LinkedIn thought leader ads are ordinary member posts — from your founder, your employees, or people who don't work for you at all — that a company pays to put in front of its audience. They don't look like ads because they aren't, until the sponsorship starts.
Below: 10 real thought leader ads pulled from LinkedIn's public Ad Library, each linked to its source, plus the part every guide skips — how an advertiser requests permission, where the author approves it, and what one-time versus auto-approval actually changes.
This page is part of the ad examples library. If you sell to other businesses, the B2B SaaS ad examples page is the natural companion.
What is a thought leader ad, exactly?
A regular LinkedIn post, written by a person, that a company sponsors through Campaign Manager. The post keeps the author's name, face and headline — the ad unit just adds "Promoted by {Company}" under the byline.
Three things make the format different from every other LinkedIn ad:
- The company doesn't write it. It sponsors something a person already published.
- The author holds a veto. Nothing runs until they approve the sponsorship request, and they can revoke it at any time — the ad stops immediately.
- You can sponsor people who don't work for you. LinkedIn allows sponsoring posts from employees and from 1st, 2nd or 3rd-degree connections — customers, partners, speakers at your event — with their permission, per LinkedIn's own documentation.
Why do buyers respond to it? Business-to-business buyers are not less emotional than consumers — the rational claim is just the vehicle. A person making an argument carries what a brand banner cannot: a face, a reputation on the line, and comments underneath where anyone can push back.
How these 10 were chosen
One afternoon in the Ad Library — August 28, 2026. We searched the advertiser index for B2B companies known to run the format, paged through their ads, and kept sponsored posts authored by people rather than company pages. Every card links to the original in the Ad Library so you can verify it.
Each card carries the post as it ran — the author's copy word for word, then the creative. LinkedIn cuts a post off after three lines, so these do too: open "see more" to read any of them in full.
One honest limitation, and it's worth knowing as an advertiser: LinkedIn's library publishes run dates, impression ranges and targeting only for ads that ran in the European Union — a transparency requirement there. For US-only ads it shows the creative, the advertiser and the payer, nothing more. Where the data exists, it's on the card. That's also why this page has no run-time chart the way our Meta-sourced galleries do: the public signal isn't published for most of these ads, and we don't invent data.
The founder feed
The classic version of the format: the chief executive argues a position, the company pays to distribute it. The company gets reach; the reader gets an actual point of view with a name attached.
💰 AI PRICING is going to be hybrid. 💰
Here's why.
- Pure per-seat doesn't work for agents.
A company with 100 users can run 100 agent tasks a day or 10 million. The headcount doesn't change. The workload does.
- Pure consumption also doesn't work.
CFOs hate it. "Your bill could be $50K or $5M depending on usage" is not a sentence that flies.
So what wins?
Think: your phone plan.
Remember when it used to be per minute and megabytes? We moved away from it.
Flat rate for the predictable stuff. Variable for the unpredictable stuff. You know exactly what your plan costs. International roaming is based on usage.
AI will land in a similar place.
Fixed fee covers the predictable stuff, including some agentic work: the AI agents and assistants that run on a reasonable cadence, bounded context, expected volume. That's budgetable.
Variable kicks in when it's not bounded. Agent runs 50,000 times a day, at random. Context window blows up on a very large query. That's when consumption pricing makes more sense.
The makers who figure out the right split win enterprise. The ones pushing pure consumption will lose deals to budget anxiety. The ones holding onto pure seats will watch their economics collapse as agents scale.
Hybrid is the model that works for both sides.
Every mature category got here eventually. AI is next. 😎
An opinion, not an offer. Gong's co-founder argues AI pricing will land hybrid — flat fee for the predictable work, usage pricing for the spiky rest — anchored to a phone-plan analogy everyone already understands.
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There is no product pitch anywhere in it. The essay sells Gong sideways: a CEO who can reason this clearly about pricing is probably building software worth a look. Note the craft — a stated enemy on each side ("pure per-seat doesn't work", "CFOs hate" pure consumption), then the familiar analogy that resolves the tension. Gong runs it as a dozen targeting variants of the same post.
Takeaway: the strongest founder ad is a position the founder would defend in a room, not a feature list wearing a face.
Every summer, Arsenal's players scatter across the globe. Every new season, they come back as one squad.
That's the idea behind The World Is Your Squad, our new campaign with Arsenal Football Club. Featuring legends from the men's and women's squads.
It's the perfect reminder of what we build at Deel every day: the tools that let high performing teams come together from anywhere in the world.
Proud to partner with the Premier League champions 🏆#COYG🔴⚪
The brand campaign, delivered by the founder. Deel's CEO announces the company's Arsenal Football Club partnership — and the analogy does the positioning: players scatter across the globe, then come back as one squad.
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Deel could have run this as a polished brand ad from the company page. Sponsoring the founder's own post instead makes a sponsorship announcement feel like news from a person — and the library's EU transparency data shows Deel putting real distribution behind it: 10,000–20,000 impressions in the covered window, targeted at Germany, Switzerland and six other markets.
Takeaway: when you have company news, test the founder's telling of it against the brand's telling. The same fact from a face often travels further.
Borrowed voices: sponsoring people who don't work for you
The least-known capability of the format, and the most interesting: with their approval, you can sponsor a customer's post, a partner's post, or a speaker's post about your event.
A lot of marketers claim that they want their website to be their “best sales rep.”
But then they build a website that does nothing that an actual seller would do.
They make prospects wait to talk to sales, hide the product, and obscure answers to some of the most common questions.
Here’s 5 ways you can actually make your site your best rep.
1. Address your competition head on
A good sales rep is going to address competitors instead of pretending they don’t exist. This is why a number of our pages at Sybill have a “what about the other guys?” section clearly explaining how we’re different from the competition.
2. A pricing page…. With pricing on it 🤯
Pricing isn’t just a question. It is THE question. If you have a pricing page with no pricing on it (like hard numbers) you’re going to go to jail. I don’t make the rules.
3. FAQs errywhere
I like to put an FAQ section at the bottom of nearly every page I work on. It forces you to skip the BS and answer questions directly. The format just works.
4. Bite-sized customer proof
Nobody wants to read your long-azz case study. And your logo bar get glossed right over. But real human faces, testimonials, and proof in small bites? It helps. That’s why reps are bugging you for case studies.
5. Interactive demos.
Been beating this drum forever, but interactive demos are itttt. We use Storylane for ours and I’m planning to scale demos for our sales team this year.
On that note… I really dig what Storylane has built with RepX.
Nobody in their right mind is saying that AI is going to replace sellers. But it can offload a bunch of work and help qualify prospects around the clock.
RepX isn’t just a “talk to sales” chat bot (hate those). It’s trained on your product documentation and sales processes, so it can handle prospect questions, discovery, qualification, and hand-offs like a rep would.
And because it’s video based and adapts in real time, every interaction feels more like an actual conversation.
(Peep the screenshot of me asking RepX about pricing plans below. RepX had specific slides and pricing ready to roll, which was very cool.)
Check it out here:
https://lnkd.in/ehNAy6x9
A customer's argument, sponsored by the vendor. Collin works at Sybill, not Storylane. His post lists five ways to make a website behave like a sales rep — and lands on Storylane's product as the way he does the fifth.
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This is a testimonial that never says the word. The advice is genuinely usable (competitor pages, pricing with real numbers, FAQs everywhere, bite-sized proof, interactive demos), so the product endorsement arrives inside something worth reading — from a practitioner whose employer is named right in the byline. Storylane paying to distribute it is the modern referral: the vendor amplifies the customer instead of quoting them.
Takeaway: your best ad copy may already be published — on a customer's profile. Ask to sponsor it instead of rewriting it.
40-something cities into my speaking circuit and somehow never made it to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Fixing that this week. Speaking at Chili Piper's event thanks to Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️ Jenn Castillo and the crew.
Shoutout Storylane and Opensense for the gifts.
No recording allowed, but I'll bring the recap Friday.
The speaker promotes the event; the host pays for the reach. A ClickUp founding member posts about speaking at Chili Piper's event — casual photo of the swag on a hotel balcony, "no recording allowed, but I'll bring the recap Friday."
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Every conference asks speakers to "share with your network." Chili Piper does the smarter version: it pays to distribute the speaker's own post, so the event promotion arrives with the speaker's credibility and none of the brand's polish. The "no recording allowed" line is the quiet masterstroke — scarcity written by a human, not a countdown timer.
Takeaway: event marketing through the guest's voice beats event marketing through the host's. Budget for sponsoring speakers' posts, not just your own.
Marketing leaders from Bloomreach, Zoom, and LogicMonitor are getting together to talk about the future of GTM - and honestly, it’s going to look nothing like what most teams are doing today.
We’re digging into the questions that are already reshaping the landscape:
→ What does GTM leadership look like when the old playbooks finally get retired?
→ What happens when AI agents stop being “experiments” and start driving how we build, scale, and decide?
I’ll be joining Kimberly Storin and Natalie Scherer at Metadata’s Agentic GTM in 2026 and Beyond to explore what’s coming and what leaders need to confront now, not later.
If you think GTM is evolving… you might be underestimating how fast it’s about to change.
📆 December 3
🎟️ Attend the Metadata.io Agentic GTM in 2026 and Beyond virtual event
https://lnkd.in/eAmPRGTp
The panelist invites her own audience. Metadata sponsors a post by one of its event's speakers — the chief marketing officer of Bloomreach — inviting people to a virtual event she's speaking at, over a card of seven named speakers.
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Compare this with the standard event ad: a brand banner announcing a webinar nobody asked for. Here the invitation comes from a peer the audience already follows, the speaker card is all faces and titles, and the host company appears only in the "Promoted by" line. Registration asks are the format's natural home — the post is a person saying "I'll be there," which is the only event copy that has ever worked.
Takeaway: for webinars and events, sponsor the speakers' invitations. A person saying "join me" outperforms a brand saying "register now."
The practitioners: posts that teach something
The format's bread and butter — a person who does the work, sharing what they learned doing it. The product appears as the tool the lesson was learned with, or not at all.
I’ve watched 250+ sessions of B2B inbound buyers interact with the website over the past month.
And most of these people don’t actually want a demo call.
They want fast answers to one question:
“Is this product relevant for me or not?”
Most websites miss this part...
Most AI chatbots today still behave like support bots:
- trained on help docs
- answering one question at a time
- dropping a Calendly link as the “conversion”
- and killing momentum right when the buyer is leaning in
That works for support.
Not for buying.
💎 Answering questions is not the same thing as helping someone buy.
A real sales rep:
- guides discovery
- qualifies intent
- handles objections
- adapts based on the buyer
- knows when NOT to push a meeting
- and changes the next step depending on the person
Sometimes that’s:
- a demo
- a trial
- self-serve signup
- pricing
- or even “you’re probably too early for us”
That’s why we spent the last year building RepX at Storylane.
Not as another AI chatbot.
But as a real product specialist sitting beside the buyer:
- trained on sales conversations, not just help docs
- able to guide buyers visually through the product
- qualifying during the conversation itself
- and helping buyers move forward without forcing every interaction into a sales call
I think the AI chatbot category is about to split in two:
1. Bots optimized for support
2. Agents optimized for helping people buy
Very different products.
#demoautomation #interactivedemos #AIagents #RepX
Fieldwork as a hook. The post opens with the author's own research — he says he watched 250+ sessions of inbound buyers using the website — and the attached graphic turns what he saw into a chatbot-versus-sales-agent comparison table.
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"I watched the recordings" is a claim a company page can't credibly make — evidence gathered by a named person is the whole trick here. The graphic underneath is pure product marketing (five rows, the product winning every row), but it's framed as the conclusion of the fieldwork rather than the starting point. That ordering is what makes it feel earned.
Takeaway: lead with the work you did, then the conclusion it forced. Evidence first makes the pitch a finding.
Here are my top 10 *Non-Expert Claude tips:
1) Invest the timing in training the robot. Tell it how to report, tell it what to study, give it as much context as possible. Give it definitions and past presentations to learn from. Then you can package this up as a skill to use again.
2) If Claude creates something complex for you, make it show the work. Ask for an excel version you can download to reveal all of the formulas used. This can be checked more easily and you'll have more trust in the output.
3) Back. Up. The. Files. I left my laptop on an airplane and I left Claude cowork there with it... enough said. (thanks Delta for getting this back to me!)
4) When you load a skill, ask the agent to read back to you a summary of its knowledge. Make sure nothing new is top of mind that you need to add.
5) Fastest Analysis: Get a report into the pivot table format you want BEFORE you send Claude the screenshot. This will give it the instant context of which dimensions you’re looking at instead of explaining columns in a csv. (I'm still so fast with Salesforce reports, this has been easy)
6) Clarity... I’ve instructed claude to ask for more context or check for understanding in the form of a multiple choice question with an option for “other” in cowork. Easy for my brain to quickly answer. The more questions it asks you, the better.
7) "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" This has always been true in the world of automation. But it's easier than ever now to build an app for small things and that might not be necessary.
8) If you're struggling to get adoption of AI tools in your company, consider a boot camp where everyone does the same project together, or a contest for an app that solves a business problem.
9) RevOps needs to be the source of truth. full stop. Claude's outputs look so pretty that they are trusted instantly. But you can still mess up your data and it can still hallucinate. We have to have a method for uniform methodology. It could be mandatory Claude skills, an official reporting app, or a system of checking work. Will vary according to your company resources.
10) Don't wait until your company has 85 apps roaming around to figure out governance, roles and permissions, and the process for making work live / shareable. GTM teams need some structure on when to experiment, and when to follow a process. It's a tricky balance for Ops Pros to solve.
PS, we talked about the majority of these things at #chilipalooza26 in my sessions. What an amazing experience to learn from 150 awesome people.
PPS, Some of this might be very elementary. I'm not an expert! I just play one on Linkedin ... so what would you add to this list?
Ten tips, zero pitch. A revenue-operations VP shares her "top 10 Non-Expert Claude tips" — practical notes on making AI useful in ops work — over a photo of her moderating a panel at the company's own conference.
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The listicle is the most shareable shape on LinkedIn, and "non-expert" in the title is doing real work: it lowers the bar for the exact audience the company wants — ops leaders experimenting with AI, not AI specialists. The event photo quietly stacks a second proof: this person teaches this on stage. The product never appears; the company's association with practical AI advice is the ad.
Takeaway: sponsor the posts your buyers would have saved anyway. Usefulness is the targeting.
The whole-team roster
The companies furthest into the format don't sponsor one voice — they run a roster. Chili Piper and Rippling sponsor product marketers, sales managers and sales development reps side by side, each speaking to the slice of the audience that recognizes itself in them.
I'm guilty of this too: I poured budget into traffic and then wondered why pipeline still felt stuck.
Even on a good day, only about 3% of your site visitors convert. The other 97% land, look, and leave.
That's what Kate Vasylenko and I are getting into on July 21. Kate's team at 42DM benchmarked 100 top AI products to find which go-to-market channels actually drive traffic, and at which stage.
I'll bring the other half: what we at Chili Piper learned from over 5 million form fills about turning that hard-won traffic into pipeline.
Join us live on July 21st. Link in the comments.
The confession hook. "I'm guilty of this too" — a product marketer opens with her own mistake (buying traffic, wondering where pipeline went), then invites you to the live session where she and a partner unpack what they've each learned.
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A confession is the fastest trust-builder in copy, and it is very hard to write from a brand account — companies don't admit things, people do. The video is deliberately unpolished: outdoors, handheld, one take. The post stacks her claims (site conversion rates, a partner's benchmark of AI products, the company's form-fill data) as reasons to attend, and the casual production keeps it feeling like a colleague's recommendation rather than a webinar funnel.
Takeaway: let people admit the mistake your product fixes. The brand can't say "I got this wrong" — your team can.
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Marlon Daniels Samson Tsui Karlie Groh Hassan Yahya Mathieu Kingston Luke Rich Ishmael Mohamed Ajay Gomes Calvin Leung Lisa Dahmani
A produced show, published by a person. A sales manager's post carries a properly produced video — presenter, microphone, office set — teasing whether a small business's messy admin could be worth $50,000, per the post's own framing.
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This inverts the usual logic: the content is studio-grade, but it ships through an employee's profile because the distribution works better there. Note who the author is — not an executive, a manager who actually sells to small businesses. When the small-business owner sees "SMB sales manager" in the byline, the targeting has already happened before LinkedIn's targeting does anything.
Takeaway: match the author to the audience, not to the org chart. The byline is part of the creative.
🤝 An offboarding process usually ends with a laptop returned, a handshake, and a card everyone signed on their way out.
🧐 It rarely ends with a check of every SaaS login, shared password, and CRM permission that person still holds.
⏳ Most businesses assume that gap is small. It isn't. The average UK business now runs on more than 130 SaaS applications, and by the time someone's last day arrives, nobody's fully sure what they can still get into.
🥷 Here's the number that should worry you more than any of that: data theft spikes 720% in the 24 hours before an employee leaves. Not after they've gone. Before.
⌛ Which means by the time the exit interview happens, the highest-risk window may already have closed.
Full piece here: https://lnkd.in/dBjz5DXu
The Great Offboarding: The UK gap putting you at riskPoor offboarding leaves UK businesses exposed to security and GDPR risks. Learn how former employees retain access — and how to close the gaps.
Yes, even the sales development rep. An SDR's post about what offboarding usually looks like — laptop, handshake, signed card — sponsored by Rippling and targeted, per the library's EU data, at Ireland and the UK.
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The most junior author in this gallery, and that's the point: Rippling sponsors voices at every level, sized to matching audiences — 1,000–5,000 impressions in the covered window, a precision play rather than a broadcast. For the cost of one brand campaign, a roster of employee posts lets the company test which voice resonates with which segment before scaling any of them.
Takeaway: thought leader ads aren't reserved for executives. Small, well-matched author-audience pairs are cheap to test.
What has worked in our own LinkedIn accounts
We run LinkedIn for business-to-business clients where a single closed deal pays for months of advertising. The numbers below are what I've seen in those accounts — operator experience, not industry benchmarks.
Native content under $0.70 a click
I've seen LinkedIn thought-leadership ads drive North-America traffic for under $0.70 per click in a niche C-suite account — on a platform with a reputation for expensive clicks. The variable that decided it, every time: the creative.
Message ads for cents, when they're earned
In the same C-suite niche, I've seen LinkedIn message ads reach decision-makers for as little as $0.15–0.16 per message. That price isn't a menu item — it's what the auction gives creative that the audience actually engages with.
The click-through bar that earns those prices
My working bar for these placements is a 5–6% click-through rate minimum — and niche C-suite audiences like logistics and government have hit 15%+. Content influences costs: clear the bar and the economics change; miss it and LinkedIn is as expensive as everyone says.
How to run a thought leader ad, step by step
The advertiser's side, per LinkedIn's Campaign Manager documentation. You need content-admin-level access on the company Page and creative manager access or higher on the ad account.
-
Create a campaign with a compatible objective
Thought leader ads run under three objectives only: brand awareness, engagement, or video views. No lead-gen forms, no website-conversion objective — this format buys attention and trust, not form fills.
-
Find the post
On the "Ads in this ad set" page, choose Browse existing content, switch to the LinkedIn members tab, and search the Posts tab by the member's name or by pasting the post URL. You can pull posts from employees or from your 1st, 2nd or 3rd-degree connections.
-
Request approval
Select the post and click Request approval, then Send. The author gets an email and an in-app notification. You can also copy the request link and send it in a direct message — worth doing, since approval requests are easy to miss.
-
Wait for the author's approval
Nothing runs until they approve. Once they do, you'll get a Campaign Manager notification and the post becomes available to sponsor like any other creative.
-
Know the format's limits before you plan around it
No call-to-action button on single image or video thought leader ads, and you can't duplicate one — each sponsorship traces back to the one approved post. Reporting shows standard campaign metrics; the author sees combined organic-plus-paid reach on their own post.
How approval works for the thought leader
The author's side — worth sending to anyone whose post you want to sponsor, because most people have never seen this screen. Everything lives on LinkedIn's Sponsorship Permissions page (linkedin.com/sponsorship-permissions).
- Approve or decline one request. The Requests and Posts tab lists every pending sponsorship request with an Approve and a Decline button. Approving one request approves that one post for that one advertiser.
- See everything you've approved. Approved posts move to the My posts section, which is the standing record of who is allowed to run what.
- Revoke any time. On any approved post: the More icon, then Revoke Approval. Ads running on that post stop and the sponsorship cancels in the advertiser's account. The veto survives approval — permanently.
One-time approval vs auto-approval
The question every thought leader asks once the requests start arriving. Per LinkedIn's auto-approval documentation:
| One-time approval | Auto-approval | |
|---|---|---|
| What it covers | One post, one advertiser, one decision | All pending and future requests from that advertiser |
| Where | Requests and Posts tab → Approve | Auto-approval tab → Turn on → Confirm |
| Scope | Per request | Per advertiser — never global across advertisers |
| You'll be notified | Every request | No per-request notifications while it's on |
| Turning it off | — | Two choices: stop new sponsorships only, or revoke past and new — the second cancels ads already running |
The sensible default: one-time approval for anyone outside your company, and auto-approval only where LinkedIn's own guidance points — advertisers you trust, which in practice means your own employer's ad account when you post as part of the company's program. Auto-approval removes the review step entirely; the author won't see what runs until it's running.
What you can and can't sponsor
Eligibility, per LinkedIn's format documentation — check this before promising a campaign around someone's post:
- Sponsorable: text posts, single-image posts, video posts, articles and newsletter posts, LinkedIn Live and event posts, and eligible collaborative posts. The post must be public and show the member's full name.
- Not sponsorable: celebration posts, documents, polls, and multi-image posts. Reshares can't be sponsored either — request approval on the original post instead.
- Whose posts: employees, and 1st/2nd/3rd-degree connections outside the company — always with the author's approval.
- A regional catch: creators in European countries covered by the Digital Markets Act don't appear in the advertiser's content search, so their posts can't be sponsored even when public.
Recreate the pattern with AI
The format resists templating on purpose — the whole value is that it reads like a person. What you can systematize is the post's skeleton. The prompt below writes drafts in the shapes this gallery keeps producing; the voice still has to come from the author's edit.
Write 3 LinkedIn post drafts for {NAME}, {ROLE} at {COMPANY}, to be used as
sponsored thought leader ads targeting {AUDIENCE}. One post per structure:
1. Position essay: a debatable claim about {INDUSTRY TOPIC}, an enemy on each side of it, one everyday analogy that resolves it. No product pitch. 2. Fieldwork post: open with first-hand evidence ("I reviewed/watched/ audited {REAL WORK THE AUTHOR ACTUALLY DID}"), then the conclusion it forced, then how {COMPANY}'s product fits that conclusion — last, briefly. 3. Confession listicle: open by admitting a mistake {AUDIENCE} also makes, then 5 numbered, genuinely usable tips. Product mention optional.
Rules: first person, short paragraphs, no hashtag walls, no "I'm excited to share", claims only from the author's real experience — leave {BRACKETS} where facts must be filled in. 150–250 words each.
Static-format templates for the rest of your LinkedIn and Meta mix — proof badges, ICP cards, comparison layouts — are in the free ad template library.
How to use these examples
-
Pick authors your buyers recognize themselves in
Founder for vision, practitioner for tactics, the rep who serves that segment for the segment. The byline targets before the targeting does.
-
Sponsor posts that already worked organically
The post's organic engagement is a free creative test. Pay to scale the winner, not the draft.
-
Ask outside voices, not just your own team
Customers, partners, event speakers — a borrowed voice with a real reason to talk about you beats a house account reading a script. Send them the sponsorship-permissions link with the request so approval takes one click.
-
Respect the veto
Authors can revoke at any time and running ads stop. Never build a campaign whose economics collapse if one person changes their mind — spread spend across a roster.
-
Match the objective to what the format does
Awareness and engagement, not form fills. Retarget the engagers with your conversion campaigns; the thought leader ad is the top of that funnel, filtered to your ideal customer profile by who bothers to read it.
If your growth plan leans on LinkedIn, this format belongs next to your search and Meta mix, not instead of it — see how the platforms split the work in the B2B SaaS examples. And if you'd rather have the whole mix run for you, that's what we do for startups and professional-services firms.
FAQ
What are thought leader ads on LinkedIn?
Thought leader ads are regular LinkedIn member posts that a company sponsors through Campaign Manager. The post keeps the author's name, photo and headline, with "Promoted by" plus the company name added under the byline. Companies can sponsor posts from employees or, with permission, from people outside the company such as customers, partners and event speakers.
How does the approval process work?
The advertiser finds the post in Campaign Manager under Browse existing content, selects it, and clicks Request approval. The author gets an email and notification, then approves or declines at linkedin.com/sponsorship-permissions under the Requests and Posts tab. Nothing runs until they approve, and they can revoke approval at any time, which stops the ad immediately.
What is the difference between one-time approval and auto-approval?
One-time approval covers a single post for a single advertiser — every new request needs another approval. Auto-approval, switched on per advertiser from the Auto-approval tab, approves all pending and future requests from that advertiser without further review. Turning it off offers two options: stop new sponsorships only, or revoke past and new posts, which also cancels ads already running.
What are the requirements for a LinkedIn thought leader ad?
The post must be public, show the member's full name, and be a text, single-image, video, article, newsletter or event post — celebrations, documents, polls, multi-image posts and reshares are not eligible. The campaign objective must be brand awareness, engagement or video views. The advertiser needs content-admin access on the company Page, creative manager access on the ad account, and the author's approval.
What do LinkedIn thought leader ads cost?
They run through LinkedIn's normal auction, so there is no separate rate card — cost depends on audience and creative strength. In a niche C-suite account we manage, I've seen thought-leadership ads drive North-America traffic for under $0.70 per click with creative clearing a 5–6% click-through rate. Weak creative pays the LinkedIn prices everyone complains about; the content decides which price you get.
Can I sponsor a post from someone who doesn't work at my company?
Yes — LinkedIn allows sponsoring posts from your 1st, 2nd or 3rd-degree connections with their approval, not only employees. The exceptions: creators in European countries covered by the Digital Markets Act won't appear in the content search, and the author always keeps the power to revoke. Customers, partners and event speakers are the natural candidates.
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