Jul 22, 2026 | 4 minute read 
For the past decade, account-based marketing has been the hallmark of a sophisticated B2B go-to-market strategy. Coordinated campaigns, tight sales-marketing alignment, personalized outreach to named accounts — ABM represents a meaningful step beyond spray-and-pray demand generation. But it has a structural blind spot: it targets companies, not people, and it still depends on signals you can only receive after someone has already engaged with you.
Person-Level Advertising (Person-Level Advertising) takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of waiting for a prospect to raise their hand, Person-Level Advertising finds the real, named individuals who are actively researching relevant topics right now — and delivers ads directly to them, before they ever visit your site.
That shift — from reactive to proactive, from company-level to individual-level — is the central difference between these two approaches, and understanding it will help you make better use of both.
What Is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a strategy in which sales and marketing teams coordinate around a predefined list of target companies or accounts rather than a broad pool of inbound leads. Instead of generating volume and filtering downstream, ABM teams identify high-value accounts upfront and craft personalized campaigns designed to engage multiple stakeholders within each organization.
The appeal is clear. ABM eliminates wasted effort on poor-fit leads, aligns sales and marketing around shared account goals, and enables the kind of deep, multi-threaded outreach that complex enterprise deals often require. According to Salesforce, 87% of B2B marketers agree ABM delivers higher ROI than other marketing tactics. This is a reflection of how effectively it concentrates resources on the accounts most likely to generate revenue.
But ABM has real limitations worth naming. It is account-level by design: it can tell you that a target company is worth pursuing, but not which individual at that company is actively in-market today. Targeting typically relies on firmographic proxies — company size, industry, revenue tier — rather than live individual intent. And ABM is reactive: you're waiting for engagement signals before you know who at a target account is paying attention. If no one engages, you have no signal.
What Is Person-Level Advertising?
Person-Level Advertising, also known as Contact Based Marketing, is a proactive, outbound advertising product built around named individual intent data. It does not require someone to visit your website first. Here is how it works:
You begin by selecting from a library of 42,000+ intent topics — including 33,000+ B2B categories and 8,900+ B2C categories. These topics can be highly specific. Examples of B2B topics include Biometrics, CRM Evaluation, Encryption Key Management Software, and 3D Modeling. Examples of B2C topics include home buyers in California, luxury SUV shoppers, home theater systems, and eco-friendly and sustainable products.
You can then build an audience of real, named individuals who are actively researching those topics. This audience is delivered as a list of hashed emails tied to real people — not anonymous cookie pools, not probabilistic lookalike segments, not retargeting audiences assembled from prior site visits.
Those hashed email audiences are then pushed to Google and Facebook, so that your ads can then be delivered directly to those specific individuals. The result is a targeting method that is identity-based rather than cookie-based, which matters because cookies are increasingly unreliable — blocked by iOS, Safari, and ad blockers, and constrained to a 14–30 day window before they expire. Because Person-Level Advertising, or Contact-Level Advertising, is identity-based, the audience is durable. Once identified, you can market to those individuals across channels without the clock running out on a cookie window.
Person-Level Advertising can result in a 40%+ conversion uplift compared to keyword bidding, lookalike audiences, and standard retargeting.
Which One Is Right for You?
ABM is likely the better fit if:
- You sell to large enterprises with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.
- You have a defined target account list that sales and marketing have agreed on.
- Your motion is primarily B2B, and deal size justifies deep, multi-touch personalization per account.
- You have the team bandwidth to build and execute account-specific campaigns.
Person-Level Advertising is likely the better fit if:
- You want to reach in-market buyers before they find you — not after.
- You serve B2C markets, B2B markets, or a mixed B2B/B2C audience where ABM's company-level focus doesn't apply.
- You want to reduce dependence on paid search keywords and anonymous lookalike audiences.
- Cookie-based tracking has degraded the effectiveness of your retargeting.
- You have a dormant CRM with leads worth reactivating, and want real-time signals on when they re-enter the market.
- You need to reach real, named individuals rather than spray ads at a probabilistic segment and hope the right person sees them.
For many teams, the right answer is both — with ABM setting the strategic direction and Person-Level Advertising handling the proactive, individual-level outreach that ABM alone cannot deliver.
The Shift That's Already Happening
Marketing has always been moving toward precision: from broadcast to segment to account to individual. Person-Level Advertising represents the logical end of that progression — not "which company might be interested?" but "which specific person is researching this right now, and how do we get in front of them before anyone else does?"
ABM remains a powerful strategy for the accounts that matter most. But the gap it leaves — the named individual who is actively in-market and invisible to you until they decide to engage — is exactly where Person-Level Advertising operates. For teams that want to stop waiting for buyers to raise their hand and start finding them first, that distinction is the one worth acting on.
To get started with Person-Level Advertising, schedule a meeting with one of our Product Specialists.
FAQ
Q: What is the difference between Person-Level Advertising and Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
A: Account-Based Marketing (ABM) targets companies or accounts that fit your ideal customer profile, while Person-Level Advertising targets specific named individuals who are actively researching relevant products, services, or topics. ABM focuses on organizations, whereas Person-Level Advertising focuses on reaching real people demonstrating buying intent.
Q: Is Person-Level Advertising better than traditional retargeting?
A: Person-Level Advertising offers several advantages over traditional retargeting because it is identity-based rather than cookie-based. Standard retargeting requires someone to visit your website first and relies on cookies that can expire or be blocked. Person-Level Advertising allows marketers to proactively reach in-market individuals before they visit a website and continues to work across devices and channels without depending on cookies.
Q: Can Account-Based Marketing and Person-Level Advertising work together?
A: Yes. Many organizations use both strategies together. Account-Based Marketing helps identify which companies to prioritize, while Person-Level Advertising helps identify and engage the specific individuals within those companies who are actively researching solutions. Combining both approaches can improve targeting precision and increase engagement with high-value prospects.
