Digital Horizons

Brand News: LinkedIn's Dominance in B2B Marketing & Australia's Gambling Ads Cap Decision

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

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Can LinkedIn really be the holy grail of social media marketing? Find out as we dissect a compelling study from Marketing Interactive revealing that a staggering 93.5% of brands prefer LinkedIn for their campaigns, with 92.8% reporting top-tier engagement. We share our unfiltered thoughts on these surprising numbers and reflect on our own trials and tribulations with the platform. Plus, we dive into the explosive rise of short-form video content and what it means for your social media strategy moving forward.

Switching gears, we unpack a significant development in the Australian advertising landscape: the proposed ban on gambling ads. Listen as we break down the government's decision to reject the ban in favor of imposing caps, and what this means for advertising agencies heavily reliant on gambling clients. We'll explore the rationale behind the proposed ban, the potential impacts of the new regulatory caps, and what these changes signify for the future of advertising in Australia. Tune in for an episode packed with insights and industry updates you won't want to miss!


The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director Walker Hill Digital
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

Speaker 1:

All right, we're back with Brand News, welcome back. So Brand News for August. We've got two articles, one hot off the press and one more of a study, more of an understanding what brands and businesses are seeing in their own advertising. Let's start with that one, because it's very relevant to our longer form podcast that we just did on LinkedIn advertising. This one is from Marketing Interactive. It's about a study and it states 93.5% of brands prefer LinkedIn for social media marketing campaigns. Now, to dig into that a little bit further that 92.8% of businesses also said LinkedIn offered the best engagement rates for them. So this is percentage of respondents in this study, not necessarily hard facts from these platforms. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2:

I don't. I don't get that at all Like I mean, maybe we're just doing LinkedIn wrong here as our business and it's just something that we have had clients see success on the platform, but it would definitely not be the one that I would say hey, businesses are going to get great results here. We've found it as probably a bit more of a challenging platform than other ones, but I mean we focus very heavily on short form content and other style posting, so maybe it's just the type of content that we've been putting out on LinkedIn has probably not been as engaging as it needs to be there.

Speaker 1:

I imagine this stat was pulled out of a study and without consideration of how many of those respondents in the study were actually B2B businesses, where LinkedIn is probably the only channel that would be relevant for them in reaching a very specific service-based business or business that they were wanting to target. That's probably why LinkedIn is ranking so high for those respondents, because they know that they can reach their ideal customer in that platform alone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but I mean I wonder whether this is also when people use it for their personal brand. So maybe that they're finding, hey, I'm getting good traction with my posting on here. I'm posting on business stuff, so I'm finding this is a business platform, but I think from brand pages it's potentially different. So maybe that, like we were just talking to Bernd about the great engagement he's been getting from his posting, from his personal page, so maybe it is the way that they're thinking about it is from their business side of things, but personal pages rather than company.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I definitely find paid ads on LinkedIn very expensive if you're especially paying for engagement north of $5, $6, $7 per engagement or interaction. So I definitely wouldn't be one of the 92.8% that said it offered the best engagements from my experience.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, and again, maybe we're just doing it wrong. Maybe people are out there crushing it on LinkedIn, but not the numbers that we've experienced.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. And further in this article it does get into some detail around the type of content that these businesses are mostly posting to social media. It had blog posts and images at 87% and 92% 92% for blog posts and then short form video making its way up at 74.7%. My take on that short form video is going to be the way to go. In our experience, from what I've seen, when we shift from client content to short form video, from static posts we see that automatic inclusion in the whatever newsfeed that channel is running. So whether it be Instagram for reels or even if it's on LinkedIn, the short form video is where we get that reach. Yeah, I agree, all right.

Speaker 1:

So the second article for brand news today. It's more of an update. This is hot off the press. We just thought best to share news, especially around the Australian advertising marketing landscape, as it happens. But this one is from the Sydney Morning Herald, but every major master is reporting on it.

Speaker 1:

The article is Murphy's Law Gambling Ad Ban to be Rejected in Favor of Caps. So a little bit more context here. There was a bill in front of the federal government that was almost going to get passed that would put a blanket ban on any advertising from gambling or gaming businesses, which would be millions upon millions of dollars in the media advertising landscape. Multiple agencies would really suffer from the loss of these clients. But the thinking there was there was a study done that identified advertising is the issue that's introducing more and more people to gambling and reintroducing those with a gambling problem back to gambling. So you can see where the reason for the bill came from and a backflip from the government there to instead impose caps on how much advertising can be done. Some of these gambling ads are so good though I can see like I don't gamble.

Speaker 2:

Oh well, I do sometimes if I'm going to watch football, because I don't really watch it and it gives me something to keep it interesting. But they're great, so I feel like they must work. If you're someone who's likely to gonna you know, could be convinced by watching an ad that you, you need to do a bit. They are great. So I guess if it is in people's best interests, they have problems and probably it is a good way to go. Yeah absolutely.

Speaker 1:

I used to work for an agency that looked after multiple gaming brands in England and it was quite disturbing that the thought that the target was to get 10,000 new funded accounts by the next football game and just reporting on these figures as though they're just numbers, but they're individuals that are going to start their journey into gambling all because of performance media advertising.

Speaker 2:

But I guess it's like everything like a little bit of gambling isn't a big negative either. So I mean being that like. I mean it's like their businesses. They need to acquire customers, so their model must be get new people gambling. But I mean as long as they've got things in places and trying to encourage people to empty their life savings into their account, then hopefully it can be done in a safe way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think caps is probably a good step forward. Yeah, I agree. So that's it for Brand News this week. We'll be back shortly with more. Thank you for listening. Thank you, bye.