The news: LinkedIn will roll out its AI ad campaign tool, Accelerate, for advertisers this fall, per Digiday.

Accelerate, which LinkedIn says will reduce the time of creating a campaign from 15 hours to five minutes, has been in limited testing since October. Additionally, LinkedIn claims that Accelerate will reduce cost per action by 52% compared with traditional campaigns.

AI and LinkedIn: The professional social media networking site has made an aggressive push into advertising and artificial intelligence in recent years, bringing AI to multiple facets of its platform.

• LinkedIn users and advertisers can now use artificial intelligence to summarize posts and profiles, review applications and search for jobs, and create content, among other uses. Many of these features are locked behind its Premium subscription service, which brought in $1.7 billion in revenues last year.
• Alongside its AI developments, LinkedIn has expanded its ad formats. The platform’s highly engaged user base and brand-safe environment has helped it develop a positive reputation among digital advertisers: 70% of respondents in a November 2023 Hootsuite survey said they were confident in LinkedIn’s return on ad investment, the highest of any social media platform.
• With Accelerate, LinkedIn is hoping to capitalize on that positive sentiment by further improving efficiency, reducing the resources required to run a successful ad campaign and lowering the barrier of entry for smaller or less-experienced brands to advertise on the platform.

AI efficiencies: AI-powered advertising tools are in high demand among marketers, and several digital platforms are investing in features to easily maneuver through the campaign creation process, from generating creative materials to targeting consumers.

• Both Meta and Google have launched AI marketing tools that allow easy access to creative material, targeting, and analytics. Even non-tech giants are leveraging AI for advertising purposes: The New York Times is using AI to help identify untapped consumer segments.
• LinkedIn’s pitch for AI focuses on ease of use: All marketers have to do is provide a link to the product they want to advertise, and Accelerate will combine that information with other data on LinkedIn to determine how a campaign should be rolled out.

Our take: AI’s potential to reduce the barrier of entry to digital advertising opens up large pools of potential spending for digital platforms. If Accelerate can address some of the complaints from earlier tests about its limited capabilities, it could help the social platform further establish itself as a leader for advertising.