How would you explain the difference between Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement to a stakeholder deciding between them?

Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is built for B2B demand generation: relatively low email volume, long buying cycles, and a data model centred on prospects that map to Salesforce leads and contacts. Its strengths are lead scoring and grading, nurture through Engagement Studio, and tight, out-of-the-box alignment with Sales Cloud.

Marketing Cloud Engagement is a B2C platform built for very high volume and cross-channel messaging — email, SMS, push, and advertising — over a flexible data model of data extensions and contacts, with scripting (AMPscript, SSJS) for deep personalisation.

The practical test I use: if the buying unit is an account with several stakeholders and sales reps working opportunities, Account Engagement fits. If you are messaging millions of individual consumers across channels with per-message personalisation, Marketing Cloud Engagement fits. Some organisations legitimately run both.