The One-Second Decision: What I Learned Testing B2B Creatives
B2B marketing campaigns have a tendency to look the same. I’m talking here specifically from my experience in the data and technology space. Open LinkedIn and the visual language is immediately familiar: data points, networks, dashboards, people sitting in front of computers, statistics, diagrams, and now an endless stream of futuristic AI visuals. These are familiar for a reason. They communicate technology quickly.
But what happens when you want to stand out from everyone else communicating the same thing?
While running LinkedIn campaigns for a data company, I was targeting business leaders and decision-makers across industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and so on, to market the company’s services and products. I tested a wide range of creative approaches. I kept the more conventional elements that are common in the industry - data points, data networks, statistics, people working at computers - and started comparing them with less conventional ones: abstract and non-figurative visuals, animals, different types of people and faces, full bodies, isolated body parts, close-ups of eyes, direct and indirect eye contact, and many variations in between.
Whenever I started seeing a pattern, I narrowed it down. I added an element, removed another, changed the framing or the subject, and tested again. Over time, some patterns became surprisingly consistent across campaigns - even when the service, product or industry we were targeting changed. One important note: I’m focusing only on the image itself here.
Of course, copy has a major influence on campaign performance too. So does text placed directly on the creative: the amount, placement, font, size, color and visual hierarchy. But that’s a different experiment—and probably a different article. For now, the question is much simpler:
Before someone reads a single word, what makes them stop scrolling?
When we’re building campaigns, we tend to think in personas. CEO. CTO. Director. Manager. Decision-maker. Technical buyer. But nobody opens LinkedIn thinking, “I am now a B2B decision-maker. Please show me an appropriate B2B visual.”
They’re still human beings scrolling through a feed.
Job titles and seniority are essential for targeting, but they don’t suddenly switch off the basic ways people respond to visual information. We still notice faces. We react to eye contact. We recognize familiar symbols. Something unexpected can interrupt our attention. An image can create curiosity or an emotional reaction before we’ve consciously thought about what it means. That sounds obvious.
But in B2B marketing, where we spend so much time thinking about industries, personas, job titles and buying roles, I think it’s surprisingly easy to forget. And some of our creative tests made this particularly visible. One of the more interesting patterns came from testing animals.
Animal-related creatives often attracted significant attention compared with more conventional B2B imagery. But the interesting part wasn’t simply that animals worked. Different animals appeared to resonate with different audiences. Among leadership audiences, for example, lion-related creative performed particularly well. With managerial audiences, we saw stronger engagement with imagery such as a black panther.
Why?
We can only hypothesize. The lion has obvious cultural associations with leadership, authority and confidence. A panther might communicate something different: agility, independence, precision or control. Perhaps people notice imagery that reflects something about how they see themselves - or how they would like to see themselves.
That doesn’t mean the takeaway is “put a lion in every C-level campaign.” The more useful takeaway is:
Don’t only ask what image represents what you’re offering. Ask what image might resonate with the person you want to reach.
Another clear pattern appeared around eye contact. I tested this with both people and animals. Subjects looking directly at the viewer consistently performed better in our experiments than subjects looking away or to the side.
Then I narrowed the variable further. Instead of showing the whole person or animal, I tested full bodies, heads, faces, isolated body parts and creatives where almost the only visible element was an eye. Those eye-focused creatives also generated strong click-through and conversion rates.
I also saw strong performance from images where the pupil was particularly prominent. There is psychological research connecting pupil size with interpersonal perception, attraction and interest, although our campaign results obviously can’t prove that this was the reason those creatives performed better. For us, it became another hypothesis worth testing:
Direct gaze + prominent eyes can be a powerful attention trigger.
Another dimension I tested was how far we could move away from conventional B2B imagery. At one end were highly recognizable data and technology visuals: computers, networks, data points, diagrams and people working. At the other were abstract and non-figurative creatives.
Neither extreme automatically wins. Generic imagery is immediately recognizable, but it can also disappear into the feed because so many companies use the same visual language. Going completely abstract isn’t necessarily the solution either.
We are creating B2B campaigns, not asking people to interpret an art exhibition. The sweet spot seems to be somewhere between familiarity and unexpectedness.
Recognizable enough to create an immediate response. Different enough to interrupt the scroll. Relevant enough that the connection becomes clear once someone reads the copy. This is where all these different experiments start connecting. Marketers spend much more time looking at their creatives than their audiences ever will.
We might spend hours discussing an image. What does this element represent? What will people associate with that object? Does this animal represent leadership? Will people understand the metaphor?
And after staring at the same creative for hours, we start seeing more and more meaning in it. The audience doesn’t have that context. They might give us a second or two.
We might look at an image and think:
“The lion represents leadership and authority, while the environment represents transformation and change…” The person scrolling probably thinks:
“Lion.” And that’s okay. The goal isn’t to remove meaning. It’s to make the first reaction immediate.
The image doesn’t need to be consciously decoded. It needs to trigger something - curiosity, recognition, surprise, familiarity, emotion - strong enough to interrupt the scroll.
For a LinkedIn ad, I like to think about that initial journey like this:
Image → Attention → Copy → Interest → Click → Conversion The image creates the first impression. If that impression is strong enough, the person might stop and read the text. If the message is relevant and interesting enough, they might click. And if what happens after the click delivers on that promise, they might convert.
Of course, real B2B buyer journeys are far more complicated than one neat sequence. But for understanding those first few seconds, it’s a useful framework. It also helps us avoid expecting the image to do everything. A close-up of an eye can be simple. A lion can be simple. A face looking directly at you can be simple.
Simple doesn’t mean thoughtless. The thinking happens in choosing what to test. The simplicity happens in what the audience ultimately sees. This was one of the most useful parts of the process for me.
Instead of simply asking whether Creative A performed better than Creative B, I tried to understand which variable had changed. I experimented with:
- Conventional vs. more conceptual imagery
- Figurative vs. non-figurative creative
- People vs. animals
- One animal vs. another
- Full body vs. face vs. isolated body parts
- Human eyes vs. animal eyes
- Direct eye contact vs. looking away
- Different professional audiences and levels of seniority
- Different degrees of abstraction
And once something showed potential, I kept narrowing it down. Animal works. Which animal?
Face works. Is it the face or the gaze?
Direct gaze works. Does it work with animals too?
Eye contact works. Do we even need the rest of the face?
That is very different from simply producing multiple creatives and picking a winner. One result can be accidental. But when the same pattern starts appearing across different campaigns, industries, services and products, it becomes much more interesting. You’re no longer only optimizing an ad.
You’re learning something about how your audience responds.
A creative getting more clicks doesn’t necessarily make it a better creative. An unusual image can generate curiosity and produce a fantastic CTR while sending completely irrelevant people to your landing page. That’s why you should look beyond clicks whenever possible.
CTR tells you whether you earned attention. Conversion tells you whether that attention was useful.
In B2B, one genuinely relevant conversation can be worth far more than hundreds of casual clicks. After all these experiments, I don’t think the conclusion is that B2B marketers should use more lions, bigger pupils or endless close-ups of eyes. Those were my/our findings, with our audiences, in our campaigns. Another audience might respond differently.
What I would take from them is the way of thinking about creative. Don’t make it so generic that nobody notices it. Don’t make it so abstract that nobody understands it. Don’t expect people to decode five layers of symbolism, and don’t try to explain your entire offering in a single image. Instead, start with a much simpler question:
What happens in the first second?
Does the image trigger curiosity, recognition, surprise or emotion? Is there something that makes a person hesitate before continuing to scroll?
If yes, you’ve earned the opportunity for the copy to do its job. Then test what created that reaction. Remove something. Add something. Change the gaze. Change the framing. Replace the person with an animal. Show only part of the face. Make it more familiar or slightly less expected. And don’t assume you know why something works until you’ve tested it again.
That, for me, was probably the most valuable lesson from the whole process. Good B2B creative doesn’t have to be complicated. But finding something simple that consistently works requires curiosity, testing and a willingness to question what a B2B ad is supposed to look like. Because ultimately, you’re not designing an image for a CEO, a CTO or a manager.
You’re designing it for a person who happens to be a CEO, a CTO or a manager - and who is scrolling through LinkedIn like everyone else. You have about a second to get their attention. Use that second well.