LAS VEGAS — Are the days of B2B marketers waiting around for small business owners to type their needs into a search box numbered?
A growing cohort of advertisers is realizing that, by the time someone searches for “freight logistics” or “business insurance,” they’ve already made up their mind – and the bidding war has already begun.
So, some portion of B2B advertising budgets is moving away from search and toward connected TV and social platforms.
“B2B marketers understand now that search is inherently a reactive channel, whereas CTV and social are proactive ones,” said Chris Moneta, director of SMB MediaLabs at Intuit, in this video interview with Beet.TV at CES 2026.
Building trust into the data pipeline
For Intuit, the opportunity to help advertisers reach small business owners through CTV hinges on one critical asset: deterministic first-party data drawn from its QuickBooks user base.
In November 2024, Intuit announced that its SMB MediaLabs audiences had become available on The Trade Desk platform, enabling advertisers to activate those segments across CTV, audio, display, and digital out-of-home.
“It was about architecting for a trust and privacy first model,” Moneta said. The company has operationalized a process that de-identifies and abstracts first-party signals at the source, ensuring that personally identifiable information never reaches the bid stream.
The result, according to Moneta, is that advertisers accessing Intuit’s audience segments on platforms like The Trade Desk receive “high fidelity intent signals that have been vetted and scrubbed of any PII.”
Interoperability as the antidote to complexity
CTV advertising has a reputation for complexity, particularly when it comes to matching audience data across platforms. Intuit’s approach has been to prioritize interoperability, making its segments available through the LiveRamp data marketplace and using standard IDs recognized by major platforms.
“By putting our audience segments on the LiveRamp data marketplace, we’ve removed the manual file matching process for advertisers,” Moneta said. “A media buyer doesn’t need to worry about understanding our data architecture. They can just select our audience segments on the platforms they’re using.”
The company expanded its distribution footprint in 2024, making its audience segments available on three DSPs. Now the focus has shifted to premium CTV platforms, with ambitions to eventually span CTV, digital display, audio, and social. “This will allow advertisers to access SMB owners with both precision and purpose,” Moneta said.
Intelligent curation and full-funnel commerce media
The CTV advertising market continues its rapid ascent. According to eMarketer, U.S. CTV ad spending is projected to reach $40.90 billion by 2027, representing a 63% increase from 2023. That growth is being driven by viewers’ migration from linear TV to streaming platforms, with CTV now accounting for more than half of time spent on digital video.
Moneta sees the next phase of deterministic CTV as one defined by intelligent curation—the ability to dynamically tailor creative content based on the industry of the small business owner watching.
“A contractor might see construction-focused content, whereas a boutique owner might see retail-focused content,” he said. “We can do this all with our deterministic data.”
