LinkedIn brings its ads to your TV

LinkedIn is taking its professional advertising to the biggest screen in the house. The company officially launched its Connected TV (CTV) advertising solution, aiming to scale professional reach onto streaming platforms.

This move brings the familiar LinkedIn Feed ad experience to smart TVs, allowing advertisers to leverage the platform's trusted targeting, campaign setup, and measurement tools within the CTV advertising ecosystem. The engineering blog post details how LinkedIn approached building this new ad offering, guided by principles of native integration, leveraging existing infrastructure, and rapid iteration.

Scaling to the Big Screen

The core of the solution involves integrating with high-quality CTV publishers through Real-Time Bidding (RTB), initially focusing on curated private marketplace (PMP) deals to ensure brand safety and content quality. As CTV scaled, LinkedIn developed a supply management system to efficiently onboard, control, and optimize these deals, accommodating publisher-specific pricing models and content expectations.

Ensuring brand suitability beyond PMP deals was paramount. LinkedIn expanded its integration with DoubleVerify, leveraging its insights to monitor traffic quality and brand suitability for its LinkedIn CTV Ads campaigns. DoubleVerify reported over 99% brand risk floor-free supply and less than 1% invalid traffic.

Reaching Professional Audiences on Household Devices

A significant engineering hurdle was identifying professional audiences on shared household devices. LinkedIn employed a data-driven, cross-device identity approach, responsibly associating CTV impressions with members while respecting privacy and consent. This required tuning its identity graph for the unique characteristics of CTV viewing, incorporating deterministic mappings from trusted partners.

Creative Specifications for Premium CTV

Meeting the stringent creative quality bars of premium CTV publishers presented technical challenges. LinkedIn enhanced its video processing pipelines to adhere to strict constraints on encoding, bitrates, frame rates, and audio specifications. They also developed creative validation systems to ensure assets met LinkedIn's CTV video specifications before use in campaigns.

Measuring Impact Beyond Impressions

LinkedIn offers robust CTV campaign reporting, including impressions, reach, frequency, and completion rates, with placement and device breakdowns. Audiences exposed to CTV ads can be matched cross-device for full-funnel measurement. For independent validation, partners like iSpot measure incremental reach, with Salesforce reporting LinkedIn CTV Ads extended campaign reach by over 70% beyond linear TV.

Brand lift testing for CTV Ads involves retargeting household members on mobile/desktop for surveys and addressing co-viewing bias. A recent case study demonstrated significant lifts in brand consideration.

Streamlining Premium Content Access

To facilitate access to premium content, LinkedIn launched CTV Select with NBCUniversal, enabling advertisers to target LinkedIn audiences across premium streaming content. Initially manual, this process has been streamlined via the Supply Management System, allowing advertisers to select deals directly within Campaign Manager.

The platform now supports third-party hosted VAST tag support, moving beyond requiring direct creative uploads to the LinkedIn Campaign Management Platform.