Sometime around 2013, a small software firm called Intridea wanted one client. Not a category, not a segment, not a thousand look-alike accounts. One. They wanted to do work for Ogilvy, the famous advertising agency. So they rented a billboard directly across from Ogilvy's Manhattan office, pointed a cheeky message and a custom web address at the one company they were after, and waited. Ogilvy's people saw it, because it was aimed at exactly the window they looked out of. A conversation started. That is account-based marketing in its purest form, and notice what it cost. Not a platform subscription. It cost the nerve to pick one account and the imagination to reach it in a way it could not ignore.
I bring up a thirteen-year-old billboard because it shows you what the words used to mean before the software companies got hold of them, and the gap between then and now is the whole story of why so much ABM has gone stale.
Here is the short history, because the history is the argument.
The idea that you might treat a single company as a market of one is old. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote about one-to-one marketing back in 1993, arguing that real advantage comes from knowing an individual customer better than anyone else does. In the early 2000s a trade group called ITSMA, through a practitioner named Bev Burgess, put the actual phrase into circulation: account-based marketing. For roughly a decade it stayed what it had always been. Slow. Manual. Expensive. Practiced by people willing to do the unscalable work of understanding a specific buyer at a specific company. It was a craft, and like every craft it lived in the hands of the person doing it.
Then, around 2015, the tooling caught up, and the meaning of the term quietly changed underneath everyone's feet.
Two companies deserve most of the credit for what happened next, and I do not mean that entirely as a compliment. Terminus, co-founded by Sangram Vajre, built a whole movement around a hashtag, FlipMyFunnel, preaching that you should stop casting a wide net for leads and instead pick your best-fit accounts and go get them. Good message. He put it everywhere: podcasts, roadshow conferences, guest posts on every business development blog with a pulse. Around the same time Jon Miller, who had already written the playbook on inbound marketing at Marketo, launched Engagio and did the same thing, publishing enormous, tactical, hundreds-of-pages-long guides to ABM that got quoted and linked and copied across the entire industry. Demandbase acquired Engagio in 2020 and kept that content engine running.
None of these people were wrong about the strategy. Concentrating your effort on the accounts that matter most is sound. It is what Intridea did with its billboard. The problem is what happened to the word once software had to be sold around it.
Software has to scale, or it does not sell. A tool that helps you do beautiful, painstaking work on ten accounts is a nice tool. A tool that promises the same on a thousand accounts at once is a category, a funding round, an exit. So the industry quietly redefined the mission. ABM stopped meaning "understand a handful of accounts deeply" and started meaning "target a large list of accounts efficiently." Those sound similar. They are opposites.
You can watch the language drift if you read the material in order. The early writing is about relationships, research, and knowing the buyer. The later writing is about intent signals, orchestration, multi-channel cadences, and how many accounts you can cover. Coverage. That is the word that gives the game away. You do not cover a person you are trying to understand. You cover a territory you are trying to occupy.
I do not blame the founders for this. They built useful things and were honest about what those things did. I blame the rest of the field, which heard "you can do this at scale" and quietly deleted the part of the sentence that mattered. The entire appeal of the original idea was that it did not scale. That was the point. The unscalable effort was the moat. When Intridea aimed a billboard at one office window, Ogilvy could tell instantly that a human being had picked them on purpose, and no competitor running a mail merge was going to fake that feeling.
What the market built instead is a machine that mass-produces the appearance of that effort, and buyers have learned to see straight through the appearance. Gartner's research on how B2B buyers actually spend their time is blunt about the result: buyers now devote only about 17 percent of the entire purchase to meeting with all potential suppliers combined, and when several vendors are in the running, any single one of them gets a sliver of that. The tools got louder and the buyers got quieter. That is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect.
So let me plant the flag plainly, because the next few posts build on it. Account-based marketing did not fail. It was never really tried at scale, because the thing that made it work cannot be scaled. What failed is the counterfeit that took its name. The industry built tools to mass-produce a gesture that only ever meant something when it was made by hand, then acted surprised when the mass-produced version stopped landing.
The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that the original still works as well as it did when Intridea rented that billboard. Better, probably, because so few people are willing to do it now. But before we rebuild the real thing, we have to be honest about what the counterfeit is doing to your buyers. That is where we go next.
Sources: - [Account-based marketing (history, ITSMA, Peppers & Rogers)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Account-based_marketing) - [Intridea's billboard aimed at Ogilvy](https://www.cognism.com/blog/account-based-marketing-examples) - [The Account-Based Revolution: origins to AI futures (Demandbase)](https://www.demandbase.com/blog/account-based-revolution-origins-to-ai-futures/) - [Gartner on B2B buyers and time spent with suppliers](https://documill.com/blog/buying-is-difficult-in-b2b-not-selling/)