It’s an all-too-familiar feeling for tech industry employees: You’re done with work and watching TV when suddenly a commercial comes on for the same B2B vendor you’ve been getting ads for at the office (or, at least, on a different computer screen in your home).
Increasingly, you have LinkedIn to thank for that experience.
Last year, the white-collar social networking platform launched its first beta test into the CTV ad buying space, allowing advertisers to send ads directly through LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager to publishing partners like Paramount, Samsung Ads and Roku.
As of a few weeks ago, those ad formats are now generally available across the US and Canada, along with new VAST tag integrations (which help standardize video ads across various players, per the IAB) and expanded reach into Paramount.
The goal, said VP of Product Management Abhishek Shrivastava, is for B2B marketers to be able to target decision makers and industry leaders down to the exact shows they watch on connected TV devices, using integrations with LinkedIn’s Audience Network to narrow viewers down to their industry vertical, role type and even into individual titles and companies.
“If you are a B2B marketer, who you reach matters, because the decisions in B2B are taken by a buying group,” Shrivastava told AdExchanger. And LinkedIn, not surprisingly, claims to have insight into what kind of person typically falls into that buying group.
Always be closing CTV
The way the Campaign Manager works is fairly straightforward. Advertisers can use LinkedIn’s data or their own to build their target audience, then they upload their creative into the tool and select which shows or publishers they want their ads to appear alongside.
Most of the CTV inventory available through LinkedIn is based on a bidding model, although there are some curated premium shows and channels that require higher upfront pricing. Known as “CTV Select,” this inventory features higher-quality shows from Paramount+ and NBCUniversal, among other publishing partners.
Once the campaign is live, LinkedIn then provides reporting via iSpot that allows buyers to compare their reach on the platform against their traditional linear TV buys. Salesforce, for example, recently found that LinkedIn’s CTV ads reached four times as many on-target impressions compared to linear TV, according to a recent case study.
“On-target impressions,” in the case of most B2B marketers, can be as granular as a single person working at a particular company.
“Titles are really important when it comes to business decision makers,” said Jonathan Vu, VP of marketing at ServiceNow, a business that develops cloud- and AI-based platforms for enterprise technology clients.
Like Salesforce, ServiceNow has already seen some success in using LinkedIn’s CTV ads. More specifically, the company credits LinkedIn with a 19% lift in awareness among audiences at large companies, and a 45% improvement in lead submission rates.
“The competitive edge here is that we’re able to use that same audience that we’re running other campaigns with on LinkedIn for that CTV buy,” Vu said.
The video wave of the future
But LinkedIn’s core audience isn’t just made up of decision makers; it’s also filled with a lot of CTV viewers, too.
A recent study from Magna Media Trials reported that 98% of LinkedIn users watch CTV in a given week, compared to 83% who watch linear TV. What’s more, a whopping 94% claim to watch CTV with ads, and 37% say they watch CTV ads “all the time.”
With all that in mind, it makes sense that LinkedIn is leaning into CTV, beyond it being a natural extension of its recent push toward video content (and, more importantly, toward video ads).
In addition to its new CTV capabilities, LinkedIn also recently announced the launch of “BrandLink,” a revamp of its Wire program that places video ads alongside editorial content.
Previously, that editorial content was restricted to articles from partnered publishers, like Forbes, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. But now it also includes instream videos from members of LinkedIn’s creator community, like Gary Vaynerchuck or Rebecca Minkoff.
For users who are accustomed to seeing influencers on video-first social channels, it might be jarring to encounter them on LinkedIn, too – the same way it is when bears start encroaching into suburban neighborhoods looking for food.
But according to Shrivastava, LinkedIn’s embrace of video isn’t about attracting new types of users to the platform; it’s about helping its existing base “find more value with video.”
“The reality is, video is the language of the internet right now,” said Shrivastava. “We are essentially trying to make video work as well for B2B and professional use cases as [it does] for the consumer side.”
And so far, at least, the influencer content on LinkedIn is “less noisy” than it is on other platforms, said Vu – partly because the audience is so niche, but also because that audience still primarily uses LinkedIn to facilitate actual human interaction.
“LinkedIn is probably more ‘social’ than any other social platform out there right now,” said Vu. “Everyone’s going on LinkedIn with a clear intention of connecting with a certain audience or point of view.”
