Building LinkedIn’s CTV Ads: Scaling professional reach to the big screen

Connected TV (CTV) is one of the fastest-growing channels in digital advertising, enabling brands to deliver impactful, long-form video experiences to highly engaged audiences on high‑quality, professionally produced content. Last year, we officially launched and announced our CTV solution, bringing the familiar ad experience from the LinkedIn Feed to streaming platforms. Advertisers can reach professional audiences, using the same trusted targeting, campaign setup, and measurement tools they already use on LinkedIn. 

In this post, we’ll provide a deep dive into how we built our CTV Ads solution, including the core design principles that guided our approach, the underlying technical frameworks and infrastructure we leveraged. We will also discuss the engineering decisions we made to deliver a scalable, reliable, and measurable experience for advertisers and publishers alike.

Our guiding principles

From the outset, we established a set of core principles to guide the design and development of our CTV solution:

Make it feel native, not bolted on: CTV should feel seamlessly integrated into the existing LinkedIn Ads product experiences for customers. This means a unified journey with campaign setup, creative workflows, audience targeting, forecasting, and reporting to avoid onboarding friction. Meanwhile, CTV viewers should experience the same high quality, professional video ads as their LinkedIn Feed. 

Leverage what already works: Utilize LinkedIn Ads building blocks across bidding, pacing, optimization, delivery, tracking, and measurement; tailor and tune to meet CTV needs, extend or build when necessary.

Ship, learn, iterate: Start with most critical features, actively gather customer feedback, and iterate rapidly to refine and enhance the product.

With those principles in place, we began building the product.

CTV supply: deal-driven private marketplace

The first question we had to answer was, “where do we serve the CTV Ads?” To offer CTV at scale, we decided to integrate with high‑quality CTV publishers via Real Time Bidding (RTB). We launched CTV with curated private marketplace (PMP) deals to uphold our commitment to brand safety and maintain a high bar for CTV content quality. These deals are created only on top of a curated publisher list and are not independent of it. 

Supply management system

As CTV scaled, it became harder to manage rapidly growing PMP deals and bespoke deal constraints (e.g. bid floors, pacing targets, spend policies). Manually curating these deals created a bottleneck so we built a supply management system that allows us to: 

• Onboard PMP deals with structured metadata and business rules (e.g., bid floors, spend goals)
• Dynamically control deal activation (e.g., enable or pause deals seamlessly)
• Optimize bidding while respecting individual deal constraints

This system allows us to manage our CTV supply more efficiently as it scales and evolves.

Supply-side dynamics in our CTV ecosystem

The CTV Ads ecosystem introduces unique dynamics where publishers play a more active role in shaping ad delivery, often with distinct pricing models and content expectations. We adapted our systems to account for this, ensuring the marketplace remains balanced and sustainable for both advertisers and publishers.

To do so, we overhauled our supply prioritization algorithms for CTV and introduced CTV-specific signals into our relevance models. These enhancements ensure our serving logic accounts for publisher objectives while continuing to deliver strong advertiser outcomes. The result is an ecosystem where advertisers reach premium professional audiences at scale, and publishers see their content monetized in ways that align with their business goals and LinkedIn’s B2B audience demand.

Elevating trust & brand suitability

Beyond the PMP model, the quality of the content where LinkedIn’s CTV Ads appear is a top priority for us. We have intensified our efforts to curate CTV supply, with content and traffic quality as core tenants of publisher selection criteria. To create an enhanced advertiser experience, we have enabled IAB Category Exclusions, Publisher Allow lists and Block lists, plus Publisher Delivery Reports for CTV within LinkedIn Campaign Manager’s Brand Safety Hub.

To maintain CTV quality, we expanded our integration with DoubleVerify (DV). Leveraging DoubleVerify marketplace suite quality insights provides a new measurement solution to monitor the Traffic Quality Insights and app-level Brand Suitability for LinkedIn’s CTV Ads campaigns. We utilize DoubleVerify's expertise to proactively filter out potentially problematic apps and invalid CTV traffic within our ad request flow.

We are pleased to share that since the beginning, DoubleVerify has measured our CTV Ads supply as over 99% brand risk floor-free, and less than 1% of impressions were detected as invalid traffic, providing confidence in the quality of Linkedin's CTV Ads supply. For additional transparency, we now offer Advertisers the ability to leverage their own DV post-bid verification tags to independently measure LinkedIn's CTV Ads. 

Reaching professional audiences on household devices

We build our advertising products to help our customers reach the right audience at the right time, with the right content. A significant engineering challenge in the CTV space is identifying if the audience is watching content on a shared household device (the TV). 

We’ve addressed this challenge using a data‑driven, cross‑device identity approach that allows us to responsibly associate CTV impressions with LinkedIn members where appropriate. This enables LinkedIn’s professional targeting capabilities to be applied to CTV ads while continuing to honor member consent, privacy choices, and advertising data settings.

Unlike personal mobile and desktop devices, CTV is a shared household medium and is often viewed by multiple users. Therefore, our identity graph has been specifically tuned to address these unique characteristics and we acquire deterministic mappings from select external trusted partners to validate and continually improve the accuracy of our identity graph.

Creative specifications for Premium CTV

From the start, we integrated with top-tier, premium CTV publishers, who have some of the highest creative quality bars in the industry. Some of these publishers have sophisticated creative review systems with stringent specifications, such as requiring certification of our DSP before we can deliver ads on their platforms. This could be challenging because publishers' expectations are subtly different and tightly enforced.

Here are some of the engineering and product challenges we solved for:

• Strict video encoding and bitrate constraints: Premium publishers often require constant bit rate (CBR) encoding, high minimum bitrates, specific codecs and no compression artifacts. If the bitrate or encoding profile is slightly off, the creative gets rejected. 
• Frame rate/frame time matching: Publishers demand native frame rates (23.98, 25, 29.97, 30 fps etc.), consistent across render, encoding, and playback. Mismatches (for instance rendering at 30 fps, but encoding at 24 fps) cause playback issues, dropping frames, or getting rejected.
• Audio specs: Some require precise audio sample rates (48 kHz is common), specific audio codecs and minimum audio bitrates. Variations can lead to rejection or poor viewer experience.
• Format, container, and file structure restrictions: Several restrictions such as no letterboxing/pillar-boxing or black bars, strict aspect ratios specifically defined file formats and metadata.
• Testing, certification, and iteration cycles: Because publishers have QA/creative review systems, each submission requires going through their pipeline, getting feedback on failures, adjusting creative recipes, re-uploading, and repeating until approval. This adds latency (often multiple hours or days), so having tooling and automation was critical.

We made several technical adjustments to meet these criteria, including:

• Enhanced video processing “recipes” (transcoding pipelines) to support constant bit rate encoding, strict codec profiles, frame-accurate FPS matching, and audio sample rate compliance.
• Extending our media asset management system to store not only different resolutions but multiple versions/variants per publisher spec, along with metadata (bitrate, framerate, codec, etc.) to enable validation before upload.
• Developing creative validation systems, so CTV creatives can be validated at upload time to prevent delivery issues down the line.

With these updates, advertisers can more easily select or upload desired video assets. Only assets that meet LinkedIn's CTV video specifications can be associated with a CTV Ads campaign. These specifications are detailed here. As detailed on our LinkedIn Help page, any video that meets CTV Ads specifications can be used for CTV Ads, but only videos created or uploaded as CTV Ads assets can be sponsored in a CTV Ads campaign. Videos originally created for non‑CTV campaigns must be re‑uploaded as CTV Ads assets before they can be used in a CTV Ads ad set.

Measure impact beyond impressions

Measuring the impact of CTV Ads is essential to make sure advertisers know how their ads are performing. LinkedIn provides CTV campaign reporting with the same robust metrics as other video formats such as impressions, reach, frequency, CPM, and video completion rates—along with placement and device type breakdowns in Campaign Manager. This gives advertisers deeper visibility into where their ads are running and how audiences are engaging.

Audiences exposed to CTV Ads can be matched cross-device and retargeted across other surfaces, unlocking full-funnel performance measurement— from initial impression on the TV screen to downstream actions on desktop or mobile.

For independent validation of reach, LinkedIn Marketing Partner iSpot measures incremental and unduplicated audience reach across TV and digital. For example, Salesforce leveraged iSpot and confirmed that LinkedIn’s CTV Ads extended their campaign’s unique reach by more than 70% beyond linear TV. LinkedIn's on target impressions for B2B audiences were 4x higher than linear TV. Because of their improved on-target reach, LinkedIn's CTV Ads were 11x more cost-effective at reaching key B2B audiences than linear TV.

To quantify brand impact, LinkedIn offers first-party, third-party, and hybrid Brand Lift Testing for CTV Ads campaigns. Measuring brand lift on CTV Ads requires solving unique challenges:

• No direct survey on TV screens. To address this challenge, surveys are retargeted to household members on mobile/desktop if a household was exposed to a CTV Ad.
• Co-viewing bias (multiple people watching together). We add a screener question before the brand lift survey. Only responses that include the same CTV service where the ad was delivered are counted in the final results.

In a recent case study, we observed a significant lift in brand consideration, unequivocally demonstrating the measurable impact that LinkedIn CTV Ads can drive for our advertisers.

LinkedIn CTV Select: accessing premium content

As our CTV business has matured, advertisers are increasingly seeking more intentional ways to access premium streaming content across top‑tier platforms, enabling them to connect with LinkedIn’s professional audiences in high‑quality environments aligned to their brand objectives.

To meet this demand, we first worked with NBCUniversal to launch CTV Select, a premium inventory solution that enables advertisers to target LinkedIn audiences across NBCUniversal’s content. Initially, this process was highly manual, requiring cross‑functional teams to coordinate deals and update systems to enable campaigns across these premium placements.

This approach proved highly successful. As advertiser demand increased and additional premium partners were added, the manual overhead became unsustainable. We recognized the need to streamline how these premium placements were managed and scaled, and extended our Supply Management System to support more efficient access to differentiated buying options across high‑quality CTV inventory.

Now, after a CTV Select deal is approved and added into the inventory, advertisers can select available deals directly within Campaign Manager, eliminating manual intervention to create a new campaign. What began as an early partner‑led implementation has evolved into a scalable product that gives advertisers more intentional access to specific premium placements, while maintaining the same high standards of quality across LinkedIn’s broader CTV inventory.

Streamlining advertiser CTV creative management with third-party hosted VAST tag support

Historically, LinkedIn required advertisers to upload their creative assets directly to the LinkedIn Campaign Management Platform. However, a standard industry practice for CTV advertisers is to rely on third-party VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) tags to distribute video assets without re-uploading files to every platform. Recognizing that the majority of CTV spend flows through VAST tags hosted directly on advertisers’ ad servers, our team fast-tracked support for this workflow via a new LinkedIn Marketing Solutions integration with Innovid.

With Innovid VAST-tag support and fresh API endpoints, brands can now:

• Reuse existing assets: Eliminate the need to rebuild creatives specifically for LinkedIn if they have the Innovid VAST-tag.
• Streamline delivery: Simply drop a VAST URL from Innovid (or another ad server) and launch.
• Optimize and measure in real time: Iterate on messaging while tracking performance in a single place.

Because the video file remains on the advertiser’s server, a single VAST tag can power campaigns across LinkedIn and other ad servers. Consolidated reporting—including impressions, quartile completion, and eCPM—is now available in one dashboard instead of a patchwork of spreadsheets.

We built this feature on top of an OpenRTB VAST wrapper. To support this new capability, we redesigned our ad-serving and creative asset data models. This ensures that externally-hosted content can flow seamlessly through existing components in our ad ecosystem (ad review, previews, and brand-safety checks) with zero friction for advertisers.

The diagram below demonstrates the flow of control between different ad components involved in real time bidding of video served via VAST tags.

Conclusion 

While building LinkedIn’s CTV Ads solution, our team focused on giving advertisers a simple, unified experience across campaign setup, creative workflows, audience targeting, optimization, and measurement. We designed this to remove onboarding friction and to meet clear content and traffic quality standards set by publishers.

To support reliable and high‑quality CTV delivery, we focused on ensuring a consistent viewing experience across premium streaming environments, prioritizing video quality, delivery reliability, and advertiser and publisher trust.

We continue to improve this experience over time by learning from advertiser and publisher feedback, monitoring performance at scale, and iterating on quality, reliability, and ease of use.

By integrating CTV Ads into LinkedIn’s broader ads suite, LinkedIn enables advertisers to reach professional audiences, while helping publishers to monetize their content in ways that align with their business goals.