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

Below is the persona map of where LinkedIn leaks, and how I’d run a credible CTV test without wasting budget.

The B2B Stack

Why LinkedIn Ads Miss Most of the B2B Buying…

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