Tony Uphoff has led a storied career, advancing from a VP at Ziff Davis early on to CEO positions at CMP Media (InformationWeek), VNU Media (The Hollywood Reporter), UBM TechWeb, Business.com, and Thomas. Under his watch at Thomas, the company was acquired by Xometry for $300 million.
In late 2023, he went in a different direction, becoming CEO of Pipeline 360, a B2B marketing company specializing in branded demand.
“All marketing has become performance marketing,” Uphoff said. “And we should just admit that. And one of the concepts that we built out on was that we believe there’s going to be a convergence between brand and demand advertising and marketing. So we built a solution we call branded demand.”
Asked if this will also become a solution for B2B media, Uphoff said that is hard to tell.
“When I look at many of the industry agendas, most of the speakers are talking about things like marketing services which contain demand generation, and how clever they are about somehow figuring out how to make money at those types of things,” Uphoff said. “The only growing part that was profitable was marketing services that contained a content studio and demand generation. I’m disappointed in the industry I grew up in that they’re not thinking from a more enlightened point of view.”
To that end, Uphoff would like “younger generations to see the vibrancy of these industries and what they are and what they can be. We’re not doing enough to get that next generation fired up about” B2B media.
Uphoff complimented the work that SIIA Media is doing and hopes there will be a convergence in the future with what he’s doing with Pipeline 360. When he made the decision not to run another B2B media company, but “to really accelerate the build out and growth of demand as a service business,” he knew he’d be looked at differently by the industry. But he also knew that he’s always had a good feel for the next big thing.
“After 25, 30 years of being a geek and having this remarkable opportunity to grow up literally at the intersection of technology, media has given me such a great ringside seat at a lot of these transitions,” Uphoff told SIIA Media Alert last week. “I don’t know that I have any innate talent other than I know a market transition when I feel one coming on because I’ve seen so many of them. And that really is that time when a disruptive technology meets demographic shifts and business trends, and something new is going to happen.”
Notes from B2BMX
Uphoff had just returned from the B2BMX West 2025 conference, where Erica Perng, Pipeline 360’s senior director, head of corporate communications, addressed five key takeaways after watching his talk there. The first three concerned marketers—how they have to do more with less, leverage AI, and process so much data. I asked Uphoff about the fourth one: “Content matters more than ever, but it’s so hard to get right.” Uphoff amplified the “so hard to get right.”
“As we look at the world through the lens of what we do at Pipeline 360, our customers spend roughly 45 cents of every dollar on demand generation on content. I’m talking about content marketing. So they’re developing white papers or hiring a firm to do it. And up until very recently we weren’t involved in content. But we would be asked almost daily, ‘Do you guys provide content services?’”
To that end, Pipeline 360 just announced that it would add content services through a partnership model with The Expert Network. Uphoff sees data and AI playing a huge role in personalizing the content they will create.
“That’s where a lot of these amazing new tools are really going to pay dividends,” he said. “If you take an asset that is valuable to an audience—let’s call it a white paper—you then have the ability to customize and personalize it, and break it into distinctive pieces. It could become a LinkedIn post, a podcast ad. We’re not going to throw a light switch though and magically all this technology is going to be well used.
“But this idea of B2B becoming more thoughtful about the content that we either create or have created, and really understanding—partly from a journalistic point of view and partly from a metrics one—that it actually solves the needs of the individuals and the buying groups that we’re targeting.”
The fifth takeaway that Perng listed was, “Reaching millennials is no longer optional.” Uphoff recalled his younger days at Ziff Davis and when he was named publisher of Information Week. People were astounded that he could be in his mid-30s and a publisher already.
“It was a different era,” he said. ”Then in 2017, for the first time in history, a generation as large as the previously largest generation was created. The millennials were now in the workforce at the same time as the baby boomers—an analog-native generation and a digital-native generation. And in many cases, particularly with the millennials, the expectations are going to be a bit different. And that puts a lot of pressure on marketers.
“Over half of B2B buying groups today are led by millennials,” Uphoff continued. “It’s not to say baby boomers aren’t still involved. But it’s a clarion call for marketers to understand. That doesn’t mean we have to play hip music or do something out of character. But if this generation is clearly raising its hand with its digital footprints and telling us this is the way I take in information, we have to listen.”
