Every year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity brings together professionals from around the globe to spotlight the future of marketing. Industry leaders, marketers, creators, and beyond join to exchange ideas, share new findings, and celebrate advancements. 

As the official Lions B2B Partner, LinkedIn is shaping the next era of B2B marketing and guiding brands through the transformation. 

The LinkedIn for Marketing Content Studio Team was on the ground all week, hosting studio conversations and live stage panels with CMOs, agency leaders, next-gen creators, and even top athletes. Here are our top 5 takeaways from Cannes Lions 2026: 

1. Great creative is defined by business outcomes 

One of the clearest signals from Cannes Lions 2026 was this: the era of creative for creative's sake is over in B2B. The work has to perform.

Melissa Berger, Chief Solutions Officer of Digitas and Chris Bagnall, CEO & Founder of Transmission made the case plainly in a session in the LinkedIn Studio at Cannes. CMOs are under more scrutiny than ever, and the numbers back it up.

91% of B2B CMOs say proving ROI is a key leadership metric. More pressingly, 79% report that budgets get cut when ROI can't be demonstrated. (YouGov Research, 2026)

What this tells us is that the conversation about creative effectiveness has moved out of the creative department and into the boardroom. Marketers who can draw a clear line from campaign to commercial outcome aren't just doing their jobs well, they're protecting their budgets and their teams.

The implication for practitioners is straightforward: build measurement into the brief from the start. Don't treat attribution as an afterthought. Creative that can't be connected to outcomes will lose ground to creative that can.

What this means for you: Before the next campaign goes live, establish what success looks like in business terms, not just impressions or engagement. Connect your creative decisions to the commercial metrics your leadership team cares about most.

2. Buyability, not awareness, is what actually closes deals

If one concept dominated the B2B conversation at Cannes Lions 2026, it was Buyability, a strategic model that recognizes that Buying Groups are a unit of decision making. To be “buyable” a brand has to build the confidence of Buyer Group members. Research from LinkedIn and Bain reveals the real reason strong B2B deals stall: buyers are not just buying a solution. They are buying a decision they can defend.

The LinkedIn for Marketing Content Studio hosted a conversation with Mimi Turner, LinkedIn's Head of Marketplace Innovation, alongside Jim Lesser, Chief Brand Officer at ServiceNow, and Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard. The conversation challenged a long-held assumption in B2B: that the goal of brand marketing is to build awareness, and demand generation handles the rest. Turner and her co-panelists argued that the two can't be so cleanly separated, and that brands paying attention only to the top of the funnel are missing the mechanism that actually converts consideration into purchase.

This framing was reinforced at Cannes when Turner and Lesser took the mainstage together for 'Cracking B2B Creativity: The Buyability Levers That Power Successful Campaigns,' unveiling new research conducted by LinkedIn and WARC. Their core argument: buyability is a measurable, actionable metric, and it's one B2B marketers should be optimizing for deliberately.

Brands are 20x more likely to be purchased when the full buying group has awareness, according to research from LinkedIn in partnership with Bain (2025).

What this means for you: Map your content to the full buying group, not just the decision-maker. Think about what each stakeholder needs to feel confident, and create work that builds that confidence at every stage.

3. Funnel-stage impact compounds, so stop measuring it in isolation

Most B2B teams still measure in silos: brand metrics in one world, demand metrics in another, and pipeline expected to make sense of both. It's one of the most persistent blind spots in B2B marketing, and it was one of the sharpest conversations we had in our studio. Kimberly Storin from Zoom, Nicole German from HSBC, and Phil Gaughran from Dentsu Creative joined LinkedIn's Alex Josephson to dig into why this approach keeps underperforming and what it looks like when brands finally break out of it.

Storin walked us through how Zoom reframed the relationship between brand and demand not as a trade-off, but as a compounding system. When the two work in coordinated alignment, each one makes the other more effective. For Zoom, that shift translated into a 55% lift in lead generation, a 6x improvement in conversion rates, and a 20% improvement in pipeline. Those aren't incremental gains. They're what happens when brand stops being treated as a separate budget line and starts being treated as the upstream force that makes demand work harder.

The point isn't to collapse brand and demand into a single, shapeless strategy. It's to make the relationship between them deliberate. When brand builds the right associations and demand activates them at exactly the right moment, each one amplifies the other. When they run in separate lanes, both leave results on the table.

What this means for you: Start by looking at how your brand and demand teams actually work together; how they share data, coordinate creative, and define success. If those conversations aren't happening, that's where results are slipping away. The goal isn't to blur the line between brand and demand. It's to make sure the handoff between them is intentional, connected, and built to compound.

4. Influence is now about credibility at scale, not reach

A shift that's been building for a while in B2B came into sharp focus at Cannes Lions 2026: the declining value of reach as a proxy for influence, and the rising importance of credibility.

LinkedIn’s Heather Freeland hosted a conversation with next-gen creators Jahleane Dolne, Damaryan Benton, and Jade Walters that made the point clearly: these three have built audiences not through scale alone, but through specificity and trust. What connected their stories was the same thread: their audiences follow them because they believe them, not just because they find them.

87% of B2B buyers prefer content from trusted industry creators, and 82% say it actively influences their purchase decisions at every stage of the buying journey (Global Web Index Power of Influence Survey for LinkedIn, 2024). 

That has even translated to the world of sports. Today's athletes aren't just endorsers, they're creators with genuine editorial authority and built-in audiences who trust their perspective. NBA legend Carmelo Anthony made that case in person, joining Denver Nugget’s player Spencer Keith Jones, Sarah Meron of IBM, and Kandace Barker of Omnicom to explore what sport teaches B2B marketers about influence. 

Anthony's career spans three decades of building belief, not just through performance, but through consistent, credible presence. That, Meron and Barker argued, is exactly the model B2B brands need to follow.  

LinkedIn athlete membership data presented at the session reinforced the point: athletes joining the platform aren't doing so to broadcast, they're doing so to build professional credibility and connect with business audiences who see them as more than competitors.

What this means for you: Invest in the voices inside your organization. Equip your executives and subject matter experts with the content, frameworks, and platforms to share their perspective publicly. Credibility at scale starts with credible individuals.

5. AI is now the front door to brand discovery, and it rewards credibility

The final theme to emerge from Cannes Lions 2026 was the one with the longest tail, and arguably the highest stakes. It confronted a reality our industry is facing: AI-powered tools have fundamentally changed how buyers find information, evaluate options, and form opinions about brands. The shift is happening faster than most marketing teams have planned for.

In a Cannes Lions official session with LinkedIn, “Winning The AI Discovery Era: Marketing to Minds and Machines,” CMOs from the world’s most influential brand tackled this problem. 

The numbers presented in the session were clarifying. 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models as part of their research process. 

LinkedIn is now the #1 most-cited domain for professional queries across AI search platforms. (Profound, 2026) 

Perhaps the most actionable data point: 75% of those citations trace back to individual profile content, not brand pages. Which means that if your organization's thought leaders aren't publishing on LinkedIn, your brand is largely invisible to the AI systems your buyers are using to make decisions.

The implication for marketers is both urgent and solvable. AI systems don't favor brands with the biggest ad budgets. They favor brands with the most credible, consistent, and well-structured content. The organizations that have invested in authoritative publishing, through their leaders, their subject matter experts, and their LinkedIn presence, are the ones showing up when buyers ask an LLM to recommend a solution.

What this means for you: Treat LinkedIn content as infrastructure, not just distribution. Audit what your executive and expert voices are publishing, how frequently, and whether it's structured in a way that AI systems can surface. The goal is to be citable, because in the AI discovery era, being citable is being visible.

The Next Era of B2B Marketing

What made Cannes Lions 2026 valuable wasn't any single session or statistic. It was watching five distinct conversations point in the same direction: toward accountability, credibility, and integration.

B2B marketing is being asked to do more: to prove outcomes, to move buyers through more complex journeys, to build trust with audiences that are harder to reach and faster to dismiss. The brands that showed up in the strongest position at Cannes were the ones that had stopped treating these as separate challenges and started treating them as a connected system all working towards trust and belief. 

Follow @LinkedInforMarketing to stay current on the insights, research, and conversations that matter most to B2B marketers.

     

Along the Croisette at Cannes Lions this year, between the bustling beach activations, standing-room-only keynotes, and endless conversations about agents, prompts and AI, one theme kept surfacing among marketing leaders:

The future belongs to brands that can prove they're worth talking about.

Not because AI needs more content. If anything, the opposite is true – we're drowning in it.

But as AI assistants increasingly become the gatekeepers of discovery, they're also becoming curators of credibility. Every day, LLMs are deciding which brands, experts, customer stories, reviews, creators and perspectives get surfaced when buyers ask questions.

In that world, visibility isn't earned simply by publishing more. It's earned by being cited, referenced, recommended and trusted.

That's changing how marketing works.

It's changing how people search. It's changing how brands build authority. It's changing how buyers make decisions. And it's changing what marketers need to do to remain relevant.

Across conversations with marketing leaders from Google, OpenAI, Chase, HP, Asana, Salesforce, Dropbox and beyond, a new reality began to emerge: we're moving from an attention economy to an intelligence economy.

As Colin Fleming, CMO of Business at OpenAI, put it:

"We've been coming to Cannes for many years now and have seen this attention economy at its finest. It's created the most amazing work that was focused on attention-grabbing behavior. But I think we're entering this intelligence economy where it's about usefulness."

The irony is this – technology is moving faster than ever but many of the winners in this new era will succeed by returning to fundamentals: understanding buyers, building trust, creating genuinely useful content and earning credibility through people, not just platforms.

The marketers who thrive won't necessarily be the ones producing the most content. They'll be the ones creating the most trusted conversations.

What Skills Will Matter Most for Marketers?

As AI automates more routine work, the skills that differentiate marketers are becoming more human: curiosity, judgment, communication, creativity and the ability to connect ideas across disciplines.

While much of the conversation around AI at Cannes focused on technology, some of the strongest insights focused on people.

Colin Fleming pushed the discussion beyond tools and platforms, arguing that the real competitive advantage lies in how marketers think:

“The technology is infinitely capable now. It's no longer a limitation of what the technology can offer you. It's: can we query it in the most interesting way? Can we stretch the brain and get curious enough to really push it to the next level?” 

This reframes AI as a creativity and curiosity challenge rather than a technical one.

CMO of JP Morgan Chase, Carla Hassan, echoed a similar idea when discussing future leadership:

“The people that are going to lead this are the people who have the ability to connect all the dots. They see patterns, they see connections, and they understand how one action impacts somebody else's work and ultimately the business.”

Several speakers also pushed back on the idea that AI would diminish the importance of creativity.

As Liz Armistead of Dropbox put it:

"Taking the time to hone your perspective and have a unique point of view is the true differentiator of brands in this new era."

The consensus among marketing leaders was that AI is increasing the value of distinctly human capabilities rather than reducing them. The marketers most likely to thrive are those who combine technical curiosity with attributes like strategic thinking, creativity and communication. 

What Should Marketing Leaders Do Right Now?

Marketing leaders should create environments where teams can experiment safely, learn continuously and build confidence with AI. The greatest challenge is not deploying the technology but helping people adapt to it.

The deeper conversation at Cannes wasn't about what AI can do. It was about whether marketers and organizations can adapt quickly enough to take advantage of it. 

For many marketing leaders the “people challenges” were harder than the technology challenges.

Shiv Singh described what many organizations are experiencing:

"We're seeing what I refer to as work identity shifting. People aren't sure what their jobs will look like in the future. They're not sure they'll be as valuable as they once were. Beneath the surface, it's creating a real uneasiness in organizations."

That uncertainty is real. And leaders have a responsibility to address it.

Lorraine Twohill emphasized the importance of vulnerability:

"We're all on this high-speed learning curve. None of us are experts. We're still having to completely transform how we work and bring our entire organization through this journey."

Meanwhile, Carla Hassan stressed the importance of creating structured environments for experimentation rather than simply asking teams to "figure it out."

The most successful organizations aren't waiting for certainty. They're building frameworks that allow people to learn, experiment and adapt together.

And increasingly, leaders are being asked to balance two opposing realities: helping teams move faster while creating enough safety and support that people don't get left behind.

The Real Opportunity for Marketers

AI isn't simply creating new marketing tools. It's changing how people discover information, whom they trust, how they make decisions, and what skills organizations value.

That presents enormous challenges.But it also creates enormous opportunities.

Across every discussion – from AI search to attribution, from creator influence to organizational transformation – a common theme emerged: the future belongs to marketers who stay relentlessly focused on the customer.

As Prashi Gore, CMO of Asana, reminded marketers:

"The pace of change is forcing us to think differently about a lot of things, but in some ways just go back to the basics: what does the buyer care about?"

And as John Zissimos, Chief Brand & Creative Officer at Salesforce, put it:

"The moment you take your eyes off your real purpose –helping your customer succeed –you're not going to do great marketing."

The marketers who thrive in the AI era won't necessarily be the ones who master every new platform or prompt engineering technique. They'll be the ones who can navigate ambiguity, connect ideas, build trust with their customers. 

Key Takeaways from Cannes 2026

1. Visibility is becoming an outcome of credibility. In an AI-powered world, being referenced, recommended and trusted matters more than simply being present.
   
2. Winning discovery requires an ecosystem, not just a website. Customers, creators, employees, partners and communities all influence how brands show up in AI-powered experiences.
   
3. The brands that create the most trusted conversations will outperform the brands that create the most content.
   
4. AI is accelerating the value of distinctly human skills. Creativity, judgment, taste, storytelling and relationship-building are becoming more important—not less.
   
5. Future marketing leaders will be connectors. The ability to spot patterns, link ideas and align teams is emerging as a critical competitive advantage.
   
6. Organizations that learn fastest will win fastest. The biggest opportunity isn't access to AI—it's building a culture that encourages experimentation, curiosity and continuous learning.
   
7. The most durable strategy remains the simplest one: understand your audience, solve real problems and create genuine value.
   

The technology may be new, but the mandate is familiar: earn attention by being useful, earn trust by being credible, and earn growth by delivering value. The brands that do all three will be the ones that stand out in an AI-powered future.

Looking for more insights on how AI is transforming the customer journey? Explore the rest of our AI Search series for practical guidance on adapting your content and marketing strategy.

     

TL;DR

• One playbook doesn’t fit all: A webinar, a conference, and a flagship summit are fundamentally different events that require different timelines, ad formats, and follow-up strategies. Match your approach to the commitment level each event demands.
• Start earlier than you think: Virtual events need 2–3 weeks of promotion; in-person and hybrid events need at least 3 months. The more a buyer has to commit (travel, budget, time) the longer your runway needs to be.
• Measure what matches your goal: Webinars are for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), conferences are for meetings and booth visits, and flagships are for deal velocity. 
• Take the LinkedIn Marketing Academy course to learn how to plan, launch, and optimize a LinkedIn Event campaign.
  

The right playbook for every event type

Getting someone to block an hour for a webinar is a quick ask. Getting that same person to book flights, clear their calendar, and convince their boss to approve a conference budget? That's a months-long sell.

Yet most event marketing treats both the same way.

The teams consistently winning with B2B events understand something others miss: the playbook has to match the commitment level. What works for a webinar will stall at a conference. What drives registrations for a flagship will feel like overkill for a product demo. Here's how to match your strategy to what each event actually demands.

Why a one-size-fits-all approach fails

Most event promotion defaults to the same pattern: a few emails, some social posts, and a display ad or two. The problem is that approach ignores what makes each event type unique, and what it actually asks of your audience.

When you match your marketing strategy to the level of commitment each event demands, you get better results. Here’s how to build the right playbook for the three most common B2B event types.

Playbook 1: Webinars

Webinars are your demand gen workhorse. They’re efficient, low-friction, and perfect for connecting with buyers who are actively researching a problem you can help solve. Product demos, thought leadership panels, educational sessions — webinars let you deliver focused value fast and generate pipeline signals in real time.

The barrier to entry is low, which means your promotional approach can move quickly and with precision.

Promotion timeline: 2–4 weeks

For most webinars, two to three weeks of promotion is the right window. If you’re running a larger virtual event with multiple speakers or tracks, extend that to four weeks. Start too early and you lose urgency; start too late and you miss your best-fit attendees who’ve already filled their calendars.

Key LinkedIn tactics

• Event Ads: Purpose-built for driving registrations. They integrate naturally into the feed with all the key details upfront, and shift automatically from pre-event promotion to live viewership to on-demand replay — one ad unit, full lifecycle coverage.
• LinkedIn Live: If you’re broadcasting directly on LinkedIn, native live streaming reaches professionals right where they are — no redirect, no friction.
• Sponsored Messaging: Test whether messages sent from a speaker’s profile outperform those sent from your brand page. In many cases, a personal sender drives higher sign-up rates.
  

Post-event actions

Your webinar shouldn’t end when you hit stop on the recording. The audience you’ve built is your warmest pipeline. Here’s how to keep that energy alive:

• Retarget attendees: Serve them mid-funnel content tied to what they just watched. If they sat through a product demo, follow up with a case study.
• Re-engage no-shows: They registered for a reason. Send the on-demand recording and run retargeting campaigns to pull them back in.
• Repurpose your content using event clipping: Edit the recording into three or four short clips for awareness campaigns. A single webinar can fuel your funnel for months as an on-demand asset. 
  

Measure success by

• MQLs generated
• Cost per lead
• On-demand views and dwell time

Playbook 2: Conferences

Conferences are where relationships deepen, deals accelerate, and your brand shows up with scale and authority. The goal isn’t just filling your booth — it’s warming target accounts before they arrive, having higher-quality conversations when they do, and extending your presence far beyond the venue walls.

Your booth might hold 50 people. Your LinkedIn campaign can reach 50,000.

Promotion timeline: 3 months

In-person attendance requires real commitment: travel, budget sign-off, time blocked. That means you need a longer runway to get on buyers’ radars before their calendars fill up. Start awareness campaigns three months out. If your conference includes a major product launch, layer in direct-response campaigns four to six weeks before the event so your message lands when buyers are primed to act.

Key LinkedIn tactics

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Run targeted ads to the specific companies you know will be attending - on LinkedIn and with off-platform event ads, wherever those accounts spend time online. Warm your target accounts before they arrive so booth conversations start with context and convert more easily. Learn more about how to put this strategy into action, here.
• Sponsored Messaging: Use direct messages to invite key decision-makers to exclusive dinners, VIP sessions, or private booth tours. Messages sent from an individual (not a brand page) drive a 3.6x lift in InMail acceptance rates for members who’ve viewed a LinkedIn Live from your company.
• Thought Leader Ads: Build social kits for your speakers so they can drive hype before the event. Authentic posts from real voices outperform brand ads, and extend your reach to each speaker’s own network.
  

Post-event actions

The window right after a conference is when intent is highest. Move fast:

• Immediate conversion campaigns: The week after, run campaigns targeting everyone who visited your booth or engaged with your event content.
• Reach the full buying group: The person who stopped by your booth is one of 6.8 stakeholders in the average B2B buying decision. Use your CRM data to identify their colleagues and run campaigns to the entire buying committee.
• Extend your keynote: Turn your main stage session into a LinkedIn Live replay, short video clips using Event Clipping, and Document Ads. A single day on stage can generate weeks of pipeline-driving content.
  

Measure success by

• Booth visits and meetings booked
• Pipeline created from conference touchpoints
• Account coverage across target companies

Playbook 3: Flagship events

Flagship events are your brand’s biggest stage, where your narrative, customer community, and product vision all come together. They’re also your most scrutinized investment. Getting the most from them means thinking beyond registrations and treating the event as a full-funnel, multi-month campaign.

Done right, a flagship event can fuel your brand for an entire quarter. Some brands have keynote content that generates leads for over a year.

Promotion timeline: 3–6 months

Flagship events require a long runway. You’re not just asking for someone’s hour, you’re asking for their travel budget, their calendar, and their team’s attention. Build executive visibility months in advance with Thought Leader Ads and Video Ads that establish credibility before the invitation arrives. The brands that win at flagships make their audience feel like attending is obvious, not optional.

Key LinkedIn tactics

• Multi-month Video Ads and Thought Leader Ads: Feature your top executives and speakers early to build excitement and establish core themes. Behind-the-scenes content (rehearsal clips, speaker previews, venue setup) creates authentic anticipation that drives registrations.
• LinkedIn Live keynotes: Stream your main stage moments to audiences who couldn’t attend. As little as 15 minutes of live content is enough to engage a virtual audience, so be selective - prioritize sessions with the highest attendee anticipation.
• Event Ads across the full lifecycle: Before (drive registrations). During (shift to live viewership). After (promote the replay). One ad unit handles all three phases automatically.
  

Post-event actions

The post-event window is where flagship ROI compounds:

• Share session recordings: Package keynotes and breakouts into an on-demand library. Record short 2–3 question interviews with speakers to surface bonus insights and retarget attendees to watch.
• Run upsell campaigns: Flagships attract your current customers. Use the momentum to launch targeted upsell and cross-sell campaigns tied to the products announced on stage.
• Sustain the community: Keep the conversation alive through dedicated digital groups or localized micro-events in key markets. The goal is to keep the flywheel spinning long after the curtain closes.
  

Measure success by

• Pipeline influenced and deal velocity
• Customer retention rates (attendees vs. non-attendees)
• Downstream conversion lift from exposed audiences

You can learn more about measuring event success by completing the short LinkedIn Marketing Academy event measurement course.

At a glance: choosing your events strategy

Use this framework to align your team on the right expectations, tactics, and metrics before you launch your next event campaign.

The event type changes. The strategy adapts. But the principle stays the same: match your playbook to what your event actually demands, from your audience, your team, and your budget. When you do, every investment compounds into real, measurable results.

To see the full framework in action, download the complete Events on LinkedIn guide for the end-to-end playbook on webinars, conferences, and flagship events.

And if you want to continue learning how to create high impact skills or put your skills to the test, visit the ‘Create high-performing events on LinkedIn’ pathway on LinkedIn Marketing Academy.

     

Marketers in the US, UK, Germany, India and globally are all fighting the same battle right now: convincing leadership that marketing is driving revenue, not just racking up impressions. When we first introduced the term bullspend to describe wasted advertising budgets, the global reaction was immediate and consistent. Professionals from different countries and industries all agreed that their organizations suffered from this exact problem. Vanity metrics like impressions and clicks often mask the reality that campaigns are failing to drive actual sales or pipeline growth.

To address this universal challenge, we took Bullspend global. We knew a single message broadcasted everywhere wouldn't work. The idea had to feel local, not translated. So we worked with our local marketing teams to do exactly that and launched tailored versions last month at OMR in Germany and Goafest in India.

How did the Bullspend campaign adapt for the German market?

Taking the campaign to Germany required wrestling with a familiar localization challenge. Advertising campaigns rarely translate one-to-one between languages. This is especially true when the core creative idea relies on a coined, provocative slang term like bullspend.

The term bullspend doesn’t translate literally into German. “While a German audience might understand the English claim, the wordplay simply wouldn't land with the necessary punch. The team needed a tagline that felt entirely native rather than translated.” - Reinhard Hupfer, Marketing Lead for Germany at LinkedIn 

So we built something new instead. We combined Unsinn — German for nonsense — with invest, and landed on Unsinnvest: investing money in nonsense. Not a translation. Its own word, built for its own market.

We brought it to the Online Marketing Rockstars (OMR) Festival, one of Europe's largest marketing and tech festivals, with 70,000 attendees in Germany this year. It provided exactly the right stage for a conversation about wasted advertising budgets. The campaign also picked up coverage in Horizont, a leading German marketing trade publication.

How did the Bullspend campaign adapt for the India market?

For India, the term ‘Bullspend’ needed rethinking. Bulls and cows carry deep religious significance there, and our first major brand campaign in the country wasn't going to risk getting that wrong.

We landed on Dullspend instead. "Dull" is a word actually used day to day in India. A bad movie is dull, a flop song is dull. Marketing spend that moves nothing is peak dullspend. It kept the urgency of the original idea while fitting the way people actually talk.

We introduced Dullspend at Goafest, India's premier advertising festival, where it landed instantly. 88% of B2B marketers in India agree that proving ROI matters more than it did two years ago, so the room didn't need convincing on the problem, just a word for it.

So what does this mean for marketers everywhere?

Bullspend, Unsinnvest, Dullspend — three words, one idea: marketers everywhere are done paying for optics. This isn't one message broadcast blindly across markets. It's the same truth, said in the language each room already speaks.

To eliminate wasted spend, marketing professionals must adopt platforms and strategies that directly link advertising to revenue. You should focus your efforts on channels that offer precision targeting and clear measurement capabilities.

LinkedIn Ads allows advertisers to target specific buyers by their industry, company, and job title.

• This level of precision prevents budgets from disappearing into irrelevant audiences.
• Furthermore, data shows that the B2B marketing platform delivers a 121% return on ad spend, which is the highest of any major ad network. (Source: Dreamdata Benchmarks Report, 2026)

     

TL;DR:

Vanity metrics don't win budgets: registrations and badge scans look good in recaps but rarely lead to more budget. Measure how events move revenue forward.

Use a three-layer framework: Reach (right accounts), Engagement (meaningful action), Revenue Impact (pipeline opened, deals accelerated, revenue influenced).

Connect data to prove it: CRM sync, CAPI, and revenue attribution turn event data into boardroom-ready proof and earn events a permanent budget line.

Pipeline beats attendance: measuring your event success

Here’s a question every event marketer eventually faces: your CFO looks at the recap and asks, “How much pipeline did this actually create?” If you’re pointing to registrations and badge scans, that doesn’t tell the whole story. 

Vanity metrics are easy to count and hard to defend. They tell you people showed up. They don’t tell you whether your event nudged a deal forward, influenced a decision-maker, or generated a single dollar of revenue. If you want your event budget to grow, or even hold, you need a measurement approach that connects your events directly to the outcomes your business actually cares about.

That shift starts with knowing what to measure and how.

The problem with defaulting to vanity metrics

For years, event success has been measured by headcount: how many people registered, how many badges were scanned, what percentage logged in. Those numbers are easy to pull and look impressive in a slide deck. But they don’t answer the question that matters: did this event drive real business results?

A webinar is meaningless if the attendees aren’t in your buying group. A spreadsheet full of badge scans from a conference booth is a collection of data points, not a pipeline. When you optimize for volume, you end up chasing the wrong signals, and that’s how event budgets get cut.

The most effective B2B event marketers solve this by replacing vanity metrics with a three-layer framework built around quality reach, meaningful engagement, and revenue impact.

The three-layer measurement framework

Think of this as measuring your events the same way you'd measure any demand gen program, by what moves buyers through your funnel and into your pipeline. LinkedIn's Events Measurement Solutions framework maps every stage to concrete KPIs and the tools to track them, so you aren’t left guessing at impact.

Upper Funnel: Drive event visibility and awareness

At the top of the funnel, success means maximizing reach across the accounts and decision-makers that matter to your business. The question isn't just how many people registered, it's whether the right people did.

Your events strategy is working when you're expanding reach and event awareness across target accounts and key decision-makers. 

That means measuring:

• Unique Reach: how many distinct individuals in your ICP (ideal customer profile) saw your event
• Brand Lift: measurable change in brand perception among your target audience
• On-target impressions and account coverage: if your sales team is pursuing 100 companies this quarter, the goal is to see as many of them as possible show up in your registration data.

LinkedIn's in-platform campaign reporting in Campaign Manager and Brand Lift Testing (available both natively and via third-party measurement) let you validate your campaign’s impact on awareness before and after the event, so you're not guessing.

Middle Funnel: Generate qualified engagement and drive event registrations

Engagement tells you whether the audience you attracted actually invested in your event, and where in the experience they were most active. It's the signal between "showed up" and "moved forward." Success here means converting awareness into registrations and sustaining meaningful activity post-event.

What to measure:

• Engagement Rate: the quality of interaction, not just volume
• High-value website actions taken before and after the event
• Event Registrations, Attendance, and View Rates:who stayed through to the end versus dropped off early
• Offline actions — demo requests, trial activations, meeting bookings that trace back to event touchpoints

The right solution stack for this stage includes Campaign Manager reporting, Event Analytics, Insight Tag with Website Actions, and Conversions API (CAPI) — together giving you a complete picture of both online and offline engagement signals.

Bottom Funnel: Connect event engagement to business outcomes and closed revenue

This is the layer that changes budget decisions. Revenue attribution connects your event directly to the outcomes your CFO is tracking: pipeline opened, deals accelerated, revenue influenced. Success means measuring events' impact on lead pipeline, revenue, and demonstrating full return on ad spend.

What to measure:

• Open Pipeline — new pipeline created within a defined attribution window post-event
• Revenue — deals influenced or accelerated by event touchpoints
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) — the full picture of event investment versus return

The solution set here goes deeper and gives you the connective tissue between event data and your CRM; so pipeline acceleration, deal velocity, and downstream conversion lift aren't just hypotheses.

And while these tools make the work faster and more precise, you don't need a fully integrated tech stack to start connecting the dots. Even without advanced attribution software, teams can manually cross-reference event registration lists against CRM records, track which attendees later converted, and surface patterns in deal timelines. The signal is there — these tools just help you find it faster.

The tools that make measurement possible

Understanding the framework is the first step. The second is having the right systems in place to actually capture the data and measure success. These tools are the foundation.

Harness the Power of Data

CRM sync

Your CRM is where event data becomes actionable. When your event platform syncs directly with your CRM, every attendee’s journey, which sessions they joined, what they engaged with, where they dropped off, gets logged automatically against their contact and account record.

This gives your sales team a personalized map for every follow-up conversation. And for your marketing ops team, it means you can trace closed-won deals back to event touchpoints, quarter over quarter, and show exactly which moments moved buyers forward.

Conversions API (CAPI)

Browser pixels are increasingly unreliable. Privacy updates and ad blockers break the tracking trail before you can follow it. CAPI builds a direct, server-side connection between your marketing systems and your ad platforms, so you can track the full conversion journey without depending on third-party cookies.

With CAPI, you can see not just who registered, but which ad drove them to act, even if they switched devices along the way. That lets you optimize budget toward the campaigns that are actually delivering registrations, not just the ones that look like they are.

Tie Event Ads Impact to Business Outcomes 

Attribution 

Attribution connects the dots between your event ad spend and revenue outcomes. In B2B, a multi-touch model gives you visibility into how various touchpoints in the buyer journey impact When you walk into a budget meeting with a clear attribution report in hand, the conversation changes. You’re not defending registrations, you’re showing pipeline sourced, deals accelerated, and revenue influenced. That’s the story that earns your event a permanent budget line.

Your event success scorecard

Before your next event, build a simple scorecard that defines 3–5 success metrics across reach, engagement, and revenue. Align your team on targets upfront so you’re not scrambling to define success after the fact.

Use this template as a starting point:

Measurement is where your event strategy either earns a permanent budget line or gets cut next year. The good news: if you’ve been building your events as an integrated before, during, and after motion, you’re already halfway there. This framework gives you the other half.

Stop measuring events as standalone moments. Start measuring how they move revenue forward.

Ready to put your event measurement strategy into action? Download the full guide here.

     

Beyond the Algorithm: Why Reputation and Trust Are the Ultimate AI-Era Differentiators

While the marketing world’s attention was on the creative showcases in Cannes, an equally important conversation unfolded at VivaTech 2026 in Paris.

Unsurprisingly, AI dominated the discussion. But as the hype settles, the most compelling takeaway for business leaders isn’t about the technology itself. A powerful theme emerged from executive conversations: in an AI-powered world, reputation, trust, and human credibility are the ultimate competitive advantages.

When algorithms can generate content at scale, authenticity becomes a rare commodity. Here are the key lessons from VivaTech on how forward-thinking brands are turning reputation into revenue.

1. Your Reputation Isn't a Campaign—It's a Full-Funnel Growth Engine

How do you transform public perception of a traditional industrial giant into a recognized leader in digital transformation and AI?

This was the focus of our session, “Building a New Reputation: How Siemens Shapes the Conversation in the AI Era,” featuring Christiane Ribeiro (Siemens) and Lauren de Boer (LinkedIn).

Siemens’ journey is a masterclass for modern B2B marketers, proving that a strong reputation is built over time through sustained executive thought leadership, not isolated product campaigns. When leaders actively shape industry conversations, the market listens.

Why Executive Voices Must Be Authentic and Accessible

This isn’t about dry corporate communications. To build genuine trust, executives need to show up authentically where their audience is.

Take Siemens’ CEO, Roland Busch. Instead of relying on dense PDF press releases to announce financial results, he used short-form video on LinkedIn with a brilliantly simple hook: "30 seconds. One cappuccino to pitch our Siemens Q2 results." By humanizing the C-suite and delivering complex data in an engaging format, Siemens shows exactly how to use executive thought leadership to drive brand affinity.

How to Turn Your Event Strategy into an Influence Engine

A strong reputation should fuel your entire event strategy, not just sit at the top of the funnel. Events are no longer isolated moments; they are continuous engines for influence.

For flagship events like Hannover Messe, Siemens partnered with LinkedIn to create a 360-degree journey that connected:

•  Top-of-Funnel: Executive thought leadership and brand awareness.
•  Middle-of-Funnel: Deep audience engagement and driving physical booth traffic.
•  Bottom-of-Funnel: Tangible lead generation and business outcomes.

Put it into practice: To move beyond vanity metrics, marketers must treat events as holistic campaigns. Engage your audience long before the opening keynote and continue the conversation long after the event ends.

Looking to apply a similar strategy? Check out LinkedIn’s Events Best Practices Guide for proven strategies to maximize the impact of your events.

2 .In an AI-Driven World, the Real Frontier Is Organizational Design

The structural shifts facing leadership were explored further in our panel, “Becoming a Frontier Marketing Organization: How CMOs lead in an AI‑first, agent‑driven world?” featuring Fiona Carney (Microsoft), Matti Yahav (Fiverr), Vincent Druguet (VML), and Amandine Martin Briand (LinkedIn).

The consensus? The biggest shift in the age of AI isn’t the tools we use, but how we make decisions. Three defining insights emerged for the future of marketing:

Frontier CMOs Redesign Decision-Making, Not Just Tech Stacks

Being a "frontier" organization isn't about adopting AI tools faster; it's about organizational design. True leadership means bringing decisions closer to real-time data and moving away from rigid hierarchies. The frontier CMO isn’t the person with the best ideas; it’s the leader most willing to change their mind when the data says so.

Your New Audience is an AI: Market to Machines or Become Invisible

Here’s a staggering reality for B2B brands: 94% of B2B buyers now start their discovery process with Large Language Models (LLMs), and 80% of shortlisted brands are in the top three at that initial stage.

Visibility alone is no longer enough. We have officially moved from the era of attention to the era of reputation. Metrics like "share of mention" within AI models are becoming as critical as search rankings. If algorithms don't trust your brand, buyers won't even know you exist.

AI Generates, But Humans Create Impact

The bottleneck in marketing is no longer content creation—AI has solved that. The real bottleneck is the quality of human judgment and trust. AI can scale your output, but humans provide the empathy, ethical oversight, and contextual judgment that make a message resonate. Becoming a frontier organization requires a cultural redesign, not just a productivity add-on.

The Frontier Takeaway

The future belongs to organizations that understand technology is only half the equation. The real frontier isn’t having the best AI model; it’s having the courage to rebuild our habits, protect our brand’s credibility, and deepen human connection—before someone else rebuilds our industry for us.

Follow the LinkedIn for Marketing Page for more insights and takeaways like these.

     

If you've ever spent hours crafting a single ad only to wonder whether a different headline or image might have worked better, you're not alone. For most small and growing businesses, ad creative is a bottleneck. It’s not because the ideas aren't there. It’s because turning those ideas into multiple polished creatives takes time that most lean teams don't have.

The result? Advertisers tend to run one ad, gather limited signals, and make decisions based on incomplete data, limiting their growth. 

That's exactly what LinkedIn's newest creative capabilities are designed to change. Built for teams that want to move faster without sacrificing quality, these tools support every stage of your creative process, from your first draft to scaling what works.

Why creative experimentation matters more than you might think

The strongest B2B campaigns are shaped through iteration: testing different messages, adapting creative for different audiences, and doubling down on what drives results.

LinkedIn data backs this up. Based on internal analysis, advertisers who run five or more ad variants see over 20% higher click-through rates on LinkedIn compared to those running just one ad. That's a meaningful lift and it comes not from spending more, but from testing more.

The challenge is that generating multiple high-quality variations has historically required significant time, creative expertise, and resources. For businesses managing campaigns alongside a dozen other priorities, that's a real barrier.

What's new: LinkedIn's creative capabilities for small and growing businesses

LinkedIn is rolling out a set of tools in Campaign Manager designed to make it easier to drive results from the creative process, from generating a first draft to personalizing ads for specific audiences to scaling what's already working.

Build a strong foundation with Brand Kit

One of the less obvious challenges of scaling creative output is inconsistency. When you're producing more ads across more campaigns, it's easy for visual and messaging to become off-brand. brand kit solves this by letting you define your brand's colors, fonts, logo, tone of voice, and key messages once so every new ad you create with AI stays on-brand, regardless of how much you're producing.

Draft with AI: going from blank page to first draft in seconds

There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank page. Anchored in your brand guidelines, we leverage AI to help you draft your ads, generating ad copy grounded in your actual business inputs. All you need is a URL for what you’re advertising, your campaign goals, and any other context you can provide, such as past high-performing creatives. The creatives aren't just generic templates. They reflect your specific inputs, so you spend less time writing from scratch and more time refining.

Ads Personalization: make your message more relevant to specific audiences

Relevance drives results, but delivering it at scale can be challenging. ad personalization makes it easy to tailor your messaging using professional attributes like job title, company, and industry, so every impression feels more relevant. The impact is clear: SMB advertisers see stronger performance with Ads Personalization.* 

Experiment and Scale 

AI ad variants: create more ways to test without creating more work

The best-performing campaigns don't rely on a single message. AI ad variants help you generate multiple versions of an existing ad with new headlines and introductory text, so you can test different messaging angles without starting from scratch. By making it easier to experiment, you can quickly learn what resonates with your audience and improve campaign performance with less effort.

Scale creative and drive performance with Flexible Ad Creation 

Flexible ad creation helps you generate and test more creative variations from a single campaign setup. Simply provide the images, videos, and copy you want to use in your campaign, and LinkedIn mixes and matches them for you to create more creatives. Businesses using flexible ad creation generated roughly 7% more creative options for their ads, helping them learn what resonates most with their audience. The best part is that as performance signals emerge, LinkedIn automatically shifts ad delivery to the best creatives to make the most of your budget.

How these tools work together

Each tool is useful on its own, but together they unlock new levels of creative performance for time-strapped teams:

• Build a strong foundation with brand kit so every ad reflects your brand from the start
• Create relevant creative using “draft with AI” and ad personalization to generate ideas and tailor messaging
• Experiment and scale with AI ad variants and flexible ad creation to test multiple approaches and prioritize what performs

This isn't about automating your creative strategy. It's about removing the manual work that slows you down, so you can focus on the decisions that actually move the needle.

Learn how to use these tools effectively

Want to see how to actually put these tools into action? We’ve got you covered.

LinkedIn Marketing Academy features short, step-by-step videos designed to show you exactly how to apply these capabilities. From building more effective creative and scaling your output to using personalization the right way and making smarter creative decisions.

Get started with ad personalization and generative AI capabilities

Each video walks you through how to:

• Build high-performing creative using these new tools
• Scale and iterate across multiple ad variations
• Apply personalization in a way that feels relevant and authentic
• Turn your ideas into campaigns you can launch with confidence

The goal is simple: give you a clear, practical path from understanding these tools to actually using them with no guesswork required.

Start building better-performing creative in Campaign Manager.

*SMB advertisers see stronger performance, with +1.4% higher CTR for Website Conversion campaigns and +2.4% more lead gen clicks on Video Ads on average.

     

Search engines have completely changed how professionals discover content. Large language models now generate answers directly on the results page, pulling information from high-authority platforms. LinkedIn stands out as one of the #1 most trusted source for professional queries. 

Publishing content on LinkedIn is no longer just about reaching your immediate network. It is about positioning your insights to be retrieved and cited by AI. However, LinkedIn’s AI search tests show that simply posting an update does not guarantee visibility.

This article breaks down those findings. You will learn:

• The mechanical differences between posts and articles
• How URL construction impacts retrieval
• Practical steps to optimize your feed content for both human readers and AI systems.

What are LinkedIn posts?

LinkedIn posts are short updates of up to 3,000 characters that can be shared by both individuals and Company Pages. Designed to grab attention and spark interaction, they’re perfect for sharing quick observations, asking questions, or linking to external content. 

Posts can include text, images, videos, polls, or documents and are ideal for:

• Share insights or quick takeaways from your work
• Highlight industry trends or breaking news
• Start conversations with a professional audience
• Amplify longer-form content like articles, reports, or blog posts

While posts are the most common content type on the platform, they are highly time sensitive and rely on early engagement signals like comments and reactions to gain traction. Although individual posts are well-cited, many AI systems treat them as pointers to more substantial content. If a post links to an external article or blog post, LLMs can use that link as additional context.For AI search engines, posts often act as secondary pathways that point toward more comprehensive primary sources. 

How to publish LinkedIn posts in three easy steps

Publishing a post takes seconds. Publishing one that earns AI citations takes a bit more thought.

The distinction matters because the first line of your post often determines its URL slug — a technical detail with real consequences for discoverability. Here's the basic process:

1. Write a clean opening line. This first sentence often becomes the foundation of your post's URL. More on why that matters in the next section.
2. Add structured text and relevant media. Use clear formatting, short paragraphs, and — where appropriate — a list or numbered sequence.
3. Publish and reply to comments early. Engagement signals in the first 24 hours influence how widely a post is distributed. High-quality comments—those that add to the conversation with insights, questions, or different perspectives—are a positive signal for both the LinkedIn algorithm and AI retrieval systems.

Consistent publishing helps your brand stay visible in the feed. But it does more than that — it creates a body of discoverable expertise that extends beyond LinkedIn and into AI-powered search.

The difference between LinkedIn posts and articles

LinkedIn posts and articles serve different, yet complementary, purposes. Our data shows a significant difference in how they perform, especially with AI search.

Here's how the two formats compare:

LinkedIn articles:

• Ideal length: 800–1,200 words
• Best for: evergreen thought leadership, detailed analysis, and building authority with frameworks
• AI performance: higher citation share due to depth and structural clarity

LinkedIn posts:

• Ideal length: 200–300 words
• Best for: timely insights, conversation starters, and summarizing key points from longer content
• AI performance: strong for engagement-driven discovery and short-answer retrieval

How articles and posts work together

The biggest mistake is treating these formats as competitors. They're a system, and the value comes from how they feed each other. Use articles to establish authority on a topic, and posts to provide regular updates that reinforce it.

Here's a simple workflow:

1. Publish one strong article. This becomes your canonical, citation-worthy anchor on a topic.
2. Break it into three to five posts. Each post takes one idea, stat, or framework from the article and gives it room to breathe in the feed.
3. Use posts to test angles. Watch which ideas spark the most thoughtful engagement.
4. Incorporate learnings into your next article. Your audience's feedback indicates what topics need deeper exploration.

Articles earn authority. Posts distribute it and highlight conversations that will sharpen your next piece. Running both consistently builds a comprehensive presence across the feed and AI-driven search.

For cadence, LinkedIn's data suggests publishing one article and two to three posts weekly. Consistency is more important than volume.

Learn more about the difference between posts, articles, reposts and newsletters on LinkedIn.

Optimizing LinkedIn posts for readers and LLMs

Gaining visibility requires a blend of technical structuring and audience engagement. You must feed the algorithms exactly what they need to process your information while keeping content compelling for human readers.

Construct your URL carefully

LinkedIn uses the first line of your post to generate its URL. Avoid starting with hashtags like #socialmedia, as they create generic URLs and dilute your keyword signal. Instead, lead with your keywords. For example, a post beginning with "Drive social media engagement..." creates a more relevant URL, like /drive-social-media-engagement.

LinkedIn creates the URL when you first publish — editing the post later won't change it.

Pro tips for URL construction:

• Front-load keywords. Start your first sentence with the most important keywords related to your topic.
• Keep it clean. Avoid hashtags in your opening line.
• Be mindful of file names. If you attach a file to your post (like a PDF), the file's name can become the URL instead of the first line of your post.
• Know what happens when you reshare. When you share someone else's post that links to a blog post, the title of that blog post can influence how it's found and ranked.
• Double check your work. URLs can’t be edited after publishing.

Frame your opening line around a direct answer or a question-and-answer format. For example, a post beginning with "Did you know LinkedIn articles account for 60% of AI citations?" creates a cleaner, more keyword-rich URL than one starting with "#ContentMarketing has never been more competitive."

Structure for direct quotes

LLMs look for information they can easily extract and quote. Frame your posts around questions and answers. Use direct questions as subheadings and follow them with one or two brief sentences of explanation. This clear formatting makes the content highly quotable. Adding a short author biography at the end of your content also helps establish credibility.

Focus on educational value

People often come to LinkedIn to learn new things in an inherently credible environment. AI systems value LinkedIn posts for similar reasons. You might explain how something works, share first-hand experience, or break down trends into actionable insights. Educational content is key to discoverability.

Build authority and engagement

AI models favor content from authoritative sources. Recent Semrush research suggests that authors with 2,000 or more followers have a solid baseline for credibility. Engagement metrics also signal trustworthiness. Top content typically earns ten or more high-quality comments that add perspective or show consensus. Encourage your peers to leave thoughtful comments to boost these signals.

Maintain content freshness

Content discovery relies on consistent activity, so it's important to regularly post thoughtful perspectives and new information to your feed. A weekly publishing schedule, for instance, drives more visibility than a monthly one. You can also update older content; including specific dates in your text helps AI understand the timeline and relevance of your insights.

See it in action: three examples of successful LinkedIn posts

Theory only goes so far. Let’s look at how these rules apply to real content formats.

1.Insight-driven post: A short breakdown of a trend with a clear takeaway. Provide an important piece of information and actionable tips on what to do about it.

2.Framework post: A structured list or model that readers can easily understand and apply for themselves. Including a visual checklist or carousel-based slides can help this content stick.

3.Experience post: Tell a story or share a first-hand lesson your audience can learn from. Insightful event recaps featuring perspectives from your brand or its thought leaders can be very valuable for this purpose.

Final checklist

Use this checklist before you publish your next piece of content.

• Write a clean opening sentence to form a strong URL slug
• Avoid using hashtags in your copy
• Structure your text with clear questions and brief answers
• Aim for posts between 200 and 300 words
• Focus on education and adding value
• Post consistently at least 2-3x a week
• Publish a mix of posts and articles. Articles build authority, and posts reinforce it.

Read more from our AI search series

Optimizing for AI is an ongoing process. As language models evolve, the tactics for content visibility will shift. Building a strong foundation on LinkedIn is just the first step in future-proofing your digital presence.

Apply these URL formatting rules and engagement strategies to your Next post. Monitor how your content performs and adjust your approach based on the engagement you receive. Check out the rest of our AI search series for more tactical advice on driving visibility across all your digital channels.

     

For the last 25 years, B2B growth has been driven by what brands say about themselves. In the new LLM era, it will be driven by what the marketplace says about a brand.

B2B marketing was built on a simple premise: tell your story clearly enough, amplify it widely enough, and you could drive demand. Visibility drove traffic, traffic drove pipeline and pipeline drove growth.

It worked - because buyers left a visible trail. But in an AI-first age, those signals are becoming blurred. 

Today, B2B buyer journeys increasingly start with Zero Click AI recommendations: 94% of buying groups use Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini before talking to sales. LLMs are changing how and where brands are surfaced and considered. 

Buyers are no longer browsing, they’re asking. They pose context-rich questions and receive sythesised answers. The journey no longer unfolds gradually, and preference is shaped quickly. Unknown brands can enter consideration, while well-known brands can disappear just as fast if they don’t meet the specificity of the buyer’s questions.

AI doesn’t go out and find new things. It pulls from what already exists. Customer stories, customer questions, content and publications, expert opinions, creator content, mentions.

AI is not a discovery system. It’s a retrieval system.

So, the question is: how do I build a record worth retrieving?

At the same time, AI is making marketing dramatically more efficient - from content production to campaign setups and overall output. But here’s the paradox: more output does not mean more confidence. AI does not reduce buyer risk. And accelerating selection is not the same as building trust.

In other words, flying faster does not make flying safer. 

This is not just a ‘dark funnel’ problem. It’s a structural shift in how influence is formed. And when systems change, instruments must also change. 

In a world where traditional discovery signals are going dark, what really drives buying group decision making?

For the last three years, my colleague Jann Schwarz and I have been exploring this question with Bain and Company, alongside an industry alliance including the ANA, IAA, Cannes Lions and WARC. We call this system Buyability. 

At its core is a simple truth: In B2B, buyers don’t buy alone. Decisions are made by groups - and those groups don’t choose what they like. They choose what they can defend. 

Buying groups include not just champions and experts, but also stakeholders across legal, finance and procurement, each with their own risks and incentives. Alignment is critical, because if one stakeholder breaks formation, the deal can stall. In this context, familiarity becomes a form of safety.

Our research with Bain found that brands are 20 times more likely to be bought when everyone in the buying group knows them from the outset. Not because they are better, but because they are easier to agree on, justify and defend. 

In fact, the most important emotional driver in B2B buying is defensibility: “whose experience and authority can I look to that makes it possible to defend this choice?”

Buyability and AI are powered by the same signals

Buyers are choosing decisions they can stand behind if they go wrong. But what we are seeing now that is new is that AI discovery is also scaled from the same signals as Buyability.

Buyability and discoverability are different systems that share the same signal layer:

• Customer proof
• Peer recommendation
• Expert endorsement
• Relevance to a specific buying situation
  

These signals do two things at the same time: They help the buyers feel confident in choosing you. And they help AI systems determine there is enough consensus to recommend you. 

The new rules for getting bought

In an AI-mediated world, trust doesn’t disappear, it becomes the system. Buyability is the navigation system that connects trust to revenue. It sets out a new set of rules for getting bought:

• Be talked about - build reputational presence across customers, partners and industry voices. 
• Be surfaced - show up in AI generated answers.
• Be thought of - be mentally available from day one.
• Be defensible - enable the buying group to align.
  

This is not a funnel. It’s a compounding system, where reputation builds momentum over time. 

Reach traffic and clicks still matter. But they no longer determine who gets bought. With AI, growth comes from being trusted, remembered and agreed upon. That is the shift from visibility to Buyability. And it’s fast becoming the most reliable navigation system for B2B growth.

To learn more, explore the full set of Buyability posts here.

     

Every marketing leader knows the feeling. You’ve run a campaign, the results look strong, but when it’s time to report, the numbers don’t tell the full story. Clicks happened, conversions happened, but were your efforts truly incremental to your business’s success?

That gap between what attribution shows and what actually happened is exactly what incrementality is designed to close. With LinkedIn’s measurement tools, it’s now easier to prove that impact and use trusted insights to guide your marketing strategy.

Why is incrementality essential?

Traditional attribution models — last-click, first-touch, or multi-touch — often credit results that may have occurred without marketing efforts. A prospect already planning to convert still counts as a conversion. A customer who would’ve found you organically gets attributed to your campaign.

Executives don’t just want to know how many conversions happened. They want to know how many conversions your campaign caused. That’s a different question, requiring a different approach.

Incrementality testing answers this by comparing outcomes between an audience exposed to your ads and a control group that isn’t. It isolates the impact of your campaigns, answering: what would’ve happened if we hadn’t run this campaign at all?

For large organizations, the stakes are high. Incrementality testing validates media spend, guides budget allocation, and connects brand activity to revenue. It also provides clear, defensible evidence that holds up in executive discussions.

Introducing LinkedIn’s new measurement capabilities

LinkedIn is strengthening our incrementality suite to make testing more flexible, reduce friction and increase statistical power. This helps advertisers generate clearer, more trustworthy decision ready incrementality assessments with greater confidence. LinkedIn’s approach combines privacy-safe, first-party data with campaign-level experimentation and intuitive reporting, making it easier for marketers to move from measurement to confident decision-making.

Campaign-level Conversion Lift Testing

Previously, lift tests on LinkedIn were run at the account level, making it harder to isolate the performance of individual campaigns. Now, advertisers can assess incremental conversions at the campaign level to take action with confidence on each campaign.

For example, a company offering AI-powered contact center and communications solutions used campaign-level Conversion Lift Testing to move beyond last-click attribution and understand which campaigns were actually driving incremental conversions. This helped identify higher-performing campaign strategies and increase investment in areas delivering the strongest lift, with exposed audiences found to be 26% more likely to convert.

Because campaign-level Conversion Lift Testing is built directly into Campaign Manager and leverages LinkedIn’s deterministic member data, advertisers can measure and act on results in the same place they plan and optimize campaigns.

Brand Lift Testing design refresh adds clarity to reporting

Brand Lift Testing evaluates how LinkedIn campaigns affect brand awareness, consideration, and intent. The refreshed interface simplifies reporting with clearer summaries, confidence-based lift statuses, and audience-driven insights.

Complex lift test results shouldn’t require advanced expertise to understand. The updated interface design makes findings accessible to any marketer, not just data analysts. Built on LinkedIn’s professional audience data and survey design, these insights reflect real perceptions from high-intent audiences, not just engagement signals.

iOS measurement for better accuracy

Incrementality relies on accurately comparing exposed and control groups, but recent changes in iOS tracking have created gaps that make this harder to measure. LinkedIn is addressing this with a privacy-preserving approach that helps match iOS traffic while maintaining confidentiality, expanding signal coverage across key delivery channels like the LinkedIn Audience Network. This reduces blind spots and improves data completeness, enabling more accurate comparisons between exposed and control groups. As a result, advertisers can better capture the true incremental impact of their campaigns and have greater confidence in their results, even as privacy changes reshape how data is collected. Building on iOS measurement already available in Brand Lift Testing, these enhancements now expand coverage to Conversion Lift Testing as well.

Clearer, more conclusive lift test results

Finally, we’ve evolved our methodology to help more lift tests reach clear, decision‑ready outcomes by improving how confidence is measured and making results easier to interpret. With tests powered by a Bayesian approach to incremental measurement, advertisers can expect to see fewer inconclusive tests and more consistent detection of meaningful incremental impact. 

Best practices for effective lift tests

Tools alone don’t guarantee success. Properly setting up and analyzing lift tests ensures clear, actionable results. Follow these key best practices. 

• Define a single business question. Focus each test on one outcome, such as brand recall, consideration, or conversion, instead of measuring everything at once.
• Use a proper control group and adequate scale. Undersized tests can produce ambiguous results. Plan for sufficient budget ($80K USD+), campaign duration (30–90 days), and audience volume to reach conclusive outcomes.
• Leverage strong signals. We strongly recommend using Conversions API with any campaign or account running a conversion lift test. This improves data quality and closes tracking gaps, ensuring that your results are accurate.
• Plan for outcomes beyond standard attribution. Use lift testing to measure conversions influenced by your ads that may not appear in traditional attribution models, ensuring a more complete view of campaign impact. 
• Avoid overlapping experiments. Running multiple tests on overlapping audiences can skew results.
• Use audience‑level insights to guide decisions. In your Brand Lift Testing results, review voter‑based metrics in the reporting experience to understand how your target audience responded, and use those insights to refine messaging and optimize future campaigns.
• Apply insights to optimization. Use lift test results to inform budget allocation, creative strategy, and future campaign decisions.
  

We are here to help marketers confidently prove, understand and optimize their true business impact on Linkedin. Ready to get started? 

Log into Campaign Manager to explore these new features, or visit LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to learn more about building a full-lifecycle event strategy.