• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

LinkedIn has rebranded its Wire Program to BrandLink as the company expands investments in video, one of the fastest-growing formats on the platform.

Since launching the Wire Program in June 2024, advertisers have seen 130% higher video-completion rates and a 23% higher view rate vs. standard video ads, and viewers are 18% more likely to convert to leads.

Wire Program launched last year, but as BrandLink the program will offer video ad placements next to some of the world’s top creator voices, including Steven Bartlett, Rebecca Minkoff, Guy Raz, Candace Nelson, Gary Vaynerchuk and others.  

Some 62% of B2B marketers believe video is most effective in reaching and influencing members of the buyer group, prompting LinkedIn to “double-down on its investment,” according to the company, which commissioned YouGov to survey 1,014 B2B marketers working for large companies across the UK, U.S., France and India. All fieldwork was conducted online between November 29, through December 20, 2024. 

LinkedIn's revenue for the first quarter of the 2025 calendar year did not cite a total dollar amount in revenue, but with the limited data it shared, revenue rose 7% year-over-year in the quarter, a little slower than the year-ago quarter. It appears users are coming to the app a little more often.

The company recently introduced a handful of services to monetize videos. B2B marketers can now sponsor “LinkedIn Shows,” defined as exclusive video content from top creators and publishers, focused on themes core to LinkedIn’s audience.

Some include the CEO playbook, AI & innovation, entrepreneurship/founders, female leadership/entrepreneurship and small business stories. 

Brands can run in-stream ads ahead of original creator and publisher content in feed, offering an authentic and engaging way to target and reach their audience.   

Services also help localize video content more effectively, which has become a top priority for 57% of B2B marketers.

LinkedIn also has begun working with more publishers, including Condé Nast, Der Spiegel, Dynamo, Entrepreneur Media, Fast Company, Front Office Sports, Inc. Magazine, Morning Brew, Penske Media Corporation, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, and WaitWhat, and expanding into multilingual content.

Expect BrandLink to add multilingual publishers and more creators, as well as more "opportunities" for advertisers, according to Abhishek Shrivastava, VP of product at LinkedIn. 

Opportunities "like expanding sponsored content availability on LinkedIn," he said. 

Performance and monetization continue to become major step-ups for advertising and video content. Shrivastava told MediaPost that expanding the number of “publishers we work with helps to fuel our ecosystem: more content from trusted sources leads to more opportunities for our advertisers.”

He said context matters and enabling marketers to align with engaging video content from trusted creators and publishers on LinkedIn can increase brand recall.

“Once advertisers identify a participating creator and publisher to align their campaign with, they can log into Campaign Manager and run a self-serve in-stream video ad on LinkedIn,” Shrivastave explained.

Advertisers can use LinkedIn’s first-party data with BrandLink to target specific attributes like job title, company, location and use language settings to reach the right audience with their campaign. 

Monetization has become critical to creators. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a study suggesting the digital economy now makes up 18% of the U.S. GDP, with more than 11 million of those jobs tied to digital economy work. Creators and social media influencers drive the fastest job growth in the digital economy, per the report, with 1.5 million Americans identifying as full-time digital creators eight times as many as in 2020. 

Is artificial intelligence moving LinkedIn closer to a YouTube-like monetization model? Analytics, introduced earlier this year, lets creators track the average watch time of their videos.

This feature, along with improved video search and vertical video capabilities, aims to improve the video creators' experience on the platform.