Because traditional B2B advertising is getting fuck all results for most people. Now, this is for a couple of reasons:
a) People in this biz don't like being 'marketed to'. Generally, we are intelligent, sensible and when making a purchasing decisions have enough contacts and resources to research the market and buy with confidence.
b) 99.9% of B2B advertising is appalingly bad. Look at AVN or XBiz. Take ANY ads, and swop over the logos, would you notice? Ooh some pictures of money, cars, naked girls, etc. All the ads are almost identical.
So, in order to make people aware of what you do WITHOUT 'marketing' at them, you need to do something different.
I set up
www.adultmarketing.co.uk where I give away free hints and tips for marketing porn. Not arrogant enough to say it is thought leadership, but it is certainly what I am aiming for.
It gets my message across, is well liked (judging by comments I get at shows and the traffic), and generates leads for me.
imho, anyway.