Scott Neuman, marketing leader at Calix and juror on the effectiveness jury for The Drum’s B2B World Fest 2026, tells The Drum why the bottleneck in modern marketing has moved from production to judgment.
What strikes Scott Neuman most about AI isn’t what it lets marketers produce. It’s what production now costs. “AI is compressing the cost and time of execution,” he said. “The bottleneck is no longer production. It’s judgment.” Neuman leads marketing at Calix, a platform company serving broadband service providers, and serves as a juror on the effectiveness jury for The Drum’s B2B World Fest 2026.
That change moves the real work earlier in the process, according to Neuman. When execution gets fast and inexpensive, the decisions made before a single asset gets built carry more weight than they used to. “Framing the right problem, building positioning that actually differentiates, making calls under ambiguity where the data runs out and someone has to decide,” he said, are the places where humans still hold the advantage, not because AI can’t generate an answer, but because the answer it generates reflects what’s already been decided. “AI scales what you decide,” he said. “So bad strategy just fails faster.”
Most marketing teams, in his view, are solving the wrong problem before AI ever enters the picture. The industry has confused access to data with access to insight, he said: “Most teams are drowning in data and disconnected channel activity but starving for insight.” His fix comes before any tool selection: first-party data quality, closed-loop measurement from marketing lead through customer retention, and experimentation cycles fast enough to generate learning rather than just activity. “The advantage isn’t more AI,” he said. “It’s better inputs and better decisions made on top of them.”
Neuman also pushes back on treating brand and performance marketing as competing budget lines. “I don’t see this as a tradeoff,” he said. “It’s a sequencing and measurement challenge.” Brand sets the ceiling on trust, future demand and pricing power, he said, while performance captures the floor beneath it. Starve either one and both suffer. His approach is to ring-fence brand investment, tie it to leading indicators like search lift and win rates, and let performance channels feed learning back into brand messaging over time.
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Even well-balanced investment can’t rescue a message that never lands, and that’s the failure point Neuman sees most often. “Teams over-focus on channels and underinvest in ideal customer profile segmentation, pain-point specificity, and value articulation by buying stage,” he said. “If the message doesn’t land, no amount of targeting or spend fixes it.”
That message problem connects to something Neuman thinks consumer marketers get wrong about B2B: the assumption that it’s a purely rational category. “B2B is emotionally driven, just with higher stakes,” he said. “Brand matters more because decisions are riskier and take more time to evaluate.” Enterprise purchases move through buying groups rather than individuals, each with its own concerns and exposure to risk, which makes holding a consistent story across every stakeholder closer to reputation management than campaign execution. “B2B marketing is closer to enterprise reputation-building than performance marketing at scale,” he said.
Asked what separates the next generation of marketing leaders, Neuman skipped past technical skill. AI fluency still matters, he said, but he defines it narrowly: knowing what questions to ask and what to trust or automate. What he ranks above it is harder to teach. “Taste and judgment,” he said. “Increasingly rare, increasingly valuable.”
Be part of what’s next at The Drum’s B2B World Fest 2026
The Drum’s B2B World Fest 2026 celebrates the strategies and ideas pushing B2B marketing forward. Jurors like Scott Neuman help recognize the work shaping how brands connect with business audiences today. Entries close July 30.
