LinkedIn Dynamic Ads Comes To Campaign Manager
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, September 10, 2018
LinkedIn, A Microsoft company, announced Monday the release of Dynamic Ads in Campaign Manager, the company’s newly revised ad management tool.
Businesses running the Dynamic Ads native ad format can create, manage and track campaigns, customizing the message to the audience with publicly available information from LinkedIn member profiles.
All key formats are available through a self-service platform, making it easy for marketers to access the tools.
"By showing targeted user profiles next to our brand, Dynamic Ads allow us to send highly targeted messages, introducing and familiarizing our business with our audience,” stated Tom Metcalfe, senior lead-gen executive, In Touch Networks. “This has resulted in higher engagement and an increase in conversion rates."
For some brands, marketers have seen up to double the click-through rates of traditional display ads with the ability to AB test and track campaigns. Brands using the format include Procore Technologies, and Vistage, explains LinkedIn Principal Product Manager Ayusman Sarangi in a blog post.
Marketers need only to build their creative and write the ad copy. LinkedIn will automatically personalize the campaign for each person targeted.
Dynamic Ads include pre-built templates with auto-translation feature, so prospective clients can understand the message no matter which language they speak. Marketers also can add macros like data-mapping tools.
The feature should become available in Campaign Manager for all businesses within the next week.
I'm sure lots of marketers will love this.
I'm also sure lots of human targets will hate it as much as they do other "personalized" advertising schemes based on surveillance.
I am sure I am not atypical in having never, ever, ever, seen an ad that attracted me in any way on Linkedin (and I've been on it since 2003), Instead I have seen countless ads for jobs I could not be less interested in, for services that are irrelevant or uninteresting to me, and for nothing that would in any way establish or amplify some brand's value. On the contrary, pretty much all the advertising I might remember on Linkedin subtracts from its brand's value by annoying me.
So I just turned off all the personalization I could in my Linkedin account. (Naturally, all the defaults were for maximum surveillance (euphemized as welcoming "relevant promoted" whatever). I've long since sworn off going to Linkedin for anything other than necessities (such as dealing with people I value who insist on connecting there). And this story just pushed me closer to closing my account entirely.
The coming war, only hinted at so far by policy moves in the EU, California and elsewhere, is between the simple human need for personal agency and privacy (at personal scale) on one side, and infinite rationalized surveillance on the other. In other words, markets vs. marketing.
The flaw behind survellance based marketing, and why it will lose that war in the long run, is that it assumes people want help from entities whose only insterest is in selling them shit. Also that it assumes a market based on endless surveillance and promotion of goods for sale, with massive negative externalities (such as cluttering the world with crap, a black market in fraud and malware, slow-loading pages, takings by interemediaries that can leave publishers with as little as 3-12% of what a brand spends, and the eventual victory of intermediary giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Linkedin at the expense of everyone else), is a desirable one.
There are better ways for markets to work. For example, with full independence and agency on the customers' side, and better signaling of actual intentions from demand to supply. Some of us, as you know, are working on that.