions directly and generate new insight into what users need.

That shift matters for marketers because it reframes the traffic problem. If users are getting answers from AI systems, search summaries or on-site assistants, page views alone will not capture the full value of content. As Sareea stated, the challenge is that your content answers your audience's questions, but you’re not getting the credit for it. Through building Ask BiBi, Sareea’s team was able to gather data behind conversations that GA4 wasn’t capturing: What are people asking, what does that reveal about intent, and how can those conversations create better audience experiences and advertiser value?

The line that really stuck with me is: “Content is no longer king; trusted content is king.” In other words, generic content will become easier to ignore, while distinct, expert-led, human-written, deeply useful content will become more defensible, more discoverable and more valuable.

That is especially important as AI search and answer engines elevate certain sources over others. As Kitchens noted in her session, trusted voices are getting stronger in AI environments, with a small number of domains commanding a large share of AI citations. 

3. Audience growth is no longer about “more is more.”

The old audience growth playbook was built around scale — growing your list, increasing traffic, capturing more leads and building larger segments. 

At OX9, the more compelling message was that audience growth now depends on precision. During the “Audience Growth: Rethinking the Traditional Playbook” session led by Golden Peak Media CEO David Saabye and Mansueto Ventures VP of Product Chrissie Lamond, the takeaway was direct: Lose the fantasy that more is always more. The right audience matters more than the biggest audience. 

That theme also appeared in discussions about events. In “The Future of Events Is Personal,” Questex Group President Rhiannon James and Clarion CDO Narisa Wild emphasized that personalization is now table stakes as event attendees are becoming more ruthless with their time. With tight budgets, the challenges of AI/tech integration, geopolitical tension and economic volatility, people are genuinely asking, “Is this worth being out of the office?” If your event audience is smaller than in previous years, you don’t necessarily need to panic as long as you have the right people there.

For marketers, that question applies far beyond events. Every webinar, newsletter, report, podcast, article and nurture sequence now has to justify the audience’s attention. Broad personalization is not enough. The opportunity is to combine declared intent with behavioral data: what someone said they planned to do, what they actually did and what that gap reveals. 

4. Advertiser value has to move beyond the lead.

B2B marketers know the lead is not the finish line, but too many measurement models still treat it that way.

OX9 repeatedly surfaced a more nuanced view of advertiser value. Kitchens noted that delivering good leads is not enough because campaign value and renewal often depend on what happens after the lead is delivered. 

That is a critical point for any marketer responsible for proving ROI. A campaign can generate leads and still fail commercially if the follow-up is weak, the account context is missing, the buyer intent is misunderstood, or the advertiser cannot connect the engagement to meaningful pipeline movement.

Several sessions pointed toward richer value models: audience behavior in relation to high-value content, user-to-company mapping, content taxonomies tied to commercial targets, intent-based segmentation, and performance metrics that show where intervention can yield greater monetization. 

In the "Market Spotlight" with Farm Journal CEO Prescott Shibles and A Media Operator Founder Jacob Donnelly, Shibles described the importance of understanding the conditions that create change in a market. For Farm Journal, that means using AI to combine demographic data, media preferences, intent data and transactional data to better understand why someone buys or doesn’t buy. 

Advertiser value cannot be based solely on lead volume — you must consider buyer context, market timing, intent signals and the ability to show how marketing helps create or accelerate real opportunity.