by The World Cup is in its business end and half time in games has shown real time tactical nous in action. What’s H2 looking like B2B Tech brands? A nudge here, an adjustment there, and just clever marketing to set the tone for the brand.
Half time isn’t the end of anything. It’s the one moment to step off the pitch, look honestly at the first 45, and change the one thing that isn’t working before it’s too late for it to matter. Does marketing and brand relevance scores have a half time built into its calendar? Is anything being tracked other than performance CTR and case study downloads?
Here’s what happens when you don’t: Gartner’s 2026 CMO data found 84% of companies are stuck in what they call a brand “doom loop” — underfunded measurement, unclear impact, tighter budgets next cycle, repeat. Confidence in even hitting basic brand awareness goals dropped from 57% to 49% this year. Nobody planned to end up there and none stopped to check either.
Not where you are. It’s where you want to be.
Where you sit could determine what your half-time move actually looks like. If you’re a legacy or industrial player whose core offering has quietly become AI-led, then the story hasn’t caught up. The small tweak is a signal of a bold move that tells the market you’ve actually shifted. If you’re an established SaaS brand bolting AI onto an existing product, the feature ships fine. But the brand lingers in obscurity. If your funnel metrics look fine but keep getting more expensive to defend, that’s the doom-loop stat again — Gartner’s data shows awareness and conversion now eat up 62.6% of media spend, up over 10% since 2024, while everything that builds long-term preference has fallen 29%. Performance is just running on a tank nobody’s refilling.
And if you’re a newer AI-native entrant, you’re playing a game of technical claims that sound identical, so the brand argument is the only one left to make. None of them are on the same clock, either. H1 in India doesn’t close till September; most of the Western market just walked off the pitch a few weeks ago. Half time lands at a different point on each calendar. It doesn’t change the adjustment, just changes the runway you’ve got left to make before it’s too late in the season to matter.
Staying Clear
This isn’t an argument for a rebrand and a big swing mid-season. Half-time adjustments work precisely because they’re small — one substitution, one sharper way of saying the thing you already do.
B2B Tech at Cannes with a story to tell
B2B usually turns up to Cannes to watch beer and car brands take the big prizes home. Not this year. SKF — a company that sells industrial bearings, about as commodity as commodity gets — won the Creative B2B Grand Prix with an actual space program, built to dramatize a belief in “frictionless work.” GoDaddy won its first-ever Lion on its first-ever entry, casting Walton Goggins to front a fake eyewear brand as a way of introducing its AI tool, Airo. And Anthropic’s Claude took the Film Grand Prix for a campaign built entirely around refusing to run ads — brand-as-differentiator, argued in public, against a direct competitor.
If any of this has been sitting at the back of your mind since H1 closed, happy to just talk it through.
