Storytelling Is the Secret Sauce

"Storytelling is the secret sauce. People sometimes imagine B2B marketing is sending gazillions of personalised emails from Salesforce. That is very wrong. I think there is so much connectivity between B2C and B2B. It is just marketing. You want to find what your customers find unresolved, urgent, and unworkable, and really address those points."

Scheglakova comes from a B2C background and has carried that perspective into ad tech marketing. Her argument is that the supposed difference between B2C and B2B marketing is mostly an excuse for being less creative and less human in B2B. The underlying discipline of understanding what the audience cares about and building a compelling story around it is identical.

"I use the analogy of a football team. The channels have their own role to play and it is about the circularity of that. Almost like a sustainable cycle of marketing where everything is interconnected and it is a constant learning curve where you are iterating as you go."

Scheglakova explicitly rejects the funnel as a mental model for how marketing works. The circular model acknowledges that the customer journey does not have a beginning and end point, that existing customers feed back into the acquisition cycle through advocacy, and that every touchpoint should be designed to deepen rather than just advance a relationship.

"Ruthless transparency means sharing everything with each other so we can build on top of each other's ideas rather than duplicating. I say to my team: if you were me, what would you do differently? What would you change? How would you work with the commercial team?"

Scheglakova applies this principle in a team that is small, distributed across multiple countries, and responsible for 30-plus markets. The operating conditions create a natural risk of duplication and siloing. Ruthless transparency is the counter-force: the discipline of making everything visible to everyone so that the team can build on each other's work rather than recreating it.

"We first try to think who are we creating it for. What is in it for them. I found a company that had incredible content but every research paper was 80 pages. I think creating relevant content is so important. The best content we have seen engagement on were exactly the questions that people do not know the answer to."

Scheglakova is making a practical point about content economics. Long, comprehensive content is expensive to produce and rarely consumed in full. The content that generates the highest engagement is the content that addresses questions the audience genuinely does not know the answer to. That requires knowing what those questions are, which requires the same customer listening and curiosity that underpins good storytelling.

"I am most excited about human creativity and the ability to apply those technologies for the future. Tech is there to provide insights for us to iterate and build new stories. The marketing will be a lot more about creativity, a lot more about craftsmanship."

Scheglakova is deliberately positioning the human creative element as primary and technology as instrumental. Her argument is not anti-AI but pro-human: the combination of human creative judgement and AI productivity tools will produce better marketing than either alone, and the winning organisations will be those that cultivate both.