monday.com Spends Like a Consumer Brand in a Category That Does Not

monday.com spent $165.4 million on sales and marketing in a single quarter. Revenue that quarter was $351.3 million. That means the company spent roughly 47 cents on marketing for every dollar it brought in.

For a B2B SaaS company, that number is striking. Most software companies in this category talk about efficient growth, product-led acquisition, and organic loops. monday.com bought subway takeovers and Super Bowl commercials.

Most marketing circles would call this reckless. I'd argue it's defensible, and the evidence from marketing science explains why.

The Category Makes Brand Investment Rational

Work management software is a strange category. Buyers are everywhere: every company with more than a handful of employees is theoretically a prospect. But most of those buyers are not shopping for work management software right now. They're in meetings about Q4 planning or arguing about vacation approvals. Purchase is not front of mind.

This is exactly the scenario the 95-5 rule describes. At any given moment, roughly 95% of potential buyers in a category are not actively in the market. Only about 5% are searching, evaluating, and ready to decide. Dominant performance marketing playbooks, which optimize for the 5% already in-market, leave the other 95% entirely unaddressed.

For most B2B software companies, that neglect feels justified. Search ad math looks clean: target high-intent keywords, measure cost per trial, report ROAS. But this approach assumes demand exists before you've done anything to create it. When a buyer finally decides to look for project management software, they already have a short list in their head. If monday.com isn't on it, the company's Google ads are bidding for attention that another brand already earned months earlier.

Mental availability is the concept that explains why. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have documented that brands grow primarily by being easy to think of in relevant buying situations, not by targeting the right people with the right message at the right moment. A "right moment" strategy only works if the brand has already done the work of becoming memorable before that moment arrives.

The media mix reflects this logic. CTV, audio, out-of-home placements in transit hubs and airports, subway takeovers. None of these channels are optimized for in-market buyers. All of them are designed to reach professionals who are not currently shopping for anything, and to make the monday.com brand easy to recall when they eventually are.

What the Creative Actually Does

Both the campaigns and the creative strategy are worth examining, because each is as deliberate as the other.

A 2022 Super Bowl spot, titled "Work without Limits," focused on positioning rather than product features. A 2025 brand campaign, built around the tagline "The first work platform you'll love to use," is explicitly emotional. Another 2025 AI campaign, "AI Had the Time of My Life," ran across CTV, audio, performance media, subway systems, and airports, combining mass reach with high-recall framing.

Then there's the volume play on social. One ad-intelligence source reported 457 active Meta ads running simultaneously, with roughly 13 new creatives produced per week. That is not a brand team dabbling in paid social. That is a systematic effort to test and maintain attention at scale.

Combining these approaches matters. Broad-reach TV and OOH build the memory structures that make the brand easy to recall. High-volume paid social keeps the brand present across the consideration journey. Rather than a bifurcated brand-versus-performance structure, this is an integrated system where the emotional work done in CTV makes the performance ads cheaper to convert.

Chapter 16 of Never Always, Never Never describes this dynamic. Patrick Gilbert worked with a global apparel brand whose data showed brand campaigns driving direct sales, and performance campaigns building measurable brand equity. A clean separation between "upper funnel builds awareness" and "lower funnel drives conversion" did not hold up in the data. Both sides bled into each other. monday.com's strategy appears to be built on the same understanding, whether explicitly or not.

A longer look at this pattern, including the analysis of how Airbnb cut performance marketing spend and grew, is a useful parallel case.

The Light Buyer Problem in B2B

Here's where most B2B marketers get the growth equation wrong. They assume their buyers are a defined, identifiable group: IT directors, operations managers, project leads. Campaigns get built targeting those personas, optimized relentlessly within that defined audience.

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research on buyer behavior tells a different story. Brands grow by reaching more buyers, not by extracting more from existing ones. Most buyers in any category, including B2B software, are light buyers: occasional purchasers with low brand loyalty and limited engagement with category content. They are not reading your blog posts. They are not subscribed to your newsletter. They are going about their professional lives, and they will think about work management software roughly once every few years.

Chapter 9 of Never Always, Never Never covers this in detail. Brands do not grow by deepening loyalty among their heaviest buyers. Growth comes from nudging the large population of light buyers to make one more purchase. Light buyers are numerous enough that even small shifts in their purchase probability translate into meaningful revenue gains.

In a B2B context, that implication is uncomfortable: the CIO who buys your software is not your only buyer. Also in the growth engine: the operations manager who influenced the decision, the department head who approved the trial, the new employee at a different company who used monday.com at their last job and recommends it during onboarding. Reaching all of them requires broad creative across channels they actually inhabit, not targeted ads served exclusively to people currently searching category keywords.

monday.com's strategy is built for this reality. Llamas in commercials and "AI Had the Time of My Life" are not accidental choices. Both are designed for recall among people who have no immediate reason to pay attention, because those are the people who will eventually make or influence a purchase.

The Counterargument Worth Taking Seriously

High spend does not prove effectiveness. That point deserves direct acknowledgment.

Spending $165.4 million on sales and marketing in a quarter is easy to do. Doing it efficiently, in a way that compounds into long-term brand equity rather than just buying revenue, is the harder question. A common accusation in the category is that monday.com's growth is essentially purchased, and that slowing spend would reveal weaker underlying demand.

Available revenue data doesn't support that concern, at least not yet. Revenue of $351.3 million in Q1 2026, up 24% year over year, followed by $364.6 million in Q2 2026, up 22% year over year, suggests the company has maintained strong growth while spending heavily. Full-year guidance pointing to approximately 20% year-over-year growth indicates the company itself expects the rate to moderate, but not collapse.

A more relevant question is whether the brand is building the kind of mental availability that reduces long-term acquisition costs, or whether monday.com needs to keep spending at this intensity just to hold its current position. That data is not publicly available. What is visible is that the strategy has produced consistent growth at scale, and the marketing science framework supporting it is solid.

Asking about brand vs. performance marketing isn't really about which one to choose. It's about whether you understand how they work together. monday.com appears to.

What Most B2B Marketers Won't Do

Described in Chapter 16 of Never Always, Never Never, the Wilt Chamberlain Effect captures the real obstacle here. Wilt Chamberlain shot free throws underhand, made 28 out of 32 in the game where he scored 100 points, and then immediately abandoned the technique because it felt undignified. Data was unambiguous. He walked away from it anyway.

B2B marketers do the same thing with brand investment. Evidence for building broad mental availability is strong. IPA DataBank data compiled by Les Binet and Peter Field consistently shows that emotionally driven, broad-reach campaigns produce better long-term profit growth than rational, targeted campaigns. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research on buyer behavior makes the case for reaching light buyers at scale rather than optimizing for known in-market audiences.

But a typical B2B marketing team reports to a CFO who wants to see attributed pipeline, not brand recall scores. Running subway takeovers and TV spots in a software company feels strange, even embarrassing, in the same way the underhand free throw felt strange to Wilt Chamberlain. Internal conversations go: "We're a software company. Our buyers are sophisticated. They respond to ROI arguments, not emotional advertising."

Research says otherwise. Findings from the emotional advertising effectiveness literature are not ambiguous on this point. Emotional advertising builds the memory structures that make rational evaluation easier later. It does not replace the rational case. It makes the rational case more likely to succeed.

At AdVenture Media, this shows up repeatedly in how brand investment upstream affects the efficiency of performance campaigns downstream. Monday.com's strategy is a public-scale version of the same dynamic.

Companies that won't run this playbook are not short on data. They're short on willingness to look strange while doing something that works. That's the Wilt Chamberlain Effect in a budget meeting.

The Actual Lesson

The whole strategy is applying the principles of consumer brand building to a B2B category that typically refuses to.

Spending is large, and media choices look unusual for enterprise software. But the underlying logic, reaching buyers before they're in market, building memory structures through emotionally resonant creative, maintaining volume and consistency across channels, maps precisely onto what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has documented as effective brand growth strategy.

Principles from the 60/40 rule in marketing, developed by Les Binet and Peter Field, hold that roughly 60% of budget should go toward long-term brand building and 40% toward short-term activation. That applies to B2B as much as it applies to consumer goods. Proportions might shift by category, but the underlying logic does not change: brand investment makes performance investment more efficient, and performance investment without brand investment is a treadmill.

monday.com's Q1 2026 numbers don't prove the strategy is perfectly calibrated. They do show that a B2B software company can spend heavily on brand, grow at 24% year over year, and not implode.

That alone should make more B2B marketers uncomfortable about their current approach.