ABM: tailoring the message

Account-based creative built from each target account’s own position in the freight market.

Role

Brand & Design Manager. Concept, art direction, design, copy.

Context

Account-based motion against a defined list of large target accounts.

With

Campaigns, demand generation and sales.

Year

2025

The proposition was not that we know your business. It was that we can already see your market.

A change in sales strategy moved Xeneta to an account-based motion against a defined list of large target accounts, where awareness of the company was low and neither out-of-home nor direct mail had been used to open a conversation before.

Context & challenge

Reaching a handful of accounts before sales did

The commercial team reported low awareness of Xeneta inside the target accounts. The move to an account-based motion was also an opening: it gave us a reason to try creative tactics the company had never used, since brand creative had not been treated as a way into an account before.

The work had to generate awareness before any sales contact, reduce friction in the first conversation, and stay present across a buying cycle measured in months.

The challenge for the brand

An account-based motion is tailored by definition, so the work had to demonstrate that Xeneta already understood the account’s freight position, not simply print their name on a banner.

My role

Concept, art direction, design and copy across every format. I worked with sales on account insight and with campaigns and demand generation on implementation.

Approach

Start from something publicly knowable

Each execution started from something publicly knowable about the account: where they ship, how their lane exposure is structured, how they contract, or a change in freight strategy reported in the trade press. Xeneta’s own market data on those lanes then supplied the hook.

That gives the creative a specific job. It has to say something true and useful about the account's own position in one line, at a scale that works on a banner and on a billboard, and it has to be unmistakably Xeneta while being unmistakably about one company.

Considerations

Long cycle. The buying cycle is measured in months, so the campaign had to stay present after the first impression rather than spend everything on it.

New territory for the company. Nothing like this had run before, so the work had to be defensible to leadership as well as effective.

Design decisions

Flattering, not intrusive. The distinction is narrow, so I set a rule for it. Reference only what a company would expect an expert supplier to already know, and nothing that implies surveillance.

One device across every scale. Executions ran from display banner to out-of-home, digital, to direct mail, and had to be recognisable as one campaign in all of them.

ACTUAL OOH SITUATED CLOSE TO THEIR OFFICES

Results

The campaign put Xeneta in front of named accounts before any sales contact, using each account's own market position as the way in. It kept prospects warm through a long cycle, kept Xeneta top of mind between touches, and came up in conversations, which is the outcome the escalation was built for.

The concept carried down into digital and direct mail, and I worked with demand gen and AEs on how each account was approached, so the creative and the sales motion were the same sequence rather than two things happening in parallel.

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