Smartly, the Helsinki-headquartered advertising technology company, said on September 22, 2026 that it had brought LinkedIn Ads into its unified advertising platform, extending automated creative production and performance analysis to the professional network. The statement, issued from New York, describes three capabilities for business-to-business marketers but names no launch markets, pricing or ad formats, and carries no comment from LinkedIn.
In Short
Smartly, a company whose software helps brands make ads and run them across many apps and websites, said on September 22, 2026 that its system now connects to LinkedIn’s advertising tools. This matters to companies that sell to other companies, because LinkedIn is where many of them advertise, and a single purchase often involves several people who each need a different message. If your team already uses Smartly, it can make and adjust LinkedIn video ads in the same place as its other campaigns, though Smartly has not said when, where or at what cost.
Three capabilities and one quote
According to Smartly, the connection adds LinkedIn to the channels marketers can run from its software. The company says the work will help marketers personalize creative for professional audiences, speed up video production and use audience and performance data to keep improving results.
The release sets the product out in three parts. Under Make B2B creative more intelligent, audience insights from LinkedIn’s professional network are combined with Smartly’s creative intelligence to produce more relevant ads at each stage of the buying journey. Scale video for LinkedIn applies AI-powered automation to produce, version and iterate video, turning a brand’s existing creative into LinkedIn-ready video assets faster. The third, Turn performance signals into action, routes campaign and creative results into what Smartly calls “a continuous intelligence loop”, which uses AI to surface what is working, identify where to optimize and inform the next round of creative and campaign decisions.
Laura Desmond, Smartly’s chief executive, provided the only quotation in the document. “Our collaboration with LinkedIn extends Smartly’s creative and intelligence capabilities to one of the most important environments for B2B marketers,” she said. “When you’re engaging a complex buying group, one message or one piece of creative isn’t enough. Smartly makes it possible to turn audience intelligence into relevant creative at scale, learn from performance, and continuously make the next ad better. Smartly’s integration with LinkedIn brings that advantage to B2B marketers.”
Desmond came to Smartly from the agency side, having led Starcom MediaVest Group and served as global chief executive of VivaKi. Her argument here concerns the structure of B2B purchasing more than the technology. Purchase decisions, Smartly said, often involve several stakeholders with different priorities, which raises the need for creative aimed at distinct audiences, buying stages and markets. In the email accompanying the release, the company added that B2B marketers are trying to deliver more relevant advertising across stakeholders, markets and stages of consideration.
What the release does not say
No LinkedIn executive is quoted, and nothing in the document is attributed to LinkedIn, although the headline presents the move as a collaboration with the network. That contrasts with Smartly’s June deal with Roku, when the announcement carried a statement from Patrick Harris, Roku’s senior vice president for global advertising sales and partnerships.
Availability goes unaddressed. The release gives no date from which customers can run LinkedIn campaigns through Smartly, no list of markets and no pricing. Nor does it name the LinkedIn formats covered. Campaign Manager sells image and video Sponsored Content; Thought Leader Ads, the paid amplification of posts written by individual members; BrandLink, which places 3 to 30 second pre-roll videos beside publisher and creator content; and connected TV ads, which Innovid began activating inside its own software in July 2025. Which of those the video tooling reaches, and in which aspect ratios, is left open.
The product names are missing as well. Over the past year Smartly has branded its tools individually: AI Studio, which it used to build Amazon-ready streaming ads and adapt assets across markets; Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, released in November 2025 to score creative before launch and analyze it afterwards; and Smartly Synapse, the orchestration and memory layer unveiled on the opening day of Cannes Lions. None appears in the LinkedIn release, so it is not clear which of them operate on LinkedIn inventory.
The data flow is the largest unknown. The phrase “audience insights from LinkedIn’s professional network” carries much of the release’s weight but is never defined. LinkedIn targets on attributes members declare about themselves and sells inventory through Campaign Manager in a second-price auction that weights bids by a predicted relevance score. The release does not say whether Smartly receives anything beyond the reporting Campaign Manager gives every advertiser, whether its system can assign creative variants to specific targeting segments, or how conversions reach it. LinkedIn opened a Company Intelligence API to five certified attribution partners in September 2025; Smartly does not say whether it is one of them.
Access terms are not a formality on LinkedIn. A proposed antitrust class action filed in the Northern District of California on September 14 alleges that the company uses partner rules and contract terms to limit what outside software can do on the network. The case concerns Sales Navigator and sales tools rather than advertising, its allegations are untested, and LinkedIn had not responded when it became public. It nonetheless shows that partner programs set the practical boundaries of any third-party connection. The Smartly release does not identify which LinkedIn program its connection runs under.
A smaller inconsistency sits in the boilerplate. Smartly lists strategic partnerships with Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, Spotify and TikTok. LinkedIn is absent, and so is Roku, whose integration dates from June. The same eight names appeared when Smartly connected to Amazon DSP in March, which points to a paragraph carried over rather than a statement about LinkedIn’s standing. The release does not clarify either way.
The numbers behind the pitch
Smartly says it supports more than 800 brands and manages over $7 billion in ad spend globally. The brand count has held steady; the spend figure stood at $6 billion in the company’s November 2025 materials. Neither number is broken down by channel or sector, so the share of that spend already running in B2B categories is unknown.
The performance claims are older. Smartly cites PwC-validated results including a 5.5x return on ad spend and 42 minutes saved every hour, the same figures it used in November 2025. They are not specific to LinkedIn, and the release gives no period, client sample, channel mix or definition of the return. The claim to lead The Forrester Wave: Creative Advertising Technologies is also made without an edition or year.
Those numbers sit uneasily beside B2B benchmarks. Dreamdata’s 2026 report put LinkedIn’s return on ad spend for B2B advertisers at 121%, drawn from 66 million sessions and 3.5 million customer journeys. The two measures are built differently and cannot be compared directly, and Dreamdata is itself a LinkedIn Marketing Partner. Still, the gap is a reminder that a blended platform average says little about what one channel returns across a B2B purchase cycle.
Smartly’s most detailed recent evidence came from an agency. When Wpromote x Giant Spoon embedded Smartly in its Polaris IQ system in June, it reported pilot results including a 26% cut in a client’s ad spend and a 29% rise in return on ad spend. Pilot numbers of that kind are case study evidence reported by the parties that produced them, and none of them involved LinkedIn.
Why B2B buyers, and why video
LinkedIn’s scale is not in doubt. Microsoft reported $17.8 billion of LinkedIn revenue for fiscal 2025, and LinkedIn revenue grew 12% in the quarter to March 31, 2026. Advertising is not reported separately from LinkedIn’s talent, sales and learning businesses, so the size of the media business can only be inferred. LinkedIn accounted for 41% of B2B advertising budgets in Dreamdata’s 2026 dataset, a larger share than any single Google product.
The buying process keeps lengthening. The same Dreamdata data stretched the average B2B journey to 272 days and 10 stakeholders. Figures presented at LinkedIn’s Indie Summit and summarized by the agency Brainlabs held that 40% of B2B deals are lost to indecision rather than to a competitor, in buying groups averaging ten people and typically including a chief marketing officer, a chief financial officer and a security lead. Desmond’s line about a single message being insufficient tracks that research closely.
Video is where LinkedIn has pushed hardest. LinkedIn Creative Labs studied more than 13,000 B2B video ads in July 2025, reporting that video viewership on the platform rose 36% in 2024 to 154 billion views; the same research attributed 73% of video completions to creative decisions rather than budget. A Wistia report covered in May 2026 found that 62% of businesses rank LinkedIn first for paid video ads.
So why would a B2B advertiser send LinkedIn video through a third party instead of building it in Campaign Manager? Smartly’s implicit answer is volume. Many brands already hold libraries of video made for other channels, and adapting them is slow. Research Smartly published with EMARKETER in July 2025 found that 72% of marketers reuse or only slightly modify assets across platforms, with just 25% tailoring creative for both social and connected TV. Turning existing material into LinkedIn-ready video is the problem the second capability targets.
A crowded route into Campaign Manager
Smartly is not alone in selling creative production for LinkedIn, and the platform itself moved first. On July 1, 2026, LinkedIn put five creative tools inside Campaign Manager – Brand Kit, Draft with AI, Ads Personalization, AI ad variants and Flexible Ad Creation – citing internal data that campaigns running five or more ad variants record click-through rates more than 20% higher than single-ad campaigns. Those tools were aimed at small and growing advertisers. For larger ones, LinkedIn in June created BrandWorks, an in-house services team whose remit includes adapting existing creative for the feed.
Outside vendors got there before Smartly too. Adobe made its GenStudio connection to LinkedIn generally available in October 2025, exporting image and video ads straight into Campaign Manager and drawing on LinkedIn performance data to refine assets. Innovid, as noted, already activates LinkedIn’s connected TV format from its own interface.
What Smartly claims as its difference is breadth. The pitch is a single system holding creative, media buying and performance data across channels, rather than a production tool that hands finished files to LinkedIn. For advertisers already running Meta, TikTok, Amazon and Roku campaigns through Smartly, that consolidation has an operational logic. For those buying LinkedIn alone, the argument is weaker, because the platform’s own tools now compete for the same work.
One more stop in a busy year
The LinkedIn release is the latest in a sequence. Smartly connected to Spotify Ads Manager in September 2025, plugged into Amazon DSP on March 2, 2026, and opened a Mexico City product and engineering hub on March 10. On March 16 it signed a non-binding letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv company that uses causal inference to estimate incrementality without user-level data. June brought Roku, the Wpromote agency deal and, on June 22, both Synapse and a partnership that made Smartly the first SaaS platform to activate Horizon Media’s Blu audience segments by API.
The channel integrations in that run covered audio and streaming television. Of the integrations PPC Land has tracked since September 2025, LinkedIn is the first whose case rests wholly on B2B buying. The measurement piece is missing: INCRMNTAL does not feature in the LinkedIn release. With journeys averaging 272 days, how Smartly would measure the incremental effect of a single LinkedIn video variant is among the more consequential questions left open.
The creative loop, and the label question
The “continuous intelligence loop” targets a documented weakness. A survey of 111 US marketers published by Perion and EMARKETER in April found that 89.2% considered creative important to campaign performance, yet only 3.6% said it was well understood and actively optimized. Some 72.1% changed creative only after results declined, and dynamic creative optimization was automated at just 22.5% of organizations. Perion sells software aimed at that gap, as does Smartly, so the framing is commercial on both sides.
AI-generated video also carries legal exposure in Europe. Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the EU AI Act became applicable on August 2, 2026, and the IAB’s voluntary disclosure framework, revised on August 18, cited NYU Stern research finding that telling consumers an ad was made with generative AI cut click-through rates by 31.5%. Smartly’s release does not say whether AI-versioned LinkedIn video will carry labels, who would apply them, or how they would interact with LinkedIn’s own policies. For B2B campaigns running across EU markets, that is not a minor detail.
What happens next
Smartly points readers to its website for further detail. Its email signature advertises ADVANCE, the company’s conference, in New York on September 29, 2026. When PPC Land covered the 2024 edition, the program opened with a panel scheduled to include leaders from Google, Meta, Snap, TikTok and Pinterest. Whether LinkedIn joins this year’s stage, and whether markets, formats and prices follow, will show how far the collaboration extends beyond a press release.
Timeline
- May 1, 2025 – LinkedIn debuts BrandLink, placing 3 to 30 second pre-roll video beside publisher and creator content
- July 9, 2025 – Smartly and EMARKETER find 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify assets across platforms
- July 15, 2025 – LinkedIn Creative Labs publishes its analysis of more than 13,000 B2B video ads
- July 21, 2025 – Innovid adds LinkedIn connected TV ads to its Social Ads Manager
- July 2025 – Microsoft reports LinkedIn revenue of $17.8 billion for fiscal 2025
- September 3, 2025 – Smartly integrates Spotify Ads Manager
- September 23, 2025 – LinkedIn opens its Company Intelligence API to five certified attribution partners
- October 1, 2025 – Smartly adds three executives to a leadership team led by chief executive Laura Desmond
- October 28, 2025 – Adobe makes its GenStudio integration with LinkedIn generally available
- November 18, 2025 – Smartly releases Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, citing $6 billion in managed spend
- March 2, 2026 – Smartly integrates Amazon DSP and uses AI Studio for streaming creative
- March 10, 2026 – Dreamdata’s 2026 benchmarks put LinkedIn at 121% ROAS and 41% of B2B budgets
- March 10, 2026 – Smartly opens a Mexico City product, engineering and commercial hub
- March 16, 2026 – Smartly signs a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL
- April 15, 2026 – Perion and EMARKETER report that only 3.6% of marketers actively optimize creative
- April 29, 2026 – Microsoft reports LinkedIn revenue up 12% for the quarter to March 31
- May 2026 – Wistia finds 62% of businesses rank LinkedIn first for paid video ads
- May 26, 2026 – LinkedIn publishes a B2B launch framework citing 272-day journeys and 10 stakeholders
- June 1, 2026 – Brainlabs summarizes LinkedIn Indie Summit data showing 40% of B2B deals lost to indecision
- June 10, 2026 – LinkedIn sets up Creator Marketplace and the BrandWorks services team
- June 17, 2026 – Smartly connects to Roku Ads Manager, with a statement from Roku’s Patrick Harris
- June 18, 2026 – Wpromote x Giant Spoon embeds Smartly in Polaris IQ and reports pilot results
- June 22, 2026 – Smartly unveils Smartly Synapse on the opening day of Cannes Lions
- June 22, 2026 – Horizon Media makes Smartly the first SaaS activation partner for its Blu Audience API
- July 1, 2026 – LinkedIn puts five AI creative tools inside Campaign Manager
- August 2, 2026 – Article 50 transparency obligations under the EU AI Act become applicable
- August 18, 2026 – IAB revises its AI disclosure framework, citing a 31.5% click-through cost of labels
- September 14, 2026 – Fairlinked e.V. and others file a proposed antitrust class action against LinkedIn
- September 22, 2026 – Smartly discloses its LinkedIn Ads integration from New York, with a statement from Laura Desmond
- September 29, 2026 – Smartly’s ADVANCE conference scheduled in New York, according to the company’s email signature
Summary
Who: Smartly, an AI advertising technology company headquartered in Helsinki with a commercial base in New York, led by chief executive Laura Desmond, which says it supports more than 800 brands and manages over $7 billion in ad spend. LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned professional network, is the platform being integrated; no LinkedIn representative is quoted.
What: An integration that brings LinkedIn Ads into Smartly’s unified advertising platform, described through three capabilities: combining LinkedIn audience insights with Smartly’s creative intelligence, AI-powered production and versioning of video for LinkedIn, and a continuous loop that feeds campaign and creative results back into decisions. The release gives no launch date, markets, pricing, supported formats or technical detail on data flows.
When: The integration was disclosed on September 22, 2026. Smartly’s ADVANCE conference follows in New York on September 29, 2026.
Where: The release was issued from New York. Smartly describes the value as reaching marketers globally but does not list the markets in which the LinkedIn integration is available.
Why: B2B purchases involve large buying groups and long journeys, and LinkedIn holds the largest single share of B2B advertising budgets in Dreamdata’s data. Smartly is positioning its cross-channel creative and measurement system as a way to produce more video variants for those audiences, entering a field where LinkedIn’s own AI tools, its BrandWorks team and Adobe already operate.
