Ep 123 - LinkedIn at Sundance Film Festival 2024 | Why Were They There and What's Cooking?
SHOW RESOURCES
Here were the resources we covered in the episode:
The last time Jim Habig was on the show
LinkedIn is sunsetting Lookalike Audiences
B2Believe Event where Ben Stiller spoke
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Why was LinkedIn Ads at the Sundance film festival in 2024? You’re about to find out on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey, there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I’m AJ Wilcox. I’m the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show, and I’m thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers to evolve through mastering LinkedIn Ads and achieving true pro status. Welcome future pro. Like you gathered from the teaser, LinkedIn was at the Sundance Film Festival here in 2024. I assure you, there’s a very good reason for that, and I’m going to tell you all about it, but first in the news. LinkedIn recently announced that lookalike audiences are being sunset at the end of February. This is again, 2024 at the time of recording.
Now, Ava Yakub, who runs the LinkedIn Ads for Zapier gave us a heads up. She’s a member of our LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. She posted about it before the LinkedIn announcement even came out. And she let us know that lookalike audiences were being sunset in favor of predictive audiences that are going to replace them, which I think is actually a really good thing. What I love about predictive audiences is the audiences are dynamic. When you built a lookalike audience, it was a snapshot. It was a certain place in time for this audience. It became this audience that you could then go and use elsewhere. But with predictive audiences, these are dynamic. They continue to build constantly. They’re going to refactor, I think, every night is what they’ve said. So when new people come into your audience who are now eligible for your targeting, it’s going to start including them in the future. And same thing with people who have moved out of your audience, LinkedIn’s going to get rid of those. So I love this dynamic feel to these.
I also am a big fan of the fact that when you build these, you get the slider. Many of you who’ve advertised on Meta before know that when you build a lookalike audience there, you get this slider from like 1 to 10 percent, and you get to control how tight your audience is. Well, LinkedIn have taken a page out of their book, and when we build a predictive audience, we get the slider.
We get to determine how tight that audience is built, or how broad. And I’m totally okay with this change, although I’ll say, there’s not a whole lot of testing that you can do with lookalike audiences before the sunset.
Because, the announcement came out a little more than a month before they were being sunset. So, I would love a little bit more, notice when things like this are going away. But, in this case, I’m in favor of it.
There’s another great feature too, that’s in the process of rolling out. By the time you listen to this, it’s probably already ramped to a hundred percent, so it should be in your account. This is the ability to retarget conversation ads interactors. Now this is only conversation ads. It’s not message ads. So if you’re only using message ads, it may be a good time to start testing into conversation ad so you get access to this. But basically, we get this ability to re-target people who have interacted with our conversation ads. I love this. I’m a fan. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time with all of the sponsored messaging ad formats. The one thing that remains on my wish list, I want to be able to exclude people who have received multiple messages. But who haven’t opened or clicked on that message. So, this is something I’ve asked the LinkedIn product people for. I hope at some point we get it, because it sucks to keep paying for, people to receive an ad, who don’t end up even opening it or clicking on it. I’ve got a quick little PSA for you. If you were running any of the sponsored messaging ad formats in January, especially if you were creating them, you may have noticed that there was a bug that set your minimum floor price percent at 0.65.
This is a bug that LinkedIn is aware of. By the time you hear this, it’s probably been fixed, but it might be a good idea to, for you to go take a look at your sponsored messaging campaigns and see if there’s any that you launched in January and your minimum bid is 0.65, you might be able to lower that and get more efficiency out of your conversation and message ads.
Something else that one of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics in our community, which if you’re not already a member of, make sure you come and join because this is where we’re talking about things way before they come out publicly. But one of the things they noticed is that when you see the lead gen form with an ad that you’re looking at, sometimes you could start to see the number of total times that that form was submitted. And I’d wondered about that. I wondered if this was a new rollout or if this was just a test, but turns out this is rolling out. And I think it’s one of the coolest pieces of social proof that you can have when you’re running a lead form campaign. It is both really cool, and it’s scary. It’s the ultimate social proof of how many people filled out that form. If the number happens to be low, because maybe you’re just barely starting, or you don’t have a high budget, you might not be ultra proud of the fact that you’re running ads with a low number of submits.
So I’m really anxious to see where this goes. So be aware, pay attention to when you see lead gen forms, pay attention if it’s showing you the total number of submits.
Last piece of news here, click to message ads are finally rolling out. They are likely ramped to 100 percent by the time you listen to this. Now I think this ad format is worthy of its own episode. So stand by for more talk about this. What this is, is it’s basically conversation ads that are shown in the newsfeed. They’re triggered by a click from the newsfeed, which means if you are in the EU or you’re targeting the EU, these should be GDPR compliant. So, of course, EU advertisers are rejoicing over this.
I wanted to read you a recent review of the show. This review was entitled, by far the best show on LinkedIn advertising. This was left by Thomas Bonte from Belgium and Thomas, sorry, if I messed up your name, but he said, “I was looking for a show on LinkedIn advertising and found more than I could imagine. AJ’s show is full of practical advice. It made me realize I was doing it all wrong. After that, I bought his course on LinkedIn Learning, which I highly recommend.”
Thomas, thank you sincerely for such an awesome review. Absolutely warms my heart. Makes all of the effort going into creating this podcast totally worth it.
For everyone else, if you have a question, a review, or feedback for the show, you can message me on LinkedIn or send us an email at podcast@b2linked.com. But send us a little audio recording and I would love to play you, your voice right here on the show. I’m happy to keep you anonymous or share your details as well and shout you out. I totally want to feature you.
Okay, on to the topic at hand, let’s hit it. So here’s a story for you. I live in Utah, which is the home of the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance started in 1978. It’s run by a nonprofit where Robert Redford is totally involved. And I think it’s probably all pretty much due to him. Cinema lovers know this as the yearly event in Park City, Utah, where actors and celebrities come to show off their new films before they hit theaters. There are awards and panel discussions, tons of parties and events. 50,000 attendees are what was expected this year. So LinkedIn invited me to an event there, and I was a little bit curious why LinkedIn was involved. Seemed a little out of place for LinkedIn to be at a film festival, but okay, I’m paying attention. It was billed as a fireside chat on the power and creativity of B2B. It was featuring Ben Proudfoot, who’s an Academy award winning filmmaker, director, all of that. I went and watched some of his, his films, his shorts, they’re amazing. So, okay, at this point, I love LinkedIn, I love B2B, and I’m looking into this director. It sounds awesome. That was enough for me. I’m in. Now, I know you couldn’t be there, so I’m gonna give you the play by play as best as I can. When I showed up to the event, I could tell this wasn’t what I was expecting. There was a line down the street to this classy venue called the UTA House. The food was amazing. It just kept on coming. There was an open bar for those of you who are into that. And as I walked in, I ran into Jim Habig, that many of you may remember from episode 103 on the Revenue Attribution Report. Hey, what’s up, Jim? “What are you doing here?”Turns out, he was on the panel. Egg on my face.
So, both he and Ben Proudfoot were being interviewed by a moderator from LinkedIn. I got to sit on the front row and I was taking notes like crazy.
Okay, here’s a quick sponsor break, and then we’ll dive into the big announcement.
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All right, let’s jump into the rest of the story here. So Jim and Ben are up on stage. The moderator is asking them questions. The first question, why in the world is LinkedIn at the Sundance Film Festival?? Jim Habig replies, it’s a fair question. The B2B world needs more creativity. And what better place to bring that message than Sundance?
We want to steal some of the great ideas from this creative world and bring them to our B2B clients and customers. But also, we want to bring the opportunity of B2B into the creative community. There’s a ton of opportunity in the B2B space. There’s gold in these hills.
Okay, that was me paraphrasing, but this is awesome. At this point, I’m listening and I’m on board. LinkedIn came to introduce some creativity into B2B. This makes sense. They’ve been doing a lot of that over the last few years. Got it. Making sense. The next question, though, is directed to Ben Proudfoot, the filmmaker, and they ask about the project and how he got involved. Okay, I’m intrigued. What project is this? It turns out that LinkedIn hired Ben Proudfoot and his production company to create a B2B documentary, and Jim was the one who spearheaded it.
This is starting to make a lot more sense. In Jim’s career, you may have remembered from when we had that conversation with him, he used to work at YouTube. So I think it’s pretty safe to say Jim knows media. Ben starts explaining how they traveled to Cannes Lions for the advertising festival in 2023. And LinkedIn is very involved in the B2B awards there at Cannes. So it was a great place to start interviewing and starting to pull on threads. And starting to find the characters in the story. Jim was then asked about his input into the creative process. He emphatically expressed that his input was simply getting out of the way and letting the professional creatives do their work. Although LinkedIn is paying for the production, this is not a documentary about LinkedIn. The filmmakers are finding the characters who care, the story, and threading it all together. It’s not focused on LinkedIn, and it’s not focused on North America. It’s global, which I absolutely love. At this point, I’m so excited to watch the documentary. Then the question was asked, when’s it going to be out? The answer, Juneish.
We also asked about how we’re going to be able to watch it when it comes out. Jim said he’s exploring distribution channels, but I think it’s pretty safe to say it will be available on LinkedIn.
And I have to say Ben Proudfoot is hilarious. His personality is infectious. He’s a great speaker. Several times he explained what he loves so much about B2B and the opportunity to highlight the stories that we get to live every day as B2B marketers. It’s obvious he’s totally bought in and excited to tell our B2B story.
Ben got several questions about his creative process and that was fascinating to listen to his stories. It was fascinating to hear him share his inspiration. It’s fascinating, like when Ben Stiller spoke at the B2Believe event. That was episode 79, in case you missed that. And I won’t bore you with my interpretation of it, but I think you’ll experience that passion that I was so excited about when you actually get to watch the film.
Jim and Ben were both asked for their advice for aspiring B2B marketers. What are the best things for them to focus on?
Ben, the filmmaker said, as quickly as you can identify the things that you’re not good at, which I think was fantastic advice.
Jim’s answer was also great. You’re going to have to try a lot of stuff, and it’s not all going to work. You got to be cool with that.
Okay, so are you like me and you’re so excited to watch this documentary? Well, make sure you’re subscribed to the show. And all of this because I can’t promise anything, but we’ve discussed the possibility of an early viewing party for LinkedIn Ads Show listeners.. So somehow we’re going to be involved in the launch, so stand by waiting for that.
A huge thanks and shout out to both Emily and Kristen there at LinkedIn for the invitation. You know who you are. Thank you so much.. And honestly, I can’t wait to watch this documentary.
Alright, I’ve got the episode resources for you right now.Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox. Take it away.
If you go down into the show notes, you’ll see a link to episode 103, which was the last time that Jim Haybig was on the show. If you want to read more about LinkedIn sunsetting lookalike audiences, I’ve linked to the post where there was lots of discussion about that. Also, if you want to hear about what Ben Stiller was talking about, or even, the first time I got to hear Jim Habig speak, that was at the B2Believe event. That was episode 79, so go listen to that, if you haven’t already. At the top of the show, we talked about several things that were brought to my attention by the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. This is an extremely low cost, incredible community where all of the top minds in LinkedIn advertising are all sharing things back and forth. Plus you get access to all four of our courses that take you from absolute beginner to total LinkedIn Ads pro.
You can get there by going to fanatics.b2linked.com. Come join up, we’d absolutely love to see you there. Now, if this is your first time listening, welcome, we’re excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button so you get this in your ears every week. But if you’re a loyal listener, would you let your friends know about the show? And one of the biggest favors that you can do me personally is to rate and review the podcast, especially on Apple podcasts. And of course, if you leave a review, I’ll give you a shout out on the show as well. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at podcast@b2linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. I’m cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
