The Buying Committee Doesn't Live On LinkedIn
High-attention channels, multi-stakeholder reach, and why the account graph, NOT the inventory, is the thing that actually matters
In this deep dive
Why LinkedIn structurally can’t reach half your buying committee
The attention data on CTV and audio and why it shifts the maths - these really are no-brainer B2B channels when you see the data below
An honest persona map: where LinkedIn is strong and where it leaks
The account graph: without it, CTV is just expensive reach
Six reasons B2B CTV breaks self-serve execution models + how to over-come them
How to run a credible test without setting £50k on fire
Why the share-of-voice window closes sooner than you think
Here’s a sentence you don’t hear enough at B2B marketing conferences: LinkedIn is structurally incapable of reaching large parts of your buying committee.
That’s not a swipe at LinkedIn. I engage regularly on it every week, and for certain personas, most notably CMOs, VPs of Sales, Product leaders in tech, anyone whose career depends on being professionally visible, it’s the closest thing we have to a deterministic reach channel. In this regard it is brilliant, there are no bugs to bare here.
LinkedIn’s own research backs this up: the platform identifies five departments that most heavily influence B2B purchase decisions — IT, Finance, Business Development, Accounting, and Operations. LinkedIn is very good at reaching one or two of them.
The problem is the other three.
If you’ve ever tried to serve an ad to a plant manager, a facilities director, a controller at a mid-market manufacturer, a mid-career IT operations lead, a procurement head, a compliance officer, or a GP practice manager — and tried to do it at the scale and frequency required to register a brand — you already know what I’m about to say.
LinkedIn’s panel is self-selected, skewed toward the ambitious, the career-mobile, and the marketing-adjacent. Vast swathes of the actual decision-making economy — operations, finance below the C-suite, field-level tech buyers, public sector, non-English-speaking Europe, and most of the mid-market below the Fortune 5000 — are either absent, dormant, or invisible behind limited activity. This is a big swarth of the B2B marketing universe.
Ice Blue Sky’s recent work on UK tech and finance buyers made the uncomfortable point plainly: public-sector IT Directors, Heads of Technology, and Finance Directors are meaningfully less active than their private-sector counterparts, with posting constrained by communications policy and profiles that are “dormant between moments” of recruitment or programme launches. They are still on LinkedIn. They are not reachable through it. In plain english? they are not logging in and spending time on there until they are looking for a new job.
So when the B2B marketing industry has a collective panic about a cookieless world, signal loss, and LinkedIn CPM inflation, the answer most of us reach for is “spend more on LinkedIn.” It’s the wrong answer. The right answer is: find the committee where they actually pay attention and use a central account graph to do it.
That’s what this piece is about.
The attention argument, with numbers attached
Let’s get past the part where we all agree that “attention matters” and look at what the measurement firms are actually finding.
Adelaide’s 2026 Outcomes Guide, published in January, pulled together 60 case studies across 16 industries. Their headline: campaigns optimised to attention metrics saw an average 33% lift in upper-funnel KPIs and 53% increase in lower-funnel impact in 2025. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a capital-allocation argument.
And CTV, specifically, sits at the top of the attention league table. Per Adelaide’s industry KPI data reported by eMarketer, CTV attention units declined slightly between 2024 and 2025 but “remain strong overall” — Adelaide’s finding is that CTV is “relatively unmatched in capturing audience interest.” An earlier Adelaide index showed CTV jumping from 57.5 to 69.5 (out of 100) between 2023 and 2024, far exceeding online video or display.
There is a reason why TV was always the king of brand advertising.
Digital audio earns the same kind of premium, and interestingly, in my opinion is radically under-valued in agency and advertising land. Industry data consistently puts podcast completion rates at 80%+ versus roughly 12% for video content. 83% of senior executives report listening to a podcast in the past week, and business leaders spend 54+ minutes a day on audio content. The UK podcast ad market is forecast at only £56m in 2025 — tiny relative to engagement — which means share-of-voice is still cheap for anyone who moves now. I’d argue podcast advertising may be the single biggest bang for buck in B2B advertising today based on this data.
Host-read podcast ads outperform programmatic audio insertions by roughly 1.7x on brand outcomes. CPMs in specialised B2B shows regularly run $50–$100+ which sounds expensive until you remember your LinkedIn Message Ad is probably costing more on a CPMQL basis and being ignored.
These aren’t advocacy numbers from a sponsored deck. They’re the aggregate of years of third-party measurement across CTV, audio, online video and display, and they point in one direction: the attention you buy on high-attention channels is not the same unit as the attention you buy on a scrolling feed.
Further reading
The LinkedIn persona map, honestly drawn
Before anyone takes this as a “LinkedIn is dead” piece, let me be clear about where it’s brilliant.
Where LinkedIn is strong:
Senior marketing (CMOs, VPs, marketing ops)
Sales leadership (CROs, VPs of Sales, revenue ops)
Tech executives in private-sector software and SaaS (CTOs, CIOs, Heads of Engineering) as well as founders and owners
Product leaders in venture-backed companies
HR and People leaders
Anyone actively hiring, fundraising, or personal-branding
This is the LinkedIn sweet spot. Deterministic targeting, high match rates, usable frequency.
Where LinkedIn is weak;
Operations, plant, and facilities leadership
Mid-market finance (Financial Controllers, FDs below the AIM 100)
IT ops and infrastructure managers at non-tech companies
Procurement and supply chain
Compliance, risk, and legal in regulated industries
Public sector at all levels
Clinical and practice-management roles in healthcare
Most non-English-speaking European markets below the C-suite
The “invisible committee” — the internal champions, budget gatekeepers, and end-user influencers who don’t post, don’t engage, and whose profiles are five years out of date
These are the people who sign off - or kill - your deal. And they are, on average, not scrollable on LinkedIn.
What they do do is watch Netflix. Listen to podcasts on their commute. Stream sport on CTV. Put on a podcast whilst doing admin. Leave an Amazon Prime Video ad-supported tier running in the background. The attention is real; the channel is just different.
Why CTV actually works for B2B (when it does)
The CTV-for-B2B case is no longer theoretical. The data has shown up.
Salesforce, in a recent case study, found LinkedIn’s CTV ads reached four times as many on-target impressions compared to linear TV. ServiceNow’s Jonathan Vu, VP of marketing, credited LinkedIn CTV with a 19% lift in awareness at large companies and a 45% improvement in lead submission rates. His comment on AdExchanger cuts to the commercial logic: “The competitive edge here is that we’re able to use that same audience that we’re running other campaigns with on LinkedIn for that CTV buy.”
Magna Media Trials found 98% of LinkedIn users watch CTV in a given week, compared with 83% for linear TV. 94% watch CTV with ads. These are the exact same decision-makers — just on a bigger, more attentive screen, in the evening, with their partner. LinkedIn have now on-ramped their data onto TradeDesk to activate CTV buys against in the US market, and my understanding is that will not expand beyond the US, at least in the near term.
Scott Stedman at the B2B agency Imaginarium, speaking to Bombora last year, put it well: “CTV is the most underutilised area of the marketing ecosystem. There’s still such an opportunity, surprise, and delight in B2B on CTV — because it’s not where most marketers are putting their budgets.” He adds the critical caveat: “With Bombora, the ability to take CTV and target it at an account level unlocks that channel in such a powerful way.”
That last line is the one that matters. This is where the activation layer, or DSP, needs to be strong enough to enable the B2B data layers that we need - as I was arguing on LinkedIn this week;
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/miketharty_a-major-holding-group-audited-a-leading-dsp-activity
Without a graph, none of this works
Here’s the part the CTV vendor marketing doesn’t lead with.
Consumer CTV is easy. Buy a demo, optimise to a conversion, walk away. B2B CTV is structurally different. You are trying to reach:
A seven-person committee
Across a six-month cycle
In a thousand named accounts
With co-ordinated frequency
Against a pipeline value not a CPM
That requires a central account graph — a single source of truth that tells you which companies are in your ICP, which are in-market, which are in active opportunities, and which individuals sit on which buying committee inside each. Without it, CTV is just expensive reach.
With it, every channel in your mix becomes a conditional layer that lights up when the graph says so:
Account enters awareness trigger (intent spike, site visit, webinar attendance) → light up CTV and audio for the account’s known DMA / IP range
Account moves to consideration → layer in LinkedIn targeting the identified committee members + contextual display on vertical pubs
Account enters active pipeline → co-ordinated air cover: CTV to the committee, host-read audio on a category podcast, sales-enablement email
Account stalls or goes dark → retargeting via display + podcast network, paused LinkedIn to preserve frequency budget
Account closes → cut spend, move to post-sale / expansion sequences
This is not a 2028 vision. It’s what leading operators do right now. Demandbase’s CTV playbook describes exactly this: uploading first-party CRM data to a CTV platform to target active opportunities as “air cover for your sales team, ensuring your brand stays visible to the entire buying committee while a deal is being negotiated.” Unisys’s Kate Coppola, speaking in their case study, landed on the same language — “visibility into and control over the campaigns we are running” as the unlock.
The graph is the conductor. CTV and audio are instruments. Without a conductor, you get noise.
CTV is HARD
Let me break character for a moment and name the reality that most of the LinkedIn “you too can do CTV” content glosses over.
CTV is hard to execute properly. And B2B CTV is harder.
The AdExchanger piece from three days ago on “agentic advertising” in CTV is instructive. Their framing: “CTV never fit cleanly into campaign execution models built for RTB-based trading.” Each CTV campaign combines custom packaging, negotiated pricing (often upfront commitments), creative requirements, delivery guarantees, and advertiser-specific measurement expectations — across systems that were never designed to operate as a single workflow. That’s before you layer on B2B-specific requirements like account-level delivery reporting, committee-level frequency management, and IP-to-account resolution.
Stedman’s take in Bombora’s piece was blunter: “You want to buy CTV? It’s a much more sophisticated process. You really need either to have a programmatic expert on your team or to have an agency partner.”
The specific executional pain points, in the order they tend to bite:
Inventory access. Premium B2B-suitable CTV is bought upfront, guaranteed, direct-IO, or through a small number of curated deal IDs. RTB will not get you on Disney+ in primetime.
Identity resolution. as we covered with the need for an account graph
Frequency management across publishers. Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Samsung Ads, Roku and the FASTs don’t share a frequency cap. Managing committee-level frequency across them requires a unified pixel, clean room, or media operator coordinating across deal IDs.
Creative. B2B has historically spent 90% of its budget on display banners. You now need 15s and 30s video for CTV, 15s and 30s audio for podcasts. Most B2B brands have none of this in the library.
Measurement. Net-new to most CROs. Upper-funnel lift studies, brand tracker alignment, MMM integration, and the stubborn fact that CTV will not directly convert in GA4. CFOs don’t love this conversation.
Reporting. Turning all of the above into something a board can read — account-level reach, committee penetration, assisted pipeline — is the bit that separates “we ran CTV” from “we prove CTV worked.”
This is why you are seeing a consistent pattern across the leading B2B marketing operators: the execution runs as a managed service, not a self-serve licence. Not because managed service is a fashionable model, but because the span of capability required — programmatic trading, identity, data engineering, creative ops, measurement science, account-graph management — is not a seat-based SaaS problem. It’s a specialist operational problem.
The brands doing this well are either (a) running the whole thing internally with a >10-person team — plausible for Salesforce, not for the 99% of B2B companies — or (b) running it via a managed partner whose entire operation exists to solve this exact class of problem. There isn’t really a credible third option.
This isn’t a self-congratulatory aside. It’s a structural observation about a channel whose complexity continues to grow: Nielsen’s measurement is contested, IP match rates are inconsistent, inventory is fragmented across walled gardens and FASTs, and the operating model for “B2B-suitable CTV” has yet to be solved by a single DSP UI.
Calculated experimentation, not a YOLO pivot
None of this is an argument to take 30% of your LinkedIn budget and put it on Roku next week.
It is an argument to do five things, in this order:
Build (or buy access to) a central account graph. If your “account list” is a spreadsheet in HubSpot, you are not ready for CTV. Start with identity: firmographic, intent, committee, status.
Honestly audit where LinkedIn is weak for your ICP. Pull match rates for your target-account person-list. If you’re missing 40%+ of your committee — and for most operations, finance, and mid-market sellers you will be — that gap is what high-attention channels are for.
Run a paired test. Take one segment. Layer CTV + podcast against LinkedIn-reachable committee members on the same accounts. Measure brand lift, reach, and pipeline velocity — not clicks.
Commit a credible budget to the test. Demandbase’s guidance is $25,000–$50,000 for a 90-day CTV test. Underfunding a test produces inconclusive data that makes it harder to justify future investment. This is correct. A £5k “experiment” is not an experiment.
Run the test through a partner who operates the whole stack. Or build the team. But don’t half-build it. That is where most of the failure stories come from.
The window is open for a bit longer
The reason this matters now — rather than, say, in 2028 — is that the high-attention channels are still under-priced for B2B share-of-voice. UK podcast ad spend at £56m, CTV pricing still consumer-optimised rather than B2B-optimised, and most B2B competitors still in the “we’re testing LinkedIn video” phase.
That window will close. LinkedIn’s own CTV product, now generally available across US and Canada with VAST integrations and expanded Paramount reach, is the clearest signal that the B2B audience on CTV is being actively priced in. When LinkedIn themselves are selling CTV to B2B buyers, it is no longer an information asymmetry worth waiting on.
My view — for what it’s worth — is that over the next 18 months the B2B marketing winners will be the ones who have built the account graph, connected it to high-attention inventory, and gotten serious about reaching the whole committee, not the one in four who happen to post on LinkedIn.
The committee doesn’t live on LinkedIn. It never really did. It just became convenient to pretend it did, because LinkedIn was the only channel we could bill against a persona.
That’s no longer true. And the operators who notice first will have the advantage.
— Mike
The B2B Stack is a practitioner-led newsletter on B2B marketing and programmatic advertising. If this was useful, forward it to the colleague who’s still telling you LinkedIn is enough.
Need help leveraging a B2B account graph, or making best in class channels like CTV and audio work for your brand or agency? FunnelFuel was built to address these challenges, upgrading the best of adtech for B2B. If you’re reading this in email, simply reply and you will land in my inbox or email me at mike [at] funnelfuel.io and we can help you get started. Or connect with me on LinkedIn here