Uphoff on Media Podcast

Uphoff on Media Podcast

B2B Is Redesigning Everything. The Customer Still Isn't in the Room

13 min · 13 mei 2026
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Beschrijving

There is a room I keep walking into. The faces change. The industry changes. The agenda changes. But the missing person is always the same. The customer isn’t there. I recently sat with a group of senior Procurement executives. Smart, experienced operators redesigning their workflows for the agentic AI era. The conversation was serious, these were executives working through real transformation. What processes should be automated. What decisions should remain human. How supplier engagement models need to evolve. But something kept nagging at me. The SaaS platform vendors their organizations depend on, the systems of record for procurement, sourcing, supplier management, kept appearing in the conversation as obstacles, not enablers. The Procurement teams were clearly articulating what they needed these platforms to do. New agentic AI features. Workflow modifications. Integration changes. And the vendors kept saying no. Not with technical explanations. Not with roadmap visibility. With the soft, faintly condescending resistance of organizations that don’t quite understand what their customers are asking for, or why. The vendors weren’t blocking transformation out of bad faith. They were blocking it because they don’t deeply understand how Procurement actually works. That’s a different and more troubling problem. You can fix bad faith. You can’t easily fix institutional ignorance dressed up as process. Then I offered a reframe that landed hard. Throughout the entire discussion — the workflow redesign, the AI feature debates, the vendor friction — not once had anyone mentioned the people this function actually exists to serve. The internal stakeholders. The suppliers. The customers of Procurement. The room didn’t push back. They recognized it immediately. These were experienced operators, they knew exactly what outside-in thinking looked like. They just hadn’t applied it to their own transformation. The problem had pulled them inward, and they’d followed it. That’s how it always happens. Not negligence. Gravity. The Same Disease, Different Organs I’ve been having a parallel conversation with B2B marketing, media, and technology leaders about brand trust. Same room. Same missing person. The data on this is worth sitting with. Studies consistently show that roughly 90% of executives believe their companies are highly trusted by their customers. Customers, when asked, put that number closer to 30%. A 60-point gap. And that gap isn’t a perception problem, a communications problem, or a positioning problem. It is a structural orientation problem. B2B leaders have been building brands, systems, and now AI workflows for themselves. Not for the people they serve. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think it’s the same failure presenting in two different organs. We built a generation of B2B marketers who can optimize a CAC ratio but have never sat with a customer and asked what they actually need. Look at the last twenty years of B2B marketing. What stands out? Not branding. Not the creation of companies that buyers genuinely trust, advocate for, or miss when they’re gone. What stands out is the extraordinary rise of digital marketing, martech, and adtech. The relentless optimization of measurable things. Click rates. Conversion rates. Pipeline velocity. Cost per lead. These tools aren’t the problem. The problem is what happened when they became the entire discipline. When the metric became the mission. When a generation of B2B marketers learned to optimize data but never learned to understand buyers. When the incentive system rewarded what could be measured and quietly penalized what couldn’t: like trust, like brand equity, like the kind of relationship where a customer stays through a bad quarter because they genuinely believe in the company. Brand requires something martech can't deliver: genuine outside-in orientation. Knowing your customer as a human being making high-stakes decisions with real accountability. That got hollowed out. Completely. Faith Popcorn Named It Faith Popcorn wrote something recently that I can't stop thinking about. Faith is one of the sharpest brand thinkers I've ever encountered, and she named something I've been trying to articulate: The Heartbeat Brand. The concept is this: consumers trust brands that measure themselves in life outcomes, not transactions. Brands that show up inside the vulnerable, real moments of a customer’s life, not just at the point of purchase. Brands that ask “what does this person actually need” rather than “how do we move more product”. She writes about Costco launching an IVF program, a warehouse retailer deciding that helping its members have babies is also its business. About the USPS carrier who already stops at every door in America and could become a genuine safety net if someone had the vision to see it. About the 60-point gap between executive confidence in brand trust and what customers actually report, and how that gap is not a perception problem but a strategic blind spot of historic proportions. Her audience is primarily B2C. But the principle lands harder in B2B, where the stakes are higher, the buying decisions more consequential, and the customer has been more systematically ignored. A B2B “Heartbeat Brand” is the vendor that shows up in your worst quarter, not just your best. The platform that redesigns its workflow around how you actually operate, not how the product team imagined it. That’s the standard. And by that standard, B2B as an industry has been failing for a long time. The SaaS Problem Is the Brand Problem Back to the Procurement room. The platform vendors gatekeeping transformation they don’t understand are exhibiting the same failure mode as the B2B marketers who built twenty years of campaigns without deeply knowing their buyers. They sold into Procurement. They deployed into Procurement. They never learned Procurement. That’s not a product problem. It’s a customer orientation problem. And it shows up as friction precisely when it’s most costly; at the moment a customer is trying to evolve, trying to adopt new technology, trying to do the hard work of organizational transformation. If these vendors had developed genuine, operational-level understanding of how Procurement functions, the conversation would be different. How sourcing decisions get made. How supplier relationships are managed. How internal stakeholders experience the process. How the job of a Procurement leader has changed as the function has become more strategic. The features would exist. The roadmap would reflect what customers need. The “no” would come with a real reason or not at all. Instead, the customer is in the room and the vendor isn’t listening. The mirror image of the Procurement team that designs its future workflow without the supplier or stakeholder in the room. It’s inside-out, all the way down. This has always been a risk in enterprise SaaS. But the penalty has historically been manageable: churn is painful, switching costs are real, and inertia protects incumbents longer than it should. Agentic AI changes that calculus entirely. When AI-native tools can replicate and integrate the workflow steps that previously required dedicated point solutions, the switching cost equation inverts. The moat that protected functionally narrow SaaS vendors — “we own this step” — becomes a vulnerability. Vendors who don’t understand the function deeply enough to evolve with it won’t just face difficult renewal conversations. They’ll be architecturally bypassed. Churn in the agentic AI era won't look like churn always has: a lost renewal, a migration project, a transition cost borne by both sides. It will look like a Procurement team that rebuilt its workflow around an AI-native platform and quietly stopped needing four of the tools it was paying for. No dramatic exit. No contentious offboarding. Just a function that evolved, and a vendor that didn't. The vendors who are gatekeeping today are revealing something important: they are not positioned to guide their customers through the agentic AI transition. And their customers are starting to notice. Agentic AI Doesn’t Fix This. It Amplifies It. Here is where urgency enters the conversation. Agentic AI is restructuring workflows at the infrastructure level. Right now, organizations across B2B are redesigning the interest-to-invoice journey. They are making decisions about what gets automated, what stays human, how suppliers are engaged, how buyers are supported, how the entire operating system of B2B commerce gets rebuilt for a world where AI agents execute tasks, not just assist with them. These decisions will be very hard to reverse. You can pull a bad ad campaign. You can reposition a brand. You can’t easily rearchitect a workflow that’s been embedded into your systems of record, your supplier relationships, and your organizational muscle memory. If the customer isn't in the room during that redesign, we don't just build bad workflows. Not when B2B marketers build agentic demand generation without deeply understanding the buyer journey. Not when Procurement leaders design agentic workflows without engaging the suppliers and stakeholders those workflows serve. Not when SaaS vendors build agentic features without operational-level understanding of how their customers actually work. We automate the inside-out orientation. We encode the blind spot at scale. The companies that will compound trust in the agentic AI era are the ones that design outside-in, starting with the customer. The rest will just fail faster. Three Questions Worth Sitting With Faith Popcorn ends her piece with a set of questions she recommends sitting with over a good bourbon. I’ll offer a B2B version. * If your platform, product, or service disappeared tomorrow, would your customers miss it, or just migrate? Not the switching cost. The actual loss. There’s a difference between a product customers are locked into and one they genuinely value. Most B2B leaders don’t know which one they have. * Does your process start with what the customer needs or with what the business has already decided to build? The SaaS vendors blocking Procurement transformation aren’t doing it maliciously. They simply haven’t spent enough time understanding how Procurement actually operates. That’s a choice, even if it doesn’t feel like one. * Who is designing your agentic AI workflows, and who isn’t in the room? This is the most urgent question in B2B right now. The workflows being designed today will shape how buyers experience your brand, how suppliers experience your Procurement function, and how customers experience everything in between for the next decade. If the customer isn’t in that design process, you’re not building the future. You’re automating the past. The gap between what B2B companies think their customers feel about them and what customers actually feel has never been wider. The technology to close that gap has never been more powerful. Neither has the technology to permanently encode it. The question for every B2B leader isn't whether agentic AI changes your business. It does. The question is whether you'll finally put the customer in the room. Or whether you'll do what B2B has done for twenty years, and just do it faster. Put the customer in the room. The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted — by myself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com [https://tonyuphoff.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

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aflevering “I Just Stumbled Across Your Profile and Thought We Should Connect” artwork

“I Just Stumbled Across Your Profile and Thought We Should Connect”

Something has gone wrong with digital networking. It was already broken in 2020. I wrote about it then and the response was significant. Thousands of people read it, shared it, and the engagement was immediate. Hundreds responded with their own stories. Worst LinkedIn outreach messages. Cringe-worthy cold emails. Tales of digital networking gone horribly wrong. Six years later, the problem hasn’t been solved. It’s been industrialized. The clumsy, tone-deaf outreach messages that were already flooding LinkedIn and email in 2020 are now being generated, personalized, and sent at machine scale. The “I just stumbled across your profile” message didn’t go away. It got cloned. Your inbox isn’t receiving one bad pitch from one untrained sales rep. It’s receiving hundreds of AI-generated messages that sound like someone did their homework, reference the right things, use your name correctly, and are indistinguishable from the thousand other messages sent to a thousand other people that same morning. We have a new problem. And it requires a new response. WHAT AI CHANGED The original sin of digital networking was low friction. Before social media and email automation, you had to stop and think before reaching out. You left a voicemail. You got through to an assistant. You ran into someone at an event. Every touchpoint required intention. Digital tools eliminated that friction. Bad habits followed. AI hasn’t fixed the bad habits. It has scaled them. There is now an entire category of sales and marketing technology built around AI outreach. The pitch is seductive. Set it up, define your audience, and let the machine handle the rest. The machine writes the message, personalizes it with data from your LinkedIn profile, and sends it at volume. No human judgment required. The result is an inbox experience that has become one of the defining frustrations of professional life in 2026. Every B2B executive I know describes their LinkedIn DMs and email inbox the same way: exhausting. Most of it AI-generated. Almost none of it relevant. Here is the irony. AI has made outreach technically better and meaningfully worse at the same time. The messages are more grammatically correct. The personalization tokens are populated. The subject lines are optimized. And none of it matters, because the signal that something is real and human and worth paying attention to has been buried under a flood of content that merely impersonates those qualities. WHAT’S ACTUALLY IN YOUR INBOX RIGHT NOW What’s Actually in Your Inbox Right Now The examples from 2020 feel almost quaint now. Here’s the 2026 update. But first, let’s start with the title of this post. “I just stumbled across your profile and thought we should connect.” Literally stumbled. As if they tripped over me in a hallway. Would you walk up to someone at a conference, extend your hand, and say “I just stumbled across you and thought we should meet”? No. You would not. Because it would be bizarre. Yet this line, or some AI-generated variation of it, lands in my inbox multiple times a week. Here are a few more from the last 30 days. I am not making these up. * “Hi Tony, I came across your work at Uphoff Advisory and was really impressed by your perspective on B2B media transformation. I think there’s a real opportunity to connect.” The tell: “B2B media transformation” is lifted verbatim from my LinkedIn headline. No one who had actually read my work would describe it that way. The AI pulled a string of text and dropped it in. Ten seconds of work, zero seconds of thought. * “Tony, given your background leading companies through disruption, I think you’d have a strong take on what we’re building. Worth a 15-minute call?” The tell: “leading companies through disruption” is executive LinkedIn filler. It means nothing and applies to everyone. This message was sent to hundreds of people with the word “Tony” swapped in at the top. * “I noticed we’re both thinking about the future of B2B marketing. Would love to add you to my network.” The tell: No human noticed anything. A prompt noticed it. And “add you to my network” is the language of a database operation, not a relationship. The tell isn’t bad grammar anymore. It’s frictionless competence. Everything is correctly spelled. The personalization tokens are populated. Nothing is real. THE HUMAN SIGNAL HAS NEVER BEEN MORE VALUABLE Here is what the AI networking deluge has actually created: a massive opportunity for people who show up as human. When every inbox is full of AI doing a passable impression of a person, a message that is clearly, demonstrably human stands out completely. Not because it’s more clever. Because it’s real. I’ve spent over 35 years building business relationships. The relationships that have mattered, that have produced partnerships, deals, opportunities, and friendships, have all started with something specific. A shared experience. A direct reference to something I actually wrote or said. A question that only someone paying attention would think to ask. Proof that the other person saw me as a specific human being, not a job title in a database. That specificity is now the rarest thing in professional communication. And scarcity creates value. Look, I get it. After 35 years of leading companies and owning a P&L, I was usually on the receiving end of outreach. People wanted meetings with me. I had the luxury of being selective. That changed when I launched Uphoff Advisory earlier this year. Suddenly I was the one reaching out. Building a client base from scratch. Introducing myself to people who had no reason to take my call. It is hard. It requires research. It requires thought and judgment. It requires, at times, a thick skin. I’m not writing this from a position of someone who has never had to hustle. I’m writing it as someone who knows exactly how difficult genuine outreach is, and who believes that’s precisely the point. The difficulty is a filter. It separates the people who did the work from the people who let a machine do it for them. EIGHT PRACTICES FOR HUMAN-FIRST NETWORKING IN THE AI ERA These aren’t new. Some of them appeared in my 2020 post. What’s new is why they matter more now than they did then. 1. Do the work AI can’t fake. Before reaching out, read something the person actually wrote. Watch a talk they gave. Reference something specific. Not a headline. Not a job title. Something that demonstrates you paid attention. AI can pull data. It can’t demonstrate genuine curiosity. 2. Focus on the right person, not the top person. The myth that you should always reach the CEO has never been more wrong. AI outreach has made senior executive inboxes the most cluttered in any organization. The decision makers who can actually move things forward are often one or two levels down. Find them. Respect their role. 3. Understand what they’re actually trying to get done. Everyone in business has a set of real problems they are working on. Before you reach out, ask yourself: do I actually know what this person is trying to accomplish? If you can answer that clearly and connect it to why you’re reaching out, you have something worth sending. 4. Write the way you’d speak to them in person. Read your message out loud before sending it. If you would never say those words in a meeting or at an event, rewrite it. The test is simple: does this sound like a person, or does it sound like content? 5. Share before you ask. Sending someone a genuinely useful piece of research, a post that directly applies to a challenge they’re facing, or a connection to someone they should know, before making any request, is the most underused practice in B2B networking. It works because it’s real. And almost no one does it anymore. 6. Respect the inbox. Don’t automate follow-ups. Don’t escalate to email when LinkedIn goes unanswered. Don’t add people to sequences without permission. The volume of AI-powered follow-up has made persistence feel like aggression. One well-crafted message is worth more than seven automated ones. 7. Apply the Golden Rule, and mean it. Before you hit send, ask whether you would respond to this message if you received it. Not would someone respond. Would you. If the answer is no, rewrite it or don’t send it. 8. Never convert a new connection into an immediate sales target. When someone accepts your connection request, they have extended a form of professional trust. Responding with an immediate sales pitch converts that trust into a transaction before the relationship has drawn its first breath. It is the digital equivalent of shaking someone’s hand at a networking event and handing them a contract. Worse is what often follows. A pitch, then a follow-up, then another, each escalating in urgency, as if the problem is that the recipient hasn’t yet understood the offer. They understood it. They chose not to respond. Silence is an answer. Respect it. If you want to build a real relationship with a new connection, start by being a useful presence in their feed. Engage with their content. Share something relevant. Earn the conversation before you ask for the meeting. THE BIGGER POINT AI is not the problem with digital networking. The problem is what happens when tools designed to scale human connection are used as a substitute for it. The professionals who will build the best networks in the next five years won’t be the ones with the best AI outreach sequences. They’ll be the ones who understood that when everyone else automated their relationships, genuine human attention became the scarcest and most valuable thing you could offer. Show up as a human. It’s a competitive advantage. The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself. “Uphoff on Media” is published by Tony Uphoff, Founder and Managing Partner of Uphoff Advisory, LLC [https://uphoffadvisory.com/]: a strategic advisory practice for founders, CEOs, and investors in B2B media, marketing, and technology. The businesses that drive business. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com [https://tonyuphoff.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Gisteren10 min
aflevering When Agentic AI Meets the Physical Economy artwork

When Agentic AI Meets the Physical Economy

I was recently asked to speak to the Southern California chapter of the Counselors of Real Estate about the impact AI is having on their industry. The irony hit me the moment I started preparing. The Counselors of Real Estate is one of the most selective professional organizations in the country. Membership requires a minimum of ten years in the commercial real estate business, a 31-page application, and four interviews. Members are expected to be at or near the top of their field. The roughly 900 members nationally and internationally include major commercial property owners, developers, architects, contractors, appraisers, agents, and consultants. Getting admitted is genuinely difficult. Thanks for reading Uphoff on Media! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The talk drew sustained engagement, pointed questions, and requests for follow-up sessions from a room of about 20 of these professionals. That is not a room that nods along out of politeness. Here is what I told them. And what the response confirmed. A note before we start. If you know someone in commercial real estate, please share this post with them. The impact AI is having on the physical economy carries real lessons for those of us who operate in the digital economy too. So even if CRE is not your world, read on. Worlds Colliding To open the discussion, I acknowledged the irony. We were going to talk about the impact of an intangible, Artificial Intelligence, on the ultimate tangible asset. Commercial real estate is land, concrete, steel, and glass. You can walk through it. You can touch it. It generates cash flow you can underwrite and model. It sits at the most physical end of the business spectrum. And it is being reshaped by a technology that exists entirely as math. That irony is not unique to CRE. It is the defining tension of the next decade of business. Agentic AI is colliding with the physical economy. Industries organized around tangible assets, physical workflows, and on-the-ground operations are encountering a technology that restructures the knowledge work wrapped around those assets faster than most operators in those industries currently realize. This is a theme I will return to on Uphoff on Media: When Agentic AI Meets the Physical Economy. The industries I see most impacted include commercial real estate, logistics and warehousing and manufacturing. Not in any fixed sequence. When the data, the moment, or a conversation like the one I had with the Counselors of Real Estate makes the case for the next one, I will write it. The thesis underneath all of it: the conventional wisdom about which industries are protected because they deal in physical assets is wrong. Not because physical assets do not matter. Because the knowledge work organized around those assets is being substituted, not enhanced. And that distinction changes everything. Lets start with CRE. First: the AI distinction that actually matters There is an enormous amount of coverage of AI in the general media right now. Most of it is focused on Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. That technology is useful. I use it every day. But the impact of Generative AI will be dwarfed by what comes next. Generative AI is reactive. You prompt it, it produces something. You ask it to summarize a lease abstract, draft a tenant response, produce a market overview. It waits for you at every step. It does not plan. It does not pursue goals. It does not act without you directing it. Agentic AI is goal-directed. You give it an objective and it figures out how to achieve it. It can browse the web, query databases, analyze documents, send communications, make decisions within defined parameters, and loop back to refine its own work. All without a human directing every step. The practical difference is not incremental. Wired into the right data sources, an Agentic AI system can be told: pull every industrial property in a 50-mile radius of Phoenix that has traded in the last 18 months from our CoStar and county recorder feeds, flag the assets with the steepest pricing moves, and draft a ranked memo on each one with the supporting comps attached. That is achievable today for a firm with the right data access wired in. The next layer, having the agent independently infer buyer identity and capital source where it is not disclosed, and reason about institutional capital flows behind a transaction, is harder and less reliable right now. It is also coming fast. Either way, the work runs overnight. The output is waiting in the morning. That is not an enhancement to the analyst function. For many firms, it replaces significant portions of it. These systems exist today and are being deployed in financial services, legal, logistics, and healthcare. They are coming to commercial real estate. In some forward-leaning firms, they are already here. The frame that will mislead you Before getting into the CRE data, there is a conceptual point worth establishing. Because how you think about this technology will determine how you respond to it. Almost every technology you have adopted in your career has been additive. It added a capability you did not have before without replacing what you were already doing. CRM systems. Email. Excel. CoStar. DocuSign. Zoom. In every case, the broker still brokered. The deal still closed because a human being with judgment, relationships, and accountability made it happen. Technology made that person faster, better informed, more organized. It did not replace them. That is the frame most operators bring to every new technology. When something new shows up, the instinct is to ask: what does this add? Where does it fit my existing workflow? That instinct will mislead you with Agentic AI. Substitutive technologies do not add to the existing workflow. They replace significant portions of it. The printing press did not improve the scribal system. It made scribes obsolete. The automobile did not augment horse-drawn carriages. It eliminated the carriage industry within a generation. The internet did not enhance physical retail, classified advertising, and travel agencies. It dismantled them. Across every technology disruption I have observed and led businesses through, intelligent and experienced professionals consistently underestimate substitutive change. Because their mental model is calibrated to a world where the core activity survives every technology wave. They look for the additive angle. They optimize the existing workflow. And by the time the substitutive reality becomes undeniable, the window for strategic advantage has already closed. Two stories running at the same time The AI story in commercial real estate is not one story. It is two very different stories running simultaneously, in different asset classes, on different timelines. Story one: AI as a massive demand driver. Data centers are the hottest asset class in commercial real estate right now, and AI is the primary engine. Jones Lang LaSalle projects that roughly 100 gigawatts of new data center capacity will come online between 2026 and 2030. That equates to $1.2 trillion in real estate asset value creation. CBRE’s 2026 Data Center Outlook puts it in sharper relief: preleasing rates on capacity now under construction are running in the mid-70% range, against a historical norm of 40% to 50%. That is not developers betting on demand. It is demand that is already under contract before the building exists. This sector is not demand-constrained. It is power-constrained. The ability to deliver 300-megawatt-plus power capacity in under 36 months has eclipsed fiber connectivity as the dominant site selection factor. Power is the new location variable. Utility relationships, behind-the-meter solutions, and powered land are driving investment decisions in ways that would have been unrecognizable to this industry five years ago. Data center construction has now surpassed office construction in the United States. If you own or manage industrial, flex, or large-footprint suburban assets, the conversation about data center conversion is a strategic question. Not a speculative one. Story two: AI as a potential demand destroyer. In Q1 2026, AI companies accounted for 22.7% of all office leasing across major US technology markets, per CBRE. That is 11.5 million square feet of demand from a tenant category that barely existed five years ago. In San Francisco, a market many wrote off, AI tenants have absorbed large blocks of Class A space that sat dark through the post-pandemic years. And yet. The same technology driving that demand is automating the entry-level workforce those companies hired into that space. As AI takes on the analytical, coordination, and processing work done by associates and junior staff, the companies currently expanding their footprint may need significantly less space per employee going forward. The signal is already visible. Meta eliminated 8,000 employees while simultaneously raising its 2026 data center budget to between $125 billion and $145 billion. Read that again. This is not a typo. It says $125b-to-$145b. That is the shape of the AI economy: fewer people, more infrastructure. The office opportunity is real but concentrated. The best buildings in the strongest markets with genuine amenity differentiation will capture AI-company tenants. The rest of the market faces the same structural headwinds it has navigated since 2020. AI may accelerate those headwinds rather than relieve them. What AI is doing inside CRE operations The productivity gains in underwriting and analytics are already measurable. Work that took analyst teams days is being completed in minutes. Rent roll analysis, lease abstract review, and market comps screening are being automated at speed across the industry’s leading firms. Morgan Stanley Research found that 37% of tasks currently performed by REITs and commercial real estate firms can be automated. That represents potential efficiency gains of $34 billion by 2030. A self-storage operator has already cut on-property labor hours by 30% through AI-powered staffing optimization. Morgan Stanley's research goes further: brokerage and services firms have the highest automation potential of any CRE sub-sector, with a possible 34% increase in operating cash flow, precisely because they are furthest along in adopting AI tools at scale. The capital markets priced the risk directly. In February 2026, shares of CBRE and JLL each fell 12% on AI disruption concerns. Cushman & Wakefield dropped 14%. The largest single-day drops for those firms since COVID. Investors were asking a specific question about how much of what the major brokerages do can be automated. The correct answer is: not all of it. The relationship-intensive, judgment-dependent, contextually complex work of CRE is genuinely resistant to AI substitution. Complex transactions require human accountability. Significant deals require human trust. That does not go away. But the analytical and administrative infrastructure supporting those transactions is a different story. And that infrastructure is significant cost and significant headcount. The agentic frontier adds another layer. Leading firms are already planning for AI systems to handle routine lease monitoring, portfolio reporting, tenant communication workflows, and initial screening. The broker of the future is a judgment and relationship layer built on top of AI infrastructure. Not an information gatherer. Eight recommendations Download this image to share with your team or keep as a reference. 1. Get your data house in order first. Agentic AI is only as good as the data it can access. Fragmented, inconsistent, or siloed information will limit effective deployment. Run an audit of where your critical portfolio and operational data actually lives, whether it is accessible, and whether it is structured. This is the unglamorous prerequisite. Most firms are not ready. 2. Start with underwriting and analytics. This is the highest-ROI entry point for most CRE operations. Pilot AI tools in due diligence and underwriting workflows before touching anything client-facing or relationship-intensive. Build confidence in the output quality and develop institutional knowledge before expanding. 3. Redesign roles, not just workflows. The instinct is to bolt AI onto existing job descriptions. The strategic move is to ask what each role is actually for. Analysts become AI system directors. Property managers become exception handlers and relationship escalation points. Leasing teams become closers rather than initial contact points. This requires deliberate organizational design. Not just a software subscription. 4. Evaluate your portfolio for data center conversion potential. If you own or manage industrial, flex, or large-footprint suburban office assets, run a rigorous feasibility assessment focused on power access and fiber infrastructure. Not every asset qualifies. Missing it where it does is a significant opportunity cost. The positioning window is open now. 5. Identify and protect your high-value human functions. Relationship-intensive, judgment-dependent, contextually complex work is genuinely resistant to AI substitution. Name it explicitly. Invest in it. Do not let efficiency pressure lead you to automate or understaff the functions that AI cannot replace. These are your competitive moat. 6. Assign someone to track this full-time. AI in CRE is moving fast enough that passive monitoring is not sufficient. Someone in your organization, or a trusted external advisor, needs to be continuously tracking developments, evaluating tools, and connecting AI capabilities to your specific business model. This is a core operational function now. Not a side project. 7. Think in the 18-to-36-month window. The early majority of Agentic AI adoption in CRE arrives in the next 18 to 36 months. Pilot programs launched this year become institutional knowledge and workflow advantage by 2027. Waiting until the technology is fully mature means starting from zero when the competitive landscape has already shifted. 8. Do not let perfect be the enemy of deployed. Imperfect early adoption builds organizational learning. Waiting for certainty means starting from scratch at the moment of maximum competitive pressure. Five trends to keep on your radar * Power infrastructure as the new location variable. Sites capable of delivering 300 MW-plus in under 36 months are being repriced. Land near utility substations deserves a serious second look. * AI-driven lease negotiation and management agents. Early deployments are underway. Know what your counterparties are using before it appears across the table from you. * Automated property management. AI-managed maintenance scheduling, tenant communications, and facilities optimization are compressing operating costs. Underwriting assumptions built on today’s expense ratios need revisiting. * Synthetic market intelligence. AI-generated market data is beginning to compete with traditional data providers on speed and accessibility. The quality gap is closing faster than most operators in this space currently realize. * The AI immunity trade in capital markets. Institutional capital is distinguishing between AI-vulnerable and AI-resistant asset classes. Physical, power-intensive, infrastructure-grade assets are being repriced as scarce in an AI economy. This is a structural tailwind for the right CRE positions. If you understand which ones qualify. The bigger pattern CRE is where I’m starting because the irony is sharpest here. The most tangible asset class in the economy, being reshaped by the most intangible technology. But the pattern underneath it is not unique to real estate. Across the physical economy, the same dynamic is playing out. Knowledge work automation is hitting industries organized around physical operations. The analytical layers, the data processing, the document workflows, the coordination functions: these are being substituted by Agentic AI regardless of whether the underlying business deals in steel, logistics, farmland, or square footage. The professionals who navigate this best will not be the ones who waited for the story to be fully written. They will be the ones who made a clear-eyed assessment of what their work actually consists of, identified what is genuinely substitutable and what is not, and repositioned their value toward the judgment, relationships, and contextual intelligence that no AI system can replicate. That assessment is hard to make from inside an industry. It requires the right frame. I will return to this theme. The next industry I cover in this thread will likely be logistics and warehousing: a sector that is simultaneously the infrastructure layer for the AI economy and a primary target of its most aggressive automation. The tension is different from CRE. The urgency is higher. But I will get there when the moment is right. If there is an industry in the physical economy you would like to see covered, let me know in the comments. The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself. “Uphoff on Media” is published by Tony Uphoff, Founder and Managing Partner of Uphoff Advisory, LLC [https://uphoffadvisory.com/]: a strategic advisory practice for founders, CEOs, and investors in B2B media, marketing, and technology. The businesses that drive business. Thanks for reading Uphoff on Media! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com [https://tonyuphoff.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

22 jun 202619 min
aflevering The B2B Event Market Is Splitting in Two artwork

The B2B Event Market Is Splitting in Two

Part 3 of B2B Media in the Machine Age A note on timing: This post is publishing on a Friday, a break from our usual Monday/Wednesday cadence. The reason is a good one. I'll be back Monday with a piece that came directly out of a presentation I gave this week to a commercial real estate leadership group. I was invited to speak on agentic AI and its impact on commercial real estate, and it clarified something important about where agentic AI is starting to reshape the physical economy. See you Monday. A few weeks ago, Apollo Global Management announced it was acquiring Emerald Holding for approximately $1.5 billion, a 42.1% premium, and simultaneously acquiring Questex, with the intention of combining the two into a platform of roughly 160 B2B events. The deal is the largest private equity bet on B2B events in years. Apollo’s rationale was stated plainly: “As AI and digital tools rapidly expand the ways professionals connect and share information, they are simultaneously elevating the value of trusted, in-person gatherings, where industries come together to do business, build relationships, and make consequential decisions.” That is either a very smart thesis or a very expensive rationalization. I've been involved in the B2B events market for most of my career: as a CEO, as a producer and operator who has built and run hundreds of events, including major technology trade shows. What I see happening right now is not a bull market in B2B events. It is a structural bifurcation. And the M&A activity, far from being a sign that the whole category is healthy, is actually a trailing indicator of a market in the middle of a painful sorting process. Let me explain what I mean. The Bull Case Is Real, But Incomplete Start with the data that supports the optimists. The U.S. B2B trade show market exceeded $15.78 billion in 2024 and is projected to surpass $17.3 billion by 2028. The post-COVID recovery in live events has been genuine. Eighty-three percent of marketing decision-makers expect marketing investments to grow in 2026. According Content Marketing Institute research, B2B marketers rank in-person events as their most effective content distribution channel, ahead of webinars, email, and social media. Apollo is not wrong that AI is paradoxically making great live events more valuable. When an AI agent can attend a webinar, summarize a panel, and extract every lead from a virtual event in minutes, the irreplaceable asset becomes physical presence in a high-trust, high-context environment. The things that cannot be digitized: the hallway conversation, the dinner where deals actually happen, the moment when a buyer and seller read each other across a table, become more scarce and therefore more valuable. That logic is sound. The problem is that it applies to some events, not to the category as a whole. And institutional capital has a way of buying the category rather than the distinction. The pendulum swung hard toward events, and for good reason. When digital disruption hit B2B media, the path forward wasn’t obvious. Audiences fragmented. Attention scattered. Display and programmatic commoditized everything they touched. Events were the one line that didn’t behave like the rest of the business. They were tangible, defensible, and they made money in a way that felt increasingly rare. At the end of the day, events are a far simpler business. Sell a booth, sell a sponsorship, fill a room. Until they’re not. That retreat into simplicity wasn’t wrong. But it wasn’t a strategy either. It was the path of least resistance in a category that had run out of easy answers everywhere else. And a business built on the path of least resistance tends to get exposed the moment the underlying conditions shift. They’re shifting now. The Bear Case Nobody Is Talking About Look past the headlines and the data tells a more complicated story. Sixty-nine percent of B2B events leaders saw their event budgets stay flat or decrease in 2025. The share of organizers expecting budget growth in 2026 dropped to 40%, down from 70% in 2025, a dramatic deceleration in a single year. And 75% of exhibitors report pressure to reduce exhibit costs, with nearly a third feeling that pressure directly from senior leadership. Meanwhile, the supply side is severely bloated. The past five years produced a proliferation of events across virtually every B2B vertical: many of them launched during the post-COVID bounce when demand was recovering and the bar for a “viable event” was temporarily very low. The market has not yet fully repriced that excess inventory. Here is the question I would ask any P/E investor underwriting a B2B events platform right now: Of those 160 events in the combined Emerald/Questex portfolio: how many are genuine category leaders with defensible market positions and profitable unit economics, and how many are subscale shows competing for the same shrinking pool of mid-market sponsorship dollars? Scale is not a strategy. It is a starting point. And aggregating subscale assets does not automatically produce a premium platform. They produce overhead. The Venue Directory data is telling: in the UK market, total event inquiries declined 4% in 2025, while the average RFP value increased 2%. Fewer companies asking. Bigger commitments from the ones who are. That's not a market in decline. That's a market concentrating around fewer, more serious buyers. Bifurcation, not a boom. The Sorting Is Already Underway Here is what I believe is actually happening, and what I see when I look at the data alongside my own operating experience: The B2B events market is sorting itself into two distinct tiers, and the gap between them is widening. * Tier One: The Category-Defining Show. In most verticals, one or two large-scale trade shows will survive and likely strengthen. These events have established brand equity, dominant market share among exhibitors and attendees, and the network effect that makes them self-reinforcing. If your industry peers are there, you have to be there. Sponsors know it, which is why top-tier sponsorships command premium pricing that smaller shows simply cannot match. The research confirms the logic: a single Tier-1 sponsorship producing 30 ICP-fit meetings outperforms eight Tier-3 sponsorships producing a handful of meetings each. Concentration produces leverage. Spread produces noise. * Tier Two: The Subscale Middle. This is where the pain is happening. Events with a few hundred to a thousand attendees, modest sponsor rosters, undifferentiated programming, and no clear reason for a senior buyer to travel and spend two days away from the office. Many of these events were viable when the market was growing fast enough to carry marginal players. That grace period is over. Planning for large-scale events dropped 12% year over year in 2026, and the budget rationalization happening inside B2B marketing departments is accelerating the winnowing. These events do not need better marketing. They need a fundamentally different model or an exit. What is emerging in the space left by the subscale middle is something altogether different, and it may be the most interesting development in B2B events right now. The Return of the Intimate Event There is a third format quietly gaining traction that does not fit neatly into the traditional event industry model, and it deserves its own analysis. Call it the intimate conference, the executive summit, the hosted roundtable, the closed-door dinner. The format varies, but the defining characteristics are consistent: small by design (25 to 150 attendees), curated ruthlessly, content-rich, and structured specifically to create real buyer-seller engagement in an environment where both parties actually want to be in the room. These are not the scaled-down version of a trade show. They are a fundamentally different product. Sixty-three percent of event organizers report increased demand for micro-events and intimate gatherings. Planning for small, hosted events is up 59% year over year. And the research on why is unambiguous: executives who will not attend a five-hundred-person conference will often accept an invitation to a closed-door peer discussion. The signal-to-noise ratio is entirely different. One trend piece from the events industry captured the format precisely: dinners of twenty-five to thirty carefully selected peers, no stage, no slides, no formal presentations, just honest, peer-level discussion about what is actually working, guided by a respected industry leader. That format reflects a broader shift in what senior buyers actually value when they give up two days of their calendar. The content richness matters as much as the intimacy. The events that are thriving in this format are not networking events with a thin content wrapper. They are substantive: built around real intellectual engagement, genuine industry debate, and a programming philosophy that treats attendees as practitioners, not audiences. The Budget That Moved Here is the insight I have not seen written clearly anywhere, and it changes the economics of the intimate event model significantly. The conventional assumption is that B2B event sponsorship comes from the marketing budget: specifically the events or demand generation line, controlled by the CMO or VP of Marketing. That assumption is increasingly wrong for the intimate conference segment. The high-value, curated event, the executive dinner, the invitation-only summit, the closed-door roundtable, is increasingly funded from field marketing budgets. And field marketing budgets are controlled by sales leaders, not corporate marketing. This matters enormously for several reasons. First, the ROI calculus is different. A sales leader evaluating a $25,000 sponsorship of an intimate roundtable with 40 qualified senior buyers is making a fundamentally different calculation than a CMO evaluating the same investment. The sales leader wants pipeline. The CMO wants brand reach and lead volume. Intimate events are almost perfectly calibrated to the sales leader’s criteria and poorly suited to the CMO’s. When more of the sponsorship dollars for these events comes from field marketing, the events become more durable, because they are being funded by the part of the organization that measures outcomes most directly. Second, field marketing budgets are growing even as corporate marketing budgets flatten. The pressure on CMOs to demonstrate brand-level ROI from events has never been higher. The pressure on sales leaders to find efficient pipeline has never been higher. Intimate, curated events serve both, but they particularly serve sales, which is why the budget is shifting. Third, and most importantly for event operators: this means the buyer for your intimate event sponsorship is often sitting in a different seat than the buyer for your trade show sponsorship. If you are selling intimate event sponsorships the same way you sell trade show booths: to the same contacts, with the same collateral, at the same price points, you are leaving money on the table and probably losing deals you should be winning. What Agentic AI Changes About All of This The Apollo thesis, that AI makes in-person more valuable, not less, is correct in principle. But it is incomplete. The more precise version of the thesis is this: AI makes the right in-person experiences dramatically more valuable, while making the wrong ones far easier to skip. Here is why. When an AI agent can synthesize the proceedings of a three-day conference, extract every relevant insight, identify every vendor worth evaluating, and deliver a crisp briefing document, the value proposition of attending a mediocre event collapses. Why would a senior executive spend two days and several thousand dollars to attend an event whose intellectual output can be captured and distilled by an AI with a quick prompt? The answer is: they will not. And they are already rationalizing their event calendars on exactly this basis. What AI cannot replicate is presence. Physical presence in a room of thirty senior practitioners who are all wrestling with the same problems. The relationship that forms over dinner. The conversation that happens in the fifteen minutes between sessions when two people realize they should be doing business together. The trust that is built when a buyer watches a seller engage honestly with a peer-level challenge rather than defaulting to a pitch. Agentic AI does not threaten those experiences. It actually elevates their scarcity value. But it will ruthlessly expose and accelerate the decline of the events that were always surviving on convenience and inertia rather than genuine value. Takeaways For B2B event operators and producers: Your portfolio strategy needs to reflect the bifurcation, not pretend it does not exist. If you own or operate a Tier-1 show in your vertical, invest aggressively in defending and extending that position. The network effects are real and the window to cement category dominance is narrowing. If you operate subscale events in the middle tier, the question is not how to market your way out. It is whether the event has a genuine reason to exist, and if so, whether it can be repositioned as a premium intimate format rather than a smaller version of a trade show. Those are very different events and require very different operating models. The intimate format is not a budget trade show. It is a distinct product that requires different programming philosophy, different sponsor relationships, different pricing, and often a different internal champion at the sponsor company. For B2B information and media companies: Events are increasingly the one revenue line that AI cannot directly disintermediate. Your content can be summarized. Your newsletters can be replicated. Your SEO can be outranked. Your in-person community cannot be cloned. The strategic imperative is to develop a deliberate events architecture, not a collection of shows, but a portfolio designed around specific audience segments and intentional format choices. The companies that figure out how to build category-defining shows in their verticals, while simultaneously running curated intimate formats for senior practitioner audiences, are creating a defensible revenue model. The ones running a handful of subscale shows alongside declining digital revenues are in a structurally deteriorating position. For P/E investors: The Apollo/Emerald/Questex bet may prove right over time. The thesis is sound. But the execution risk is significant, and the questions worth pressure-testing are: What is the quality distribution within that portfolio of 160 events? How many are genuine Tier-1 category leaders versus subscale assets that are being carried by the platform? What is the plan for the middle tier: rationalization, repositioning, or hope? The more interesting investment thesis in B2B events right now may not be the large-scale consolidation play. It may be the premium intimate format operator who has figured out the field marketing budget unlock, built authentic practitioner communities, and is running events that senior buyers actually want to attend. That is a smaller company, a harder business to find, and a much better risk-adjusted investment. The B2B events market is not dying. But it is splitting into winners and losers faster than most of the institutional capital entering the space appears to understand. The events that survive will do so because they are genuinely irreplaceable: because the experience cannot be synthesized, compressed, or skipped. Everything else is in a slow motion decline that more M&A will not fix. The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself. “Uphoff on Media” is published by Tony Uphoff, Founder and Managing Partner of Uphoff Advisory, LLC [https://uphoffadvisory.com/]: a strategic advisory practice for founders, CEOs, and investors in B2B media, marketing, and technology. The businesses that drive business. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com [https://tonyuphoff.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

19 jun 202617 min
aflevering The Vertical Intelligence Company artwork

The Vertical Intelligence Company

Part 2 of B2B Media in the Machine Age Something significant is being built from the ruins of ad-supported B2B media. Not a replacement for what was lost. Something more valuable and sustainable. Call it the vertical intelligence company. These businesses don’t look much like the B2B media companies that came before them. They’re not chasing page views and declining CPMs. They’re not dependent on programmatic advertising, platform algorithms, or the next trade show cycle. They’re building something that professional buyers, executives, and operators have always needed and rarely had: trusted, domain-specific intelligence that’s hard to find anywhere else, delivered efficiently, priced appropriately, and designed for the way business professionals actually work today. The irony is sharp. The forces that destroyed the old model are the same forces enabling the new one. The Trends That Changed the Market Three structural shifts have converged to create an opening that didn’t exist five years ago. * The professional trust deficit reached a breaking point. Business professionals have always been skeptical of general business media when it comes to decisions that actually matter. But the gap between what general media can deliver and what domain experts actually need has never been wider. When a procurement executive needs to understand how agentic AI is reshaping supplier selection, or when a payments operator needs current intelligence on cross-border settlement, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal are not the answer. They were never the answer. What’s changed is that the alternatives can now be built. * The cost structure for building vertical intelligence collapsed. Proprietary data collection, analysis, content production, distribution, and subscriber management used to require enterprise-scale infrastructure. That’s no longer true. A well-run team of three to five people can now build a meaningful data asset, publish at a professional cadence, reach a targeted professional audience, and manage subscriber relationships, at a fraction of the cost that would have been required a decade ago. The barriers that kept this model the exclusive domain of large research firms like Gartner and Forrester are down. * The monetization stack expanded. The old B2B media model ran on two revenue lines: advertising and events. The vertical intelligence company runs on five or six. Subscriptions. Tiered data access. Benchmarking reports. Sponsored research. Community and membership. Consulting adjacencies. None of these revenue streams is new in isolation. What’s new is the ability to stack them at small-company scale, without the overhead that used to make multi-revenue-line businesses the province of large media conglomerates. The Accelerant: Agentic AI Here is where the story gets interesting for operators and investors paying close attention. The AI moment is broadly understood as a threat to media businesses. That framing is correct for one type of media business. It’s incorrect — and actually inverted — for another. Agentic AI is devastating to commodity information. If your business model depends on aggregating, packaging, and distributing information that can be found elsewhere, AI has already begun to erode that value. Search behavior is changing. Attention is shifting. The traffic model that kept general digital media alive is under structural pressure that will not reverse. But agentic AI amplifies the value of what it cannot replicate: irreplaceable domain expertise, proprietary data, and trusted professional community. A language model can synthesize publicly available information about B2B payments trends. It cannot replace a team with deep relationships inside the payments industry, producing original research, running proprietary surveys, and hosting conversations that shape how practitioners think about the problems in front of them. The vertical intelligence company is structurally positioned to benefit from exactly the shift that is accelerating the decline of general media. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a function of what these businesses are actually built on. What This Looks Like in Practice The model is already operating. You can see it clearly in businesses that have made the transition, whether or not they would describe themselves in these terms. * PYMNTS [https://www.pymnts.com/] is not a payments news site. It’s a payments intelligence company with original data, proprietary research, and direct subscriber relationships. Its value to readers and sponsors comes from domain depth and data, not from traffic volume or display advertising. * Art of Procurement [https://artofprocurement.com/] is not a procurement podcast. It’s a professional intelligence and community platform for procurement leaders, with content, events, benchmarking, and advisory services built around a specific professional audience with real budget authority and unmet intelligence needs. * ThomasNet [https://www.thomasnet.com/?utm_term=thomasnet&utm_campaign=PB%3AG%7CNT%3ASN%7CAN%3AThomasNet%7CCN%3ABranded&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=2612745988&hsa_cam=21280982770&hsa_grp=163774556842&hsa_ad=699105707981&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-316144171195&hsa_kw=thomasnet&hsa_mt=e&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21280982770&gbraid=0AAAAACzAVrtQLB2sUs-QWd7_5k1njpsLG&gclid=Cj0KCQjwi8nRBhDhARIsAHZf_pbfeZFfHVcpoWGe98wWuQYy93aqULynS79pKQUp0Ur1lURnXtnZorcaAhhCEALw_wcB], through its acquisition by Xometry, demonstrated a version of this at industrial scale: a directory and information platform that became a vertical intelligence infrastructure for manufacturing sourcing: embedding data, analytics, and transactional capability into a single professional ecosystem. These businesses share a structure. They have domain expertise that took years to accumulate. They have proprietary data that can’t be replicated by scraping public sources. They have deep, trusted relationships with a specific professional community. And they have multiple ways to monetize all three. The Implications For operators: The question is no longer how to protect ad revenue. It’s whether you have the domain expertise, audience trust, and data assets to make the transition to vertical intelligence. Many current B2B media businesses do not. The ones that do have the foundation for something more valuable than B2B media has produced in a generation. The transition requires discipline, and a willingness to reject the instinct that drove many B2B media businesses further into the trap. Faced with revenue pressure, the natural move was to go broader: more topics, more verticals, more audience segments. The logic was intuitive. More reach means more inventory means more revenue. What operators discovered was the opposite. Each step out diluted the demographic precision, the audience engagement, and the domain authority that had made them valuable in the first place. They traded their core asset for scale that turned out not to be worth much. The vertical intelligence company runs the opposite play. It goes deeper, not broader. And depth, executed with the right technology and data capability, turns out to be the mechanism for scale, not the obstacle to it. You are not trying to be everything to a broad industry. You are building deep credibility with a specific professional community and creating data and intelligence that community cannot get anywhere else. That is a different editorial strategy, a different commercial model, and a different organizational design than the one most B2B media operators are running today. For investors: The valuation framework for vertical intelligence companies should not be built on CPM multiples or traditional media metrics. The right comparables are SaaS businesses and research platforms: recurring revenue, data asset value, community lock-in, and net revenue retention. These are the metrics that reflect what these businesses actually are. The market has not fully priced this yet. Businesses that look like small B2B media companies on the surface are sometimes sitting on data assets, subscriber relationships, and domain authority that are worth considerably more than their current revenue multiples suggest. The investors who develop a sharper lens for this category before it becomes consensus will have an advantage. The Larger Irony Business professionals have always needed what the vertical intelligence company delivers. Domain-specific, trustworthy intelligence that helps them make better decisions, stay ahead of their markets, and do their jobs at a higher level. That need didn’t emerge with the internet or with AI. It has always been there. What has changed is the ability to serve it efficiently, at scale, and profitably. The technology that is collapsing one model of information business is simultaneously making it possible to build a better one. The B2B media company of the future is already here. It just doesn’t call itself a media company. The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself. “Uphoff on Media” is published by Tony Uphoff, Founder and Managing Partner of Uphoff Advisory, LLC [https://uphoffadvisory.com/]: a strategic advisory practice for founders, CEOs, and investors in B2B media, marketing, and technology. The businesses that drive business. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com [https://tonyuphoff.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

17 jun 202610 min
aflevering The Relationship Was the Product artwork

The Relationship Was the Product

Part 1 of B2B Media in the Machine Age B2B media isn’t dying. It’s being restructured by forces most of the industry still hasn’t fully identified. Over the next three posts, I’m going to name them. This series covers how the category got here, where it’s going, and what the restructuring means for the people running these businesses right now. I’ve spent most of my career inside B2B media. Publisher, CEO, operator, investor. I watched the print market collapse and the digital transformation happen in real time. I watched companies that built durable, franchise-level businesses make decisions that looked rational in the moment and proved catastrophic over time. I was inside some of those decisions. What I’ve come to understand is that the real break wasn’t the one most people talk about. It wasn’t digital. It wasn’t the platform dependency trap. It wasn’t even the collapse of print advertising, as dramatic as that was. The break was in the relationship. For decades, the most valuable thing a great B2B media company sold wasn’t reach. It was buyer intelligence. Publishers knew their professional communities better than marketers did. That knowledge was the product. Advertisers paid for access to a publisher’s understanding of the buyer, not just access to the buyer. Digital ended that. It shifted the value proposition from intelligence to execution. From knowing the buyer to delivering impressions. It looked like progress. It was actually a trade. And most of the industry made it without understanding what they were giving up. That’s where this series starts. The Wrong Lesson The wrong lesson is the most dangerous kind. It feels like wisdom. It’s derived from real experience. It’s shared broadly enough that it becomes consensus. And it sends an entire industry in exactly the wrong direction. B2B media drew the wrong lesson from its collapse. And most of the industry is still paying for it. The revenue decline was real. The audience fragmentation was real. The structural pressure from programmatic advertising, platform dependency, and the erosion of print was real. I’ll cover the mechanics of that unwind later in this series. What I want to examine now is what operators concluded from it, why that conclusion accelerated the damage, and what the businesses that survived actually learned instead. Because the survivors learned something different. Something that looks counterintuitive on the surface but turns out to be the only strategy that makes sense once you understand what was actually lost. They learned that the product was never the content. The product was the relationship, and specifically, what that relationship was built on. The Flywheel Nobody Named For decades, the best B2B media franchises ran on a flywheel that nobody stopped to name, because it didn’t need a name. It simply worked. And it’s only in hindsight we can now see how powerful this flywheel actually was. It went like this: editorial focus and depth created genuine buyer knowledge. That buyer knowledge made B2B media companies indispensable to marketers. Not because they could execute a program that reached an audience, but because they understood that audience better than the marketer did. A publisher covering the electronics manufacturing supply chain knew procurement cycles, knew what engineers were worried about, knew which decisions were being made and by whom and when. That knowledge was the basis of the relationship. Marketers came to publishers not just to advertise, but to learn. That knowledge advantage drove advertiser investment. That investment funded deeper editorial. Which produced more buyer knowledge. The flywheel spun. The value wasn’t reach. It was intelligence. Publishers were the people who knew your buyer better than you did, and were willing to make the introduction. The relationship between B2B media and B2B marketers was, at its core, a knowledge exchange. I know something you need to know. And because I know it, you need me in the room when you’re making decisions about how to reach this market. That’s not a vendor relationship. That’s a strategic partnership. And it’s the thing that justified premium pricing, long-term contracts, and the kind of institutional loyalty that made B2B media franchises durable across decades. What Digital Actually Changed Here’s what’s usually said about what digital did to B2B media: it disrupted the print revenue model, it commoditized reach, it introduced programmatic pricing, and it handed audience aggregation power to platforms. All of that is true. But it’s not the root cause. The root cause is that digital marketing fundamentally changed the nature of the value relationship. It shifted the marketer’s core question from what do you know about my buyer? To what can you execute for me? And once that question changed, everything downstream changed with it. In the pre-digital model, the marketer needed the publisher’s intelligence to make good decisions. In the digital model, the marketer had dashboards, attribution tools, programmatic platforms, and intent data feeds. The publisher’s buyer knowledge: built painstakingly through years of editorial investment, suddenly looked less like a strategic resource and more like one input among many. Or worse, like something the marketer could approximate themselves. The relationship didn’t erode. It was reclassified. Publishers went from strategic partners who knew the market to execution vendors who could deliver eyeballs. And execution is a commodity business. You can always find someone who will run the program cheaper. Digital didn’t just change the economics of B2B media. It changed what B2B media was being paid for. And that’s a much harder problem to solve than a CPM collapse. The content syndication era made this concrete. The thesis behind pay-per-lead programs — TechTarget built an entire company on it — was that documented purchase intent could substitute for the buyer knowledge publishers had historically provided editorially. If a contact downloaded a white paper, you had evidence of interest. That was something. But it commoditized fast. Because intent signals don’t convey buyer intelligence, they generate lists. And lists can be bought from a dozen vendors. The publisher was no longer in the room helping the marketer understand the buyer. They were handing over a spreadsheet and moving on. Even the smarter digital adaptations never fully restored what had been lost. The flywheel didn’t slow down. It stopped cold. The Wrong Lesson, Compounded When revenue started declining, the instinct across most B2B media businesses was to grow the addressable market. More topics. More verticals. More content formats. More audience segments. If the core audience wasn’t generating enough revenue, find more audiences. The logic tracked on a spreadsheet. Reach drives inventory. Inventory drives advertising revenue. More audience equals more revenue. What operators discovered, slowly, then all at once, was that each step out diluted the thing that had made them valuable in the first place. Demographic precision eroded. Engagement declined. The domain authority that had justified premium pricing started to look like every other trade publication. The buyer knowledge that had been built over years in a specific vertical couldn’t survive dilution into adjacent markets. Advertisers noticed before publishers did. The businesses that went broadest to survive ended up the most exposed. They had traded their one defensible asset: deep knowledge of a specific professional community, for volume that turned out to be worth nothing at scale. This is the lesson the collapse was supposed to teach. Most of the industry drew the opposite conclusion. What the Survivors Actually Learned The businesses that came through the collapse, not just surviving but building something sustainable, did something that looked irrational from the outside. They went deeper instead of broader. They doubled down on domain expertise at the exact moment the market seemed to be rewarding scale. They learned three things that the broader industry missed. Focus is the mechanism for scale, not the enemy of it. When you go deep enough in a specific vertical, the audience you build is more valuable per member than any broad audience can be. A readership of 50,000 senior procurement professionals is worth more to the right advertiser than 5 million general business readers. The math of depth beats the math of breadth once you stop measuring impressions and start measuring influence. Technology doesn’t change the value of buyer knowledge, it changes how you build and deliver it. The vertical intelligence model isn’t a nostalgia play for the print era. It’s a recognition that the original value proposition: we know your buyer better than you do, is more achievable now than it ever was. First-party data, behavioral signals, proprietary research, AI-assisted synthesis: the tools for building genuine buyer intelligence have never been more powerful. The question is whether publishers will use them to rebuild the relationship or just generate more content. The relationship has to be the product again. This is the hardest shift. It requires rebuilding sales motions, repricing the offering, and reconstituting the trust that was traded away during the programmatic era. But it’s the only path to a business that isn’t perpetually competing on execution cost. The vertical intelligence model isn’t a new idea. It’s the original idea, rebuilt for the current era, with data, AI, and workflow integration as the delivery mechanism instead of editorial alone. The Open Question for Operators The vertical intelligence model is not available to every B2B media business. It requires a foundation that not every operator has: genuine domain expertise, a professional audience with real workflow needs, and the organizational willingness to sell intelligence access rather than impression inventory. The honest diagnostic question for any B2B media operator right now is not how do we grow our audience? It is: do we still know something specific about a specific professional community that that community cannot easily find elsewhere? If the answer is yes, the path to rebuilding the strategic relationship is more accessible than it has ever been. If the answer is no, if the business traded its domain authority for breadth that didn’t pay, the recovery is harder. But the diagnosis at least is clear. The flywheel that built the best B2B media franchises was always powered by knowledge. Digital stopped it by changing what knowledge was worth. The question now is whether the industry will rebuild it with better tools, or spend another decade competing on execution in a race it was never going to win. The category isn’t just being disrupted. It’s being reinvented. In Part 2, I’ll lay out what the leading B2B media companies are actually becoming, and why the ones that get there first will be very difficult to displace. The views expressed in Uphoff on Media are entirely my own. They don’t represent the opinions of any company I’ve led, any board I’ve sat on, or any investor who’s had the pleasure of debating strategy with me over the years. If something I write here sounds brilliant, I’ll take full credit. If it turns out to be wrong, I was clearly misquoted by myself. “Uphoff on Media” is published by Tony Uphoff, Founder and Managing Partner of Uphoff Advisory, LLC [https://uphoffadvisory.com]: a strategic advisory practice for founders, CEOs, and investors in B2B media, marketing, and technology. The businesses that drive business. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonyuphoff.substack.com [https://tonyuphoff.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

15 jun 202612 min