LinkedIn accelerates its pitch to B2B marketers with AI-powered ad tools

As LinkedIn’s vp of product management, Abhishek Shrivastava, explained: “B2B marketers have to make do with how to fit their own needs into the existing B2C tools.”

Digiday caught up with Shrivastava to dig into what makes Accelerate both similar to and dissimilar from other solutions, its wider plans for advertising and to explore whether reports of LinkedIn aspiring to be TikTok are wide of the mark or not. 

Earlier this year, Accelerate, LinkedIn’s answer to an AI black box tool, was officially rolled out globally to all advertisers complete with video ads after being in a period of testing. This initially included a small set of North American advertisers during its initial launch in October 2023, which expanded to about a 50% global roll out in beta until the official global launch in October 2024. Despite this expansion, the tool is still in beta according to LinkedIn. Or as Shrivastava put it: “There’s a lot of iterations that we have to go through in terms of getting it right.”

And there’s a good reason for caution — $18.34 billion in U.S. digital ad spending is on the line this year, according to eMarketer. With more marketers raised on digital now controlling the budgets, ad dollars are flowing to the platforms they believe will deliver the best results. LinkedIn believes Accelerate will help it continue to keep its place near the front of that queue in B2B advertising. 

“LinkedIn has put a lot of effort into encouraging more frequent and interesting posting in a more social environment in the last five years, and if enough inventory was available then this kind of automated tool could help to attract advertisers who are unfamiliar with the platform,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior analyst at Enders Analysis.

Accelerate’s pitch isn’t too dissimilar to its counterparts on the B2C side; it’s a promise of efficiency and transparency. 

“[On Accelerate] When AI does something for you, it tells you what data is powering that change or that recommendation that is providing to you,” said Shrivastava. “Number two, it provides you insights in terms of what is truly working.” 

So for example, when some customer says (hypothetically) they’ve seen a 42% drop in their cost per result, Accelerate can tell the marketer what truly made the difference,” Shrivastava explained. “Whether it was the audience, the creatives, the placements or something else in the campaign.” 

As MacEwan said, what counts is removing as much friction as possible for advertisers. “Whether they should trust the headline performance indicators from any of these black boxes is another matter, and it is wise for sophisticated advertisers to maintain internal media mix and econometric modeling to gauge long-term performance for themselves,” he said.

While marketers have limited control over how goals are achieved, they can verify outcomes using their own measurement tools, much like on other platforms. 

“AI will do all the work for you, and you have the ability to review every single piece of the work that AI has done for you,” Shrivastava said. “And you have to click the button to say, ‘yes, I accept this and I go forward with it.’”

In the early stages, Accelerate focused on two objectives: website visits and lead generation along with a single image ad format. Fast forward to now, the product has also incorporated brand awareness, website conversion, video views and new formats including document ads.

According to LinkedIn’s own data, campaigns created using Accelerate have seen a 42% lower cost per action, compared to classic campaigns on the platform.

“A lot of smaller companies, as well as larger ones, are finding a lot of value from it, in terms of the results that they’re seeing being driven by this product,” Shrivastava said.

Part of that value lies in Accelerate’s speed. By cutting campaign creation time from 15 hours to just five minutes, it gives marketers a faster way to reach hard-to-find B2B decision makers. For businesses of all sizes, it’s less about catching up and more about leveling the playing field.

“The entire product vision is centered around how to make B2B marketers more successful, more productive, drive results that their businesses need, and showcase those results back to the colleagues at the company. Everything is in that context,” Shrivastava said.