The Agency Audience Model Is Overdue for a Rethink — And the Data Proves It

Media agencies are built around scale. Contracts are structured around reach. Campaigns are evaluated on impressions, CPMs, and the size of the audience delivered. The bigger the audience, the bigger the engagement — and the bigger the contract.

It’s a model that has worked for decades. But in B2B paid media, it is increasingly at odds with what actually drives results.

The Structural Tension

When an enterprise contracts a media agency to run a B2B campaign, the agency’s incentive — and often its contractual obligation — is to reach as broad an audience as possible within the defined target market. Large audiences justify large media buys. Large media buys generate larger contracts. The agency’s value proposition is, in part, its ability to reach more people than the client could on their own.

The problem is that in B2B, broad reach and buying relevance are not the same thing. As we explored in a previous post, research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that only around 5% of any B2B target market is actively in a buying cycle at any given moment. Serving a broad audience of 500,000 contacts may fulfill the campaign specification — but the overwhelming majority of those impressions are landing on people who are not evaluating vendors, not forming short lists, and not in a position to convert.

More reach does not mean more results. It often means more waste, at scale.

A Real-World Test: Precision vs. Volume

We recently conducted an A/B test that puts this tension in sharp relief. Two email campaigns were run against the same enterprise B2B target market:

Campaign A — a broad audience of 500,000 contacts built from company-level intent data via Bombora, enriched with contact data from Apollo.io. This reflects the standard approach most B2B marketing teams and agencies currently deploy.

Campaign B — a person-based intent audience of 5,000 high-intent personas identified by Delivr.ai, targeting the specific individuals within buying committees actively demonstrating research behavior.

The results were not marginal. They were stark.

The person-based intent audience was 100x smaller. It produced 7x the open rate, 54x the reply rate, and more than 2.5x the closed deals. The smaller audience did not constrain performance — it drove it.

So Should Agencies Move to Smaller Audiences?

Not entirely — and this is an important distinction. The 95:5 rule doesn’t argue against broad audiences. It argues for using them in the right context.

Brand campaigns should absolutely run against the full target market. Reaching the 95% who are not yet in market is how you build the recognition and trust that puts you on the consideration list when they eventually do enter a buying cycle. For this objective, scale matters and broad audiences are the right tool.

But intent campaigns — the campaigns designed to influence active buying decisions — need to operate differently. They require person-based audiences built from real research behavior, refreshed continuously as new buyers enter the market, and measured on pipeline contribution rather than impressions delivered.

The structural answer is not smaller contracts. It’s smarter campaign architecture — maintaining the scale of brand spend while adding a precision intent layer that converts the in-market opportunity at a fundamentally higher rate.

The Opportunity for Forward-Thinking Agencies

The agencies that figure this out first will have a significant and durable competitive advantage. The ability to demonstrate closed deals — not just impressions and CTRs — will redefine what enterprise clients expect from a media partner.

Most agencies are currently competing on the same axis: reach, scale, and channel breadth. The agency that walks into a client conversation with a dual-strategy framework — brand at scale for the 95%, precision intent for the 5% — and backs it with outcome data like the results above, is having a fundamentally different conversation than its competitors.

That’s not a threat to the agency model. It’s an evolution of it. And the data to make the case already exists.

The question is which agencies will move first.