• by Colin Kirkland , January 17, 2025

In its newest promotional campaign, LinkedIn warns companies about the perils of accidentally targeting the wrong audiences, ultimately showcasing the B2B social-media platform’s suite of evolving AI audience-reach tools.

“We’ve all been on the receiving end of ad targeting so poorly executed it left us wondering who, exactly, they thought we were. For a while, I kept getting ads for expensive pots and pans and I’m barely even capable of cooking instant ramen!” LinkedIn writes in a blog post highlighting the new campaign, adding that “As customers, these failures of targeting are at most a passing annoyance. But for the companies serving ads to the wrong audience? Those missteps cost the B2B sector millions of dollars a year in wasted ad spend.”

To help marketers eliminate “a staggering amount of waste” with regard to their ad budgets, LinkedIn says its AI-powered targeting tools will “open the door to over 1 billion users” by targeting and filtering audiences based on industry, company, role, and more. 

While it’s worth noting that LinkedIn has around 400 monthly active users on its platform, not 1 billion, the company says its new campaign will run on digital channels, and will include still image assets, like “When targeting stays on target, budgets do too,” and “Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.”

The latter example speaks to the whimsical offbeat tone included in the campaign’s video spots.

For example, one spot features a group of archaeologists confounded by a stand-alone computer server, accompanied by the tag line: “Stop advertising your servers to archaeologists on site survey.” 

Overall, the creative campaign is committed to persuading marketers to lean into LinkedIn’s newest AI-powered ad tools, like its “Audience Network,” “Connected TV feature,” and its new “Qualified Leads Optimization” tool, which invites advertisers to tailor their campaigns to target leads that meet specific marketing or sales criteria.  

Last month, the company explained that marketers can connect their CRM and CAPI [LinkedIn’s conversions API] to share examples of qualified leads, which will be used by LinkedIn’s optimization tool to find similar prospects, promising higher conversion rates and reduced spending waste. 

In addition, the company’s Campaign Manager portal now features a “Companies” section designed to help marketers understand how companies are interacting with their brand through engagement levels -- low, medium, high and very high -- while being able to experiment with various filtering options.