Reach engaged B2B decision makers with LinkedIn CTV and Live Event Ads

By Lindsey Edwards, Vice President, Product Management, @LinkedIn

Marketing campaigns are only as effective as the audience they reach. And, with 94% of Fortune 100 companies trusting us to help them reach their key audiences across our community of 1 billion members, we’re always considering new ways to reach engaged decision makers to help our customers capture buyers’ attention. That’s why today, we’re introducing new ad solutions to help you target and engage with your audiences both on and off LinkedIn with LinkedIn CTV Ads, including LinkedIn Premiere – a managed offering with NBCUniversal – and Live Event Ads at B2Believe in New York. 

Expanding campaign reach and capturing buyer attention with LinkedIn CTV Ads

With only 5% of buyers in-market for a new purchase at any given time, consistent engagement with your audience in creative ways across multiple channels - from video to events - helps ensure your brand is memorable when it's time to buy. Knowing that nearly 90% of US households embraced Connected TV in 2023 and the 90% of you that used it last year believe that it helped to reach B2B buyers—we’re introducing LinkedIn CTV.* This new offering builds on the success of In-stream Video Ads, which are helping customers nearly triple their in-stream video completion rate, and is designed to help you get your creative in front of the LinkedIn audience against high-quality, streaming television content on connected sets.

Right within Campaign Manager, you can easily launch a LinkedIn CTV campaign and scale it across our network of publishers, including Paramount, Roku and Samsung Ads. With LinkedIn CTV, you can rest assured that your campaign is aligned with publishers across the LinkedIn Audience Network, which DoubleVerify measured as over 99% brand safe since the beginning of our partnership.

In addition to introducing LinkedIn CTV, we are also partnering with NBCUniversal to introduce LinkedIn Premiere, a new managed offering in Campaign Manager that helps you target decision makers in the United States across NBCUniversal’s premium streaming content on CTV. 

“In today’s television landscape, reaching strategic audiences in a premium environment is key to developing media plans that perform. By partnering with LinkedIn, NBCUniversal can give our marketing partners unique access to business decision makers who are already watching our brand-safe, diverse, and culture-defining content,” shared Dominick Vangeli, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Advanced Advertising, NBCUniversal. “This collaborative solution continues our momentum of building an audience-first media ecosystem to deliver a curated and relevant experience for viewers as well as an optimal and effective strategy for advertisers.”  

For some of you, developing CTV campaigns may be a new endeavor, it may be something that you need added support in launching with a specific targeted audience in mind, and we’re here to help with LinkedIn Premiere. For others, you may want to initiate your own LinkedIn CTV campaign across our network of publishers. Here’s how it works once you create your video ad and login to Campaign Manager:

• Choose Your Objective: Login to Campaign Manager and choose “Create a brand awareness campaign” as your objective, and select “Connected TV only campaign” 

• Determine Your Target Audience: Target decision makers in English across the US and Canada using attributes like company, seniority and interests  

• Set a Budget and Schedule: You have the opportunity to determine your advertising campaign budget and the timing for your campaign

• Review and Launch: As always, take a final look at all assets and choices before you launch

• Measure Your Success: Although you can use native reporting, like Performance Summary Reports, Revenue Attribution Report, Conversions API and our new CTV Brand Lift test to measure your success and make strategic decisions about your future CTV campaigns, we know you need more, especially with 94% of you sharing that you find it challenging to measure the success of your campaigns.*

That’s why–in addition to our native reporting–we are collaborating with industry leading partners, like iSpot for advanced audience measurement and Kantar for objective brand lift studies, to help you better assess the reach of your campaigns against your target audiences. Using iSpot, you’re able to measure your effectiveness in reaching B2B audiences across platforms, like linear and CTV, for the first time. By leveraging Kantar, you can get deep, actionable insights about how your campaign leads to a lift in brand awareness, affinity, or resonance among your target B2B audience.  

Continuing to build your brand with LinkedIn Live Event Ads

In addition to our new offering, LinkedIn CTV, today we'll also introduce Live Event Ads as another way to increase event registrations, build brand awareness, and drive measurable results from investments in events.

With the number of professionals viewing events on LinkedIn growing 34% in the last year, people are looking for ways to learn and network with their peers and industry leaders. To help you continue to build brand awareness in new ways and deepen engagement with prospective buyers, we are testing Live Event Ads. This new, global format helps you promote your company's live event before, during and after it takes place, dynamically adjusting based on when it occurs.

Reaching more of the right people 

We know that reaching the right buyers is harder than ever–the B2B purchase cycle is getting longer and more complicated as the buying committee grows. Through new products, like LinkedIn CTV, and partnerships with companies, like NBCUniversal, iSpot and Kantar, we’re committed to helping you reach key decision makers where they are, while building your brand. But, our work doesn’t end here, and we are always considering your feedback and testing new ways to help you reach more of the right people so that you can continue growing your brand. 

*Methodology

LinkedIn commissioned YouGov to conduct a study of B2B marketing and advertising professionals in the United States. Data was collected from 1/29-2/13 among US residents ages 18-75 employed full- or part-time in a company with at least 250 employees. A total of 231 interviews were conducted, with a margin of error of ±6.4% at the 95% confidence level. YouGov sampled to ensure sufficient representation by age groups, US Census region, industry, job title, and company size.