Welcome to the first issue of The Marketing Lab.
This newsletter exists because marketing changes faster than most playbooks do.
Every issue, I’ll break down experiments, campaigns, trends, and ideas that are actually moving the needle and separate them from the recycled advice that somehow survives every algorithm update.
Let’s start with something impossible to ignore.
B2B tech companies have suddenly discovered humour.
Not the occasional April Fool’s campaign. Actual comedy. Skits. Mockumentaries. Creator-style videos.
Companies that used to produce webinars and gated PDFs are now producing content that looks suspiciously like what creators have been doing for years.
The obvious question is: why now?
Observation
For years, the B2B playbook looked like this:
- Produce a 50-page report.
- Put it behind a lead form.
- Generate MQLs.
It worked because information was scarce. Today, information is effectively free.
Anyone can create blog posts, whitepapers, buying guides, industry reports, “ultimate” ebooks, thought leadership articles.
Large language models didn’t kill content marketing. They commoditised content production.
Your prospect no longer needs to read your 47-page PDF. They can upload it to ChatGPT or Claude and ask, “Summarise the five most important insights.” Thirty seconds later, they’re done.
The scarcity shifted. Information became abundant. Attention became scarce.
And when attention becomes scarce, marketers start competing differently.
Exhibit A: Slack
In 2014, Slack launched one of the most influential B2B software videos ever made.
The video wasn’t a product demo. It wasn’t a feature walkthrough either. It was essentially an office comedy sketch about the chaos of email, Dropbox, text messages and scattered communication.
At the time, that was almost heretical in B2B software marketing.
The result? 1.45 million YouTube views on the original upload, 3.58 million views on the later re-upload, thousands of likes and shares, and one of the most memorable software launches of the last decade. People still reference the campaign more than a decade later.
The genius wasn’t the humour itself. It was that every office worker immediately recognised themselves in the problem.
The joke wasn’t random. The joke was the pain point.
Exhibit B: ServiceNow
Enterprise software companies have historically been terrified of personality. Professional meant serious. Serious meant boring.
ServiceNow appears to disagree. Over the last few years, they’ve increasingly leaned into creator-style videos, celebrity partnerships, lighter tones and humour-driven campaigns instead of relying exclusively on reports and webinars.
More interestingly, they publicly shared some of the results: a 30% increase in leads among audiences exposed to the campaign, and a 9% lift in aided brand awareness.
Those are numbers finance teams understand.
The lesson: humour isn’t replacing demand generation. It’s improving the efficiency of attention capture.
Exhibit C: The next generation of B2B
Companies like Swarmia are producing content that feels far closer to creators than traditional B2B brands.
The objective is to earn a place in feeds dominated by creators and entertainment. Because that is the actual competitive set now. You’re not competing against another whitepaper. You’re competing against LinkedIn creators, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, podcasts, memes, and everything else on the internet.
Why humour works
Humour is a pattern interrupt.
Most B2B messaging sounds something like this: “Accelerate business outcomes through AI-powered workflow orchestration.”
Your buyers have seen variations of that sentence thousands of times. Their brains have become extremely efficient at ignoring it.
Humour forces attention. Surprise creates attention. Attention creates memory. Memory creates consideration.
The best B2B humour also creates something even more valuable: recognition. The buyer watches and thinks, “That happened in our company last week.”
That’s not entertainment. That’s positioning.
But does it convert?
This is where marketers become sceptical. Views don’t pay salaries. Pipeline does.
The answer is yes, with an important caveat.
Humour is exceptional at solving top-of-funnel problems: reach, recall, brand affinity, shareability, lower acquisition costs.
What humour doesn’t replace: product education, sales conversations, proof points, case studies.
The winning formula increasingly looks like this. Humour earns attention. Education builds trust. Sales converts demand.
The companies winning today aren’t replacing expertise with entertainment. They’re using entertainment to earn the right to deliver expertise.
Actionables
1. Turn customer frustrations into content. Bad approval processes. Procurement delays. Meeting overload. The six-person email chain. These are usually better content ideas than your product features.
2. Make the audience the hero of the joke. Punch up at bureaucracy. Punch up at processes. Never punch down at customers.
3. Separate attention content from conversion content. A skit doesn’t need to close the deal. It needs to earn the next click.
4. Stop asking whether content feels professional. Ask whether it feels memorable. Those are increasingly different questions.
Lab Notes
The rise of humour in B2B marketing isn’t just chasing a creative trend. It is an economic response.
When information becomes cheap, attention becomes expensive.
The companies that win over the next decade probably won’t create more content than everyone else. They’ll create content people voluntarily choose to watch.