LinkedIn Launches Carousel Ads for Sponsored Content

LinkedIn today launched carousel ads for its Sponsored Content native advertising format, a new tool for B2B companies to tell their brand stories and engage with their target audiences on the LinkedIn platform.

The carousel ads aim to inject emotion into the B2B marketing process, according to Abhishek Shrivastava, director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. “When people make decisions about buying a consumer product, there are emotions involved, and similar emotions are involved when you’re making decisions about business purchases,” Shrivastava says. “Business marketing should humanize interactions with its target audience, and that’s the approach we’ve been taking at LinkedIn in terms of building capabilities and tools to allow people to paint a compelling and engaging story to their target audience, so that they can connect emotionally with them and help them make decisions.”

Each individual carousel ad features a swipeable series of up to 10 cards, each of which can be customized. This flexibility enables companies to share more of their content and ultimately create higher-quality interactions with their target audiences.

“Earlier this quarter we launched video which is a great way to use sight, sound, and motion to tell a story, and carousel is just the next evolution of that,” Shrivastava elaborates. “Now you have the capability to upload up to 10 images to tell a brand story—to describe your product in more detail, talk about your product catalog, talk about the insights that people have provided about your product—[to deliver] all those pieces in a very compelling fashion to your target audience.”

He adds that by allowing companies to include up to 10 cards of content, each carousel ad can encompass the entire marketing process. “What is really compelling about this ad unit is that it really goes across the entire funnel,” he says. “Imagine the first few images being more on the branding side, and as your target audience’s interest gets peaked they can learn more about the product and offering that you have in the same experience. And ultimately if they like what they’re seeing they can submit themselves as a lead that you can follow up with later on.”