Originally published by The Drum. Written by Reuben Webb, B2B Editorial Lead at The Drum.
The below article first appeared following conversations at the Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix, where Anna Eliot discussed buyer intelligence, the decline of the traditional click trail, and how data-driven insight is reshaping modern B2B creativity.
The Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix is not short of bold claims. But sitting down with Anna Eliot, CMO of pharosIQ, there is a sense that her company has been quietly building something the rest of the market is only now realizing it needs.
pharosIQ came together through the merger of MRP and Contentgine in 2024, and Eliot joined the conversation barely a week after repositioning the business entirely. Launching on a Friday, presenting at a major industry summit on the Monday. It is, she admits with a laugh, a punishing sequence.
“At the highest level,” she says, settling in, “pharosIQ is an intelligence-driven organization. What’s core to us is developing first-party B2B intelligence. And as an activation of that intelligence, we offer campaign solutions for B2B technology and services companies.”
The instinct, she explains, came from recognizing a structural flaw in how B2B marketing has traditionally operated: creative and media first, audience second. “Most organizations have done it the other way around, deciding what to say before understanding who they’re speaking to. We started with the data.”
That data orientation has become unexpectedly timely. The dominant conversation at this year’s Forrester B2B Summit centers on what presenters have called the GTM singularity: the idea that the rise of AI-driven, zero-click search has effectively blown a hole in the top of the marketing funnel. Buyers are researching without leaving a traceable footprint. The click trail that B2B marketers built their measurement systems around is disappearing.
I ask Eliot how pharosIQ is responding to what feels like an existential shift for demand generation.
“Nobody had a crystal ball,” she says. “But what we built means this largely doesn’t affect us. We already have visibility beyond that singularity.” Rather than relying on search behavior and web traffic, pharosIQ’s atlasIQ platform tracks content consumption across its own ecosystem, building a layered picture of where any given account sits in the buying journey: from early awareness through to active evaluation and purchase readiness. It doesn’t rely on the click. The summit’s opening keynote had framed the stakes plainly: the GTM singularity could resolve one of two ways. Resist change, and you get the business equivalent of a black hole, dense, collapsed, with nothing escaping. Embrace it, and you trigger a supernova. Eliot’s view is clear – pharosIQ was already positioned for the latter.
Also new this week is the formal launch of atlasIQ Intelligence as a standalone product, making the underlying data available to purchase directly rather than only through managed campaign activation. This expands pharosIQ’s relevance beyond marketing into sales and revenue operations, enabling broader go-to-market alignment. ”We can now help entire revenue teams align around the right accounts, the right people, and the right timing,” she says. “That’s a powerful shift.”
The summit’s preference marketing sessions had made the case clearly: brand investment is structural, not optional. Buying teams need to know and trust you before the purchase process begins. I push Eliot on what that actually demands of marketers, and use Workday’s rock stars campaign as a provocation. It is, by any measure, a masterclass in B2B brand building. Real rock stars, a genuine cultural insight about the way Americans call their colleagues rock stars, and a creative execution bold enough to make HR software genuinely memorable.
“It’s a fantastic campaign,” she says. “That’s exactly the kind of work that builds preference at scale. Memorable, culturally sharp, deeply relevant to the audience.” But she quickly grounds the point.” The reality is most marketers don’t have that level of budget. What’s interesting about where we sit is that intelligence can be a form of creativity. Understanding the questions buyers are asking, often before they recognize the problem, and showing up with the right message at exactly the right moment. It may not be rockstar-level, but it’s impact is undeniable.”
It is a phrase that seems to capture something about pharosIQ itself. A company that has been building its answer to the industry’s biggest current problem for years, without quite announcing it. Until now.
“Ten out of ten, Forrester, no notes,” Eliot says, as we wrap up. “The theme this year is incredibly timely. We’re in the middle of another transformation, and people here can feel it.