When I talk to B2B marketers right now, I hear the same thing: they know the landscape is shifting, but they're not sure where to start. Traditional SEO playbooks aren't keeping up, website traffic is declining, and the buyers they're trying to reach are increasingly getting answers from AI before they ever land on a brand's site.

That's why we built Unlocking AI Search Visibility: the B2B Marketer's Guide to LinkedIn.

This is our first comprehensive guide to AI search, designed for B2B marketers who are new to optimizing their content for AI visibility. We'll share real strategies and examples, internal test results, and real findings from the last eighteen months as we navigate this shift alongside you. We don't pretend to have all the answers, but we do have data, a framework, and a commitment to transparency about what's working (and what’s not).

Here are four lessons from the guide, and why they matter for your strategy.

AI search has already arrived, and here's how it's changing the way buyers find you.

The numbers tell a clear story. According to 6sense, 94% of B2B buyers now use generative AI for research. Gartner predicts that traditional search volume will drop by 50% by 2028. And here at LinkedIn, our own marketing sites have seen non-branded search traffic decline by up to 60%.

This isn't a future trend, it's happening now.

What makes this shift so significant for B2B marketers is how it changes the buying process itself. The average B2B buying cycle compressed from 11.3 months in 2024 to 10.1 months in 2025, driven by faster AI-enabled research (6sense, 2025). Buyers are doing more in less time, and they're doing it inside AI models.

According to Forrester, AI search is a top priority for 90% of B2B marketing and enterprise leaders. But only 34% of B2B tech marketers say they feel prepared to execute a strategy, with 51% citing limited internal knowledge as a key barrier (eMarketer, 2026).

Here's the other thing the data tells us: LinkedIn is your strongest starting point. Profound's 2026 research confirmed that LinkedIn is the number one most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search. Meltwater's 2026 analysis found that 75% of LinkedIn citations came from individual member profiles, with follower count mattering far less than demonstrated expertise.

As Mimi Turner, our head of marketplace innovation shared, "The shift to AI search ushers in an era where reputation can be more intentionally built, not just bought. Discoverability is no longer dominated by SEO or ad spend, but by the credibility signals a brand projects, like expert opinion, third-party media coverage, and authentic social commentary."

AI visibility isn't one team's job. It takes a coordinated content system.

The signals that shape AI visibility come from everywhere: owned channels, social, earned media, and employee voices. No single team touches all of them, so coordination becomes the real work.

The guide shares how we built an internal AI Search Taskforce that united SEO, PR, editorial, social, paid media, brand, and product marketing under one shared strategy. The results gave us a working model we could document and share.

The core idea is straightforward: AI systems don't just rank one "best" piece of content per query. They aggregate information across many sources, then synthesize an answer. That means a model is far more likely to cite your brand when several credible sources reinforce the same themes. One strong article isn't enough. You need a body of content that returns to the same topics from different angles.

Here are some key checklists to get you started. We go deeper on each of these within the guide.

Build your content foundation

• Align on three to four core topics your brand should own
• Build topic clusters around each theme
• Create multiple content pieces from different angles
• Use clear, consistent language and strip jargon from your LinkedIn Pages and posts

Put LinkedIn to work

• Establish your Company Page as a trusted entity
• Post at least 2-3x a week around your key topics
• Publish long-form articles on your priority themes
• Launch a newsletter to keep subscribers engaged
• Co-create content with credible voices and creators

Activate your people

• Encourage executives to share their points of view
• Get product experts explaining core concepts
• Help employees post regularly on shared themes

Reach beyond your channels

• Author contributed articles in respected publications
• Share research and participate in expert interviews
• Identify and partner with niche creators who align with your brand values

Articles and posts do different jobs in AI search, and you need both.

This chapter gets tactical. LinkedIn articles and posts serve different but complementary purposes in AI search, and understanding that distinction changes how you use them.

Articles generate roughly 60% of LinkedIn content citations. Posts account for the other 40%. You need both.  

Articles are your depth play. They earn citations and build the long-form authority that AI models draw from. Aim for 800 to 1,200 words, structure them with clear section headers that mirror the questions your audience is actually asking, and add a TL;DR near the top so both people and models can grab your key takeaways quickly.

Example of a top-cited article:

LinkedIn for Marketing Article: 'How to Optimize LinkedIn Articles for Engagement and AI Visibility'

Why it works: The title is clear and communicates the value of the content right away. It’s also well-structured, defining key terms and using subheadings to separate ideas. It includes step-by-step instructions and a checklist at the bottom.

Posts are your distribution play. Keep them between 200 and 300 words, lead with your most important keywords in the opening line (which often becomes your post URL), and use a simple question-and-answer structure that's easy for AI to extract and quote.

Example of a top-cited post:

LinkedIn for Sales post: '5 ways AI has reshaped the way buyers find information'

Why it works: This insight-driven post breaks down a trend with a clear, actionable takeaway, giving readers the context and practical next steps they need. It frames the content around a real question and leads with the most important keywords, which are reflected in the post URL.

Here's a simple workflow to articles and posts together:

1. Publish one strong article. This becomes your foundational, citation-worthy anchor on a topic.
2. Break it into three to five posts, each taking one idea or stat from the article.
3. Watch which posts spark the most conversation.
4. Fold what you learn back into your next article.

Articles checklist:

• Start with a question-driven title that doubles as your URL
• Add a TL;DR summary near the top
• Subheaders that map to audience questions
• Include examples, lists, and clear definitions
• Close with a summary and practical next steps
• Publish on a consistent weekly rhythm

Posts checklist:

• Write a clean opening line built around your core keywords
• Don't bury the lead: put your most important point first
• Keep to one key idea
• Use a simple question-and-answer or list structure
• End with a clear takeaway or an invitation to comment
• Publish two to three times a week and reply quickly

Why traditional metrics are blind to AI visibility, and what to track instead.

Traditional metrics like keyword rankings and click-through rates don't capture AI visibility. If discovery is happening inside AI-generated answers, your analytics dashboard is only telling part of the story.

This guide presents a three-tier measurement framework based on how AI retrieval actually works, breaking down each tier by its key signals, how to interpret them, and which metrics to track at each stage.

• Leading indicators: These are signals that move fast and give you an early sense of what's working, such as post impressions, reactions, comments, and shares on LinkedIn.
• Outcome metrics: These move slowly and show you whether your content is actually showing up in AI-generated answers, including citation counts, share of voice, citation rank, and sentiment.
• Diagnostic patterns: These help you figure out what's going wrong when results don't improve, including content format, author performance, and the types of prompts being used.

Mixing these three together is a mistake. Each one tells you something different, and they don't move at the same speed. Keep them separate, and you'll always know which number to pay attention to, and when.

One thing to set expectations on: AI visibility shifts rarely happen overnight. Profound's research shows a median of 6.81 days for new pages to be cited by ChatGPT or Claude, but 90% of pages take up to 37 days. Set a 30-day minimum before evaluating impact, and avoid making go/no-go decisions on early data.

As Cassie Dell, our Head of Organic Growth, advises: "Don't fall for universal 'best practices.' What works for one brand might not work for yours. It's crucial to test and gather your own data. By staying updated on industry trends and questioning popular strategies, you can develop a unique approach that resonates with your audience."

Measurement checklist:

Foundations

• Form a cross-functional task force to align signals across teams
• Onboard an AI search citation tracking partner (options include Meltwater, Profound, and Semrush)
• Set up AI Overviews tracking in traditional search analytics tools
• Allow 30 days for new content to generate meaningful data

Metrics

• Identify your leading indicators (e.g., LinkedIn engagement signals)
• Define your outcome metrics (e.g., citations, share of voice, sentiment)
• Establish diagnostic patterns to troubleshoot performance (e.g., author, format, prompt type)
• Measure sentiment and downstream business impact

Ongoing process

• Conduct monthly audits to identify performance patterns
• Use diagnostic patterns over time, not single data points
• Continuously test, learn, and adjust your strategy

What we hope you take away from this

The brands that adapt early are the ones who'll shape how AI talks about them. You don't need to overhaul everything at once. Start with one core theme, publish one in-depth article and two supporting posts on LinkedIn, activate a few credible voices on your team, and set a baseline for citations and share of voice. Review it in 30 days.

This guide is the beginning of an ongoing conversation. We're testing and learning in real time, and we'll keep sharing what we find,  including data from our own internal experiments. Transparency matters to us, and so does helping you navigate this shift with clarity rather than hype.

Read the full guide, Unlocking AI Search Visibility: the B2B Marketer's Guide to LinkedIn, and stay tuned for the next chapters in our AI Search Series on the LinkedIn for Marketing blog. We'll keep the learnings coming.

     

Think about the last time you made a major business purchase. Chances are, you didn't decide because of a single ad, sales pitch, LLM query, or recommendation. Instead, it was the accumulation of trusted signals from research, peers, customers, employees, and industry experts that reinforced one another until the choice felt obvious. That's how credibility is built in modern B2B buying.

This insight is at the heart of our newest research: The Credibility Code. In partnership with Ipsos, we set out to understand how credibility is built in modern B2B buying. We found that trust emerges through a network of reinforcing signals from brands, employees, customers, peers, and creators. The research shows that credibility is not just a measure of trust, it is a commercial advantage that makes brands more buyable by increasing buying group confidence throughout the buying journey. 

For B2B marketers who've spent years optimizing for reach, the implications are significant. The real competitive gap isn't visibility. It's credibility.

The real problem in B2B isn't awareness, it's buyer credibility

B2B marketing has long been built around attention. More impressions, more reach, more content. But attention without credibility doesn't close deals. It creates noise.

Let this number sink in: 40% of B2B deals are lost not to competitors, but to indecision (source: The Jolt Effect, Matthew Dixon and Ted Mckenna, 2022), and the average B2B purchase involves 22 stakeholders and takes 272 days to close (Source: LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report, Dreamdata, 2025). This means buying groups spend the better part of nine months navigating alignment, revisiting vendor shortlists, and producing internal justification decks — often with someone asking to delay the decision until next quarter.

The core challenge isn't information. It's risk management.

An AVP at a major financial services firm captured the dynamic precisely:

"It's a lot harder to get into trouble for making the decision that everyone else would have made."

This observation reflects something fundamental about how B2B decisions actually get made. Buyers don't optimize for the best option on paper, they optimize for the most defensible one. Trust is what makes a choice feel defensible.

Why credibility is built through reinforcement, not repetition

Repeating a message louder doesn't make it more believable. Credibility compounds when multiple voices say the same thing — each one carrying a different kind of authority, each one landing with a different person in the buying group.

That's the foundational insight behind The Credibility Code: a framework for helping B2B brands move beyond awareness and build the kind of trust that actually converts.

The Credibility Stack: four layers, one system

The Credibility Code rests on a simple structure we call the Credibility Stack: four distinct sources of credibility, four voices, working as one system, each one strengthening the next. 

Do you remember the last time you made a B2B purchase decision? Each signal you experienced mapped to one of these four voices, often without you realizing it:

How does brand credibility set the foundation for B2B trust?

Every successful credibility system begins with the brand. The brand establishes the narrative, the positioning, the "why this matters." Through thought leadership and strategic communication, brands create the foundation that gives meaning to everything else. Nine in ten decision-makers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to outreach from that company (Source: Reaching Beyond the Ready, Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 2024)

Why do employees play such a critical role in B2B credibility?

When employees share insights, experiences, and perspectives, they make expertise feel more authentic and more relatable. Employees bring credibility into professional conversations, communities, and networks that brands cannot easily access themselves. Remarkably, a company's employees collectively reach 12x its own follower base through their personal networks (Source: The Ultimate Guide to Working with B2B Creators, LinkedIn, 2025). 

How do customer advocates make B2B decisions feel defensible?

Few signals are more powerful than hearing from someone who has already made the decision, with Customer advocates and peer recommendations providing validation that marketing simply cannot replicate. They're what make a decision feel defensible instead of just desirable. In fact, B2B buyers are three times more likely to choose a recommended vendor over a cheaper one (Source: The Principles of Buyability, LinkedIn and Bain & Company, 2025)

What role do creators play in scaling B2B credibility?

Creators are trusted interpreters of industry knowledge, translating complex ideas into content and formats that audiences actually paying attention to. Creator content arrives with established trust already attached to existing audiences, with subject-matter expertise and authentic authority. 

It is important to stress, none of this works as a sequence or as single activations. The Credibility Stack operates as a compounding system, each layer amplifying the next, until the whole is worth more than any single voice on its own.

None of this works in isolation

The Credibility Stack isn't a sequence, and it's not a set of standalone tactics. It's a compounding system. Each layer amplifies the Next until the whole is worth more than any single voice operating alone.

A strong brand point of view makes employee content more coherent. Employee advocacy makes customer testimonials more credible. Customer validation makes creator content more impactful. And creator content brings the entire system to audiences that none of the other layers can reach efficiently on their own.

This compounding dynamic is what separates brands that generate activity from brands that generate confidence. And in B2B, confidence is what moves buying groups from hesitation to yes.

Creators Represent the Biggest Opportunity to Build Trust at Scale

Our newest thought leadership piece focuses on creators because they're the most immediately actionable layer for brands. Here's why creators stand out:

• They provide instant access to trust. Brand voice, employee advocacy, and customer references all take time to build. Creators give brands access to trusted audiences and established authority that organizations would take years to build independently.
• Credibility is built into their content. It's embedded directly into the content experience, not bolted on afterward.
• B2B brands underestimate their impact. Most recognize that creators matter, but very few have built real partnerships, investment, or consistent activation with them. The common assumption is that creators are, at best, an awareness play.

• The data tells a different story. Through our analysis of more than 100 creator-led ads, on and off LinkedIn, we found that:
  • Creator-led paid content is predicted to drive 1.5x stronger long-term brand impact versus standard video content (source: The Credibility Code, LinkedIn & Ipsos, 2026).
  • Creator-led paid content drives 1.2x stronger consideration versus standard video content (source: The Credibility Code, LinkedIn & Ipsos, 2026)
• Their biggest advantage is long-term. Creators don't just drive short-term buyer behavior and sales. They lift brand health and brand equity over time, building the kind of trust that sticks through the entire buyer's journey.

The credibility advantage belongs to brands that build it deliberately

The Credibility Code research reveals a clear competitive divide. Brands that optimize for reach alone will see diminishing returns as buyers drown in content and grow skeptical of marketing messages. Brands that build deliberate credibility systems combining brand authority, employee advocacy, customer validation, and creator partnerships will convert more attention into pipeline.

This matters even more as AI search reshapes how buyers discover and evaluate vendors. Brands with strong credibility signals like thought leadership, employee insights, customer references, and creator-endorsed expertise are better positioned to surface in AI-generated answers and be cited as trusted sources. The Credibility Stack doesn't just work for human audiences. It works for the AI systems that increasingly shape early-stage B2B buying decisions.

Buyers are out there doing their research, building shortlists, and looking for signals that tell them which choice is safe. The brands that win will be the ones that provide those signals across every voice in the buying journey.

To explore the full research and learn how to build a creator strategy that compounds trust at scale, download the full study on the LinkedIn B2B Institute website.

     

Convert your Events Marketing from Cost Center to Demand Driver

Here’s a tension every B2B marketer knows: your CFO is watching this quarter’s pipeline while your buyers are somewhere in the middle of a 200-plus-day journey — researching, debating, building internal consensus. Events sit right at the intersection of those two pressures. Done right, they can satisfy both.

The problem is that most event strategies are still built around a single moment: drive registrations, host the session, move on. The shift is simple, but it changes everything. Instead of asking “how do we get people to come to our event?” start asking “how does this event connect to everything else we’re doing to drive growth for our business?”

That’s the difference between event marketing and marketing with events.

The world your buyers are living in

B2B buying decisions are rarely made by one person. The average buying group now includes 6.8 stakeholders, and 74% of decision-makers report hitting internal conflict that stalls the process. Your competitor isn’t the only thing slowing deals down. Internal misalignment is.

The average buying group now includes 6.8 stakeholders, and 74% of decision-makers report hitting internal conflict that stalls the process.

(Source: Dreamdata Benchmark Report, 2025, Gartner B2B Buying)

Events are one of the few tactics that cut through. A conference booth isn’t just a place to hand out swag, it’s an audience-building opportunity. A webinar isn’t just an hour of content, it’s a nurture engine that can fuel your funnel for months. A flagship summit isn’t just a customer celebration, it’s a lever that moves deals already in motion. But only if you treat each event as part of a bigger motion, not a standalone moment.

The event marketing flywheel: before, during, and after

an engine that warms audiences before the doors open, activates them in real time, and converts that interest into pipeline after the session ends. The flywheel has three phases:

Before: 

Build anticipation. The weeks before your event are critical. The brands that win start early enough to build curiosity first, then nurture intent. On LinkedIn, that means Video Ads to spark awareness, Thought Leader Ads to establish credibility, and Sponsored Messaging in addition to Event Ads to convert registrations among the right buying group members.

During: 

Maximize engagement. Event day is a competition for attention. Whether you’re hosting in-person, virtual, or hybrid, your job is to turn passive attendees into active participants. Event Ads and Off-platform Event Ads automatically shift from driving registration to driving live viewership. Spark real-time conversation in the chat. Ask questions, surface answers, make virtual audiences feel as included as the people in the room. On average, there are 31x more viewers for company-hosted events promoted by event ads compared to company-hosted events without event ads promotion - so the energy you create now compounds later.

After: 

Convert interest into pipeline. This is where many teams drop the ball. The audience you’ve built — registrants, attendees, video viewers — is warmer than any cold prospect you’ll ever target. Reach them before the memory of the event fades. Set up retargeting campaigns that meet people where they are: serve event registrants a recap, re-engage no-shows with the replay, and push deeper content to video viewers. Members are 28% more likely to engage with subsequent marketing campaigns after seeing an event ad. 

Extend your event’s life with content

Your event ends, but your content strategy shouldn’t. Every session, keynote, and panel is raw material. For example: 

• Turn a standout talk into a Document Ad 
• Clip a panel discussion into short videos for LinkedIn using the Event Clipping feature. 
• Amplify post-event reflections from speakers with Thought Leader Ads. 
• Use Event Ad Replay to give on-demand access to audiences who missed the live moment.

A strong webinar can drive leads for 6–12 months as an on-demand asset. A flagship keynote can fuel an entire quarter of content. The brands that plan this upfront, before the event happens, are the ones who see compounding returns on every dollar they spend.

Measure what actually moves the needle

Registrations and booth scans look good in a recap email, but they alone rarely lead to budget growth. The measurement shift you need is the same one you’re making across your event strategy: stop measuring events as standalone moments and start measuring how they move revenue forward.

Think in three layers:

• Reach: Did you get in front of the right accounts and decision-makers?
• Engagement: Did they register, attend, and take meaningful action?
• Revenue impact: Did it open pipeline, accelerate deals, or influence closed revenue?

Connect your event data to your CRM. Measure pipeline acceleration for deals that touched the event. Track deal size and retention for customers who attended versus those who didn’t. That’s the story your CFO actually wants to hear.

Your event action checklist

Ready to put this into practice? Use these steps to make your next event a pipeline driver, not just a line on the budget sheet:

• Set your true north with revenue goals: Tie the event to quarterly and annual pipeline before you book a venue or choose a platform.
• Map the decision-making crew: Know the 6–7 stakeholders in each target account. Build outreach that speaks to all of them.
• Lay the groundwork with early awareness: Start with Event Ads, Video Ads and Thought Leader Ads before you ask anyone to register.
• Sync gears with sales: Equip your sales team with plays for before, during, and after the event.
• Build your content recycling plan: Decide in advance how sessions become Document Ads, clips, and blog posts.
• Set up retargeting before day one: Confirm tracking is live so you can act on warm audiences the moment the event ends.
• Track pipeline velocity, not just headcount: Focus on how events accelerate deals and impact deal size.

Your events are one of the highest-intent marketing moments of the year. The brands that treat them as a journey, not a day, win more registrants, convert more pipeline, and see their event investment compound over time.

Before, during, and after: the event is always on.

Ready to go deeper? Download the complete Events on LinkedIn guide and get the full playbook for webinars, conferences, and flagship events.

     

Most conversations about AI-powered marketing come from the outside looking in: analysts, consultants and vendors describing what transformation should look like. Patrick Brown offers a different vantage point. As SVP of growth marketing and insights at Adobe, he runs the organization that is actually doing the work, using Adobe's own products to operationalize AI across content, orchestration, analytics and measurement, in real time, under real deadlines.

In an exclusive interview, Brown talks through what it actually feels like to lead a team in the middle of that shift. He covers the move from AI as a set of tools to AI as a redesign of how an organization works, the balance between brand governance and campaign speed inside GenStudio for Performance Marketing, what unlocked Adobe's own shift from broadcast email to real-time personalization with Journey Optimizer, and where he sees the gap widening between marketing organizations that are adapting to AI and those that are standing still.

Brown expands on the data behind the shift, the internal model that stress-tests Adobe's own products before customers ever see them, where AI has changed his team's day-to-day work the most and the one thing he'd tell a marketing leader to do differently on Monday morning.

Q: The Adobe Digital Insights report points to how AI is reshaping visibility and content performance. What are you seeing inside Adobe's own data that corroborates or surprises you about where marketing is heading?

A: What stood out was how fast the quality of traffic flipped. A year ago, the traffic coming into the retail sites we measure from AI assistants converted at about half the rate of our other traffic. This quarter it is converting roughly 54% higher, and revenue per visit moved the same way.

That is a meaningful shift, because it suggests AI is not simply adding another referral source. It is helping people arrive with more context, confidence and clearer intent. I didn't expect that to turn around in twelve months, and it did.

What confirmed it is how broad the shift is. AI-sourced traffic is up triple digits year over year almost everywhere we look: around 138% in retail, 194% in travel and over 100% in financial services. That kind of consistency across categories usually means the behavior is here to stay.

What I keep coming back to is why this is happening. More than half of consumers say they are leaning on AI more than they were a year ago, and the ones using it to shop say they feel more confident in what they buy and return it less often. That tells me the real change is about trust.

For marketers, it means discovery is moving earlier into the conversation itself, before anyone clicks. The teams seeing the returns made their content easy for AI to read and use, and they did it early. Being useful in that answer is starting to matter as much as ranking in search ever did.

Q: Adobe's GMI team is described as "customer zero" for Adobe's own marketing tools. What does that model ask of a team?

A: Customer zero is ultimately an empathy model.

It is a feedback loop among our marketers, product teams and customers, helping Adobe improve its product, strengthen the experience and enabling us to speak honestly about what it takes to make transformation real.

For my team, that means pressure testing Adobe's marketing technology with real deadlines, data, integrations, handoffs and complications. That gives us a clearer view of where customers will find value, where they may face friction and what needs to be true for adoption to succeed at scale.

It also makes customer conversations more credible, because we can speak from direct experience about implementation, support needs, adjustments, and measurable impact. Just as importantly, it requires humility: sometimes we validate what is working, and sometimes we uncover gaps in the product, process, or change management that need to be addressed.

All of that learning matters because it helps us build a better path for customers.

Q: Where has AI had the most unexpected impact across the marketing workflow?

A: The biggest impact has been in the intelligence layer, not just in how quickly we can access insights, but in what we are able to do with them.

We have always had a tremendous amount of data. In one part of our insights infrastructure alone, we evaluate roughly 5.6 million contact-product engagement signals each week. The challenge was never whether the signal existed. The challenge was turning that signal into something teams could understand, trust and act on.

That is where AI is changing the work. It is helping us move from reporting what happened to understanding what matters, why it matters and what action we should take next.

AIR.ai and AdNova are good examples: they are not just reducing manual reporting effort, they are helping teams generate performance narratives, standardize analysis and make insights easier to use across regions and channels.

In planning and performance, AI systems are helping teams bring more consistent decision logic into forecasting, budget allocation and performance optimization. And across the broader workflow, tools like Adobe Workfront help connect planning to execution so those insights can become part of how work actually moves.

That is the unexpected shift: insight is becoming more operational. It is closer to the decisions teams make every day, like where to invest, what to test, which audiences to prioritize, which messages are working and where we need to adjust.

Analysts are spending less time assembling information and more time applying judgment: interpreting the data, pressure-testing recommendations and helping teams make better decisions.

That is the real unlock. AI helps us turn insight into impact. It gives teams a clearer view of what customers need, the confidence to make better decisions and the ability to deliver more relevant experiences at the moments that matter.

Q: For a marketing leader reading this at Cannes who's still working out where to start, what's the one thing to do differently on Monday morning?

A: Stop treating AI as a campaign and start treating it as infrastructure. Most of the teams I talk to have run AI pilots. They've done the experiment. They have the case study. But the underlying way the organization works hasn't changed. The measurement model is the same. The workflow is the same. The team structure is the same. That's the gap.

The leaders who are pulling ahead aren't the ones who found the best AI tool. They're the ones who redesigned how their team operates around the assumption that AI is doing the work, and that humans are directing and improving it. That's a harder change than running a pilot. But it's the one that actually compounds.

Watch the full interview with Patrick Brown above, and explore more from Adobe's Growth Marketing and Insights team on LinkedIn.

     

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 use LLMs somewhere in their purchase journey (Source: 6Sense, 2025).

Furthermore, B2B buyers select a favored vendor before engaging sellers — and that pre-contact favorite wins the deal roughly 80% of the time.

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.