LinkedIn tests ads in media videos

LinkedIn is rolling out new features to help B2B marketers develop their brands and interact with its community of one billion professionals. How? By advertising on videos from "trusted" media and content publishers.

LinkedIn launches a new program: "The Wire

The Wire program will add InStream video ads alongside content from "trusted publishers". The aim is to capitalize on the boom in video consumption within the application. In short: to create new monetization opportunities for publishers.

Brands and advertisers will now be able to choose a specific pre-roll placement (from 3 to 15 seconds) with selected publishers."Knowing that U.S. viewers will spend 55 minutes more each day with digital video than with traditional television, aligning your brand's message with the publisher's content in a format that resonates with buyers will make it easier to remember at the time of purchase," said Lindsey Edwards, vice-president of product management at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn aims to win over publishers

For this initiative, LinkedIn has teamed up with a series of publishers including Barron's, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, MarketWatch, NBCUniversal, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance. While the Beta phase has just been inaugurated, the platform has not yet indicated whether the Wire program will be open to other publishers.

According to their statements, the test period over the last few months has proved positive, enabling publishers to generate advertising revenue. Prior to its beta launch, executives from Bloomberg, Reuters, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal told Digiday that they were selling advertising through the program, signing up between three and 35 clients. Bloomberg Media was the first publisher to join the Wire program, officially launching in autumn 2023. Since then, the sales team has reportedly signed 35 advertising deals incorporating pre-roll ads on its LinkedIn videos (either exclusively for the program, or as part of wider campaigns). "We're past the validation stage," said Nick Sallon, director of partnerships at Bloomberg Media. "There's really no cap on the number of LinkedIn users an advertiser can target. Because of the scale of this platform, that means the size of advertising opportunities is significant."

This is a godsend for media outlets that are struggling on other social platforms. Indeed, on both Meta and X, journalistic content is becoming less and less popular, to say the least.

In its alpha phase, the terms of the agreement called for a 50-50 revenue split between the publisher and LinkedIn, as well as a fixed CPM of $50. Penry Price, vice president of marketing solutions at LinkedIn, said the $50 CPM is comparable to the platform's rates for its other advertising offerings. From July 2024, the revenue share will remain the same, but pricing will shift to an auction model, driven by advertiser demand for specific audience segments. "Our aim will be to improve our customers' performance while maximizing our own revenue potential. I expect us to optimize in ways that drive efficiency; however, the old adage remains true: you get what you pay for, and in this case, it will be premium editorial content and [first-party] data from LinkedIn. Win-win, especially in an open Internet awash with misinformation and MFA content," said Josef Najm, director of programming and partnerships at Thomson Reuters, in an e-mail to Digiday.

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The Wire program will not be available in Europe

According to a spokesperson for the professional social network, to enable mass deployment, the Wire program will be "available in all languages, on mobile and other devices". However, it will not be available within the European Union. Why will this be the case? The answer lies in 2 acronyms: RGPD and DSA (Digital Services Act). Indeed, suspecting LinkedIn of using sensitive data for advertising targeting purposes, in March 2024 the European Commission asked the platform (owned by Microsoft), to explain its use of users' personal data.

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LinkedIn expands its AI capabilities in Accelerate

LinkedIn is also adding more AI capabilities to its advertising tools, via new elements for its fully automated "Accelerate" advertising option.

New features include theintegration of Microsoft Designer for creative customization: " To get started, simply describe what you'd like to see, or upload your own image. From there, Designer lets you choose from several options with various images and text overlays, which you can further personalize with your own logos and images."

Marketers using "Accelerate" will also be able to optimize the targeting of their campaigns with exclusion lists (companies and third parties). Finally, an AI marketing assistant will boost their campaigns by adding more recommendations on how to refine and improve ads.

These new features are designed to emphasize Accelerate's success since its launch. Indeed, according to the first results unveiled by the platform :

• Advertisers using Accelerate create campaigns that are 15% more effective.
• They also found that the cost per action was 52% lower than with conventional campaigns.
• Video downloads on LinkedIn increased by 45% year-on-year.

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