Side by side
| LinkedIn CTV | Programmatic CTV (The Trade Desk, DV360, StackAdapt, MNTN, Vibe…) | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience source | LinkedIn first-party professional data: uploaded account or contact list, job titles, function, seniority, industry, company size, matched to households | Household demographics, content and context, publisher data, third-party B2B data (Bombora, 6sense, Dun & Bradstreet), IP-to-company matching |
| Best for | A named account list (ABM); senior titles at specific companies | A category audience; national reach; markets LinkedIn does not serve |
| Inventory | Paramount, Roku, Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels and other publishers through LinkedIn's partners; US, Canada, UK | Nearly all streaming apps and FAST channels through the exchanges and PMP deals; global |
| Median CPM | $25.76 (p25 $20.31, p75 $50.88), 31 accounts; $46.97 on audiences under 50,000 | Typically $20 to $45 for B2B including data fees; premium direct deals higher |
| Completion | 98.7% (non-skippable) | 95 to 98% (non-skippable) |
| Minimum | $10 a day, self-serve in Campaign Manager, no contract | Self-serve DSPs from a few thousand a month; agency seats on TTD or DV360 usually $5,000 to $25,000 a month plus fees |
| Frequency control | Per campaign; median 1.95 in the panel; no cross-publisher cap beyond LinkedIn's | Cross-publisher and cross-device caps in the DSP |
| Measurement | Reach, frequency, completions, post-view conversions (Insight Tag), brand and site lift, Companies tab engagement on targeted accounts | Reach and frequency across publishers, incrementality studies, IP-based site visit and footfall attribution, cross-device graphs, third-party verification |
| Creative | 15 or 30 s, 1920 x 1080, no CTA; one spec sheet | Same spots; publisher-specific specs and QA vary |
| Brand safety | Publisher list only | Publisher allow and block lists, app-level controls, verification vendors |
| Who runs it | Your LinkedIn team or agency, in the same account as the feed | A programmatic trader or agency with a DSP seat |
When each one wins
LinkedIn CTV wins when
- The plan is a list. 58% of LinkedIn CTV campaigns in the panel ran on an uploaded list, and list campaigns reached the audience more often (frequency 2.00 against 1.62 for cold) and held it longer (31.6 against 21.0 seconds).
- The list is 20,000 members or more and the buyer is in the US, Canada or the UK.
- The feed campaigns run on the same list, so the lift can be read where it shows up: in 12 panel accounts, feed landing page CTR was 42% higher during a CTV flight (higher in 9 of 12).
- The budget is a slice of a LinkedIn programme rather than a media plan of its own: $5,000 to $15,000 for an eight-to-twelve-week flight.
Programmatic CTV wins when
- The audience is a category, not a list: every IT decision maker at a 1,000-plus company, every CFO in financial services. LinkedIn can target that too, but the DSP reaches more households for the money.
- The market is outside the US, Canada and the UK, or the LinkedIn inventory in the market is too thin to deliver (the two UK accounts in the panel ran national audiences of 720,000 to 2.8 million to get impressions).
- Cross-publisher frequency control and third-party measurement are requirements: enterprise brand teams, agency holding companies, anyone with an incrementality mandate.
- The spend is large enough for a DSP seat and a trader, $25,000 a month and up, and CTV is a media plan in its own right.
Running both
Large B2B accounts run LinkedIn CTV for the named list and programmatic for category reach, with frequency managed separately because the two do not share a cap. The order matters: LinkedIn first, because the list is the audience the whole programme is built on and the effect is read in the feed campaigns on that list; programmatic second, when the plan calls for households the list does not name. Kiin runs the LinkedIn side in the same account as the feed campaigns and adds programmatic through Innovid or a DSP partner when it earns its place. The benchmark behind the LinkedIn numbers is LinkedIn CTV Ads Benchmarks 2026; how we run it is on the LinkedIn CTV agency page.
Programmatic figures are typical ranges from published DSP and agency rate cards and are not Kiin Labs data; the LinkedIn figures are the median advertiser account across 31 accounts, 118 campaigns and $811,149, 8 September 2025 to 7 September 2026.