Dullness in B2B advertising is usually treated as a matter of taste, something a braver client would fix. It has been measured, and the measurement is unkind. When the LinkedIn B2B Institute ran roughly 1,600 business-to-business ads through System1’s emotional testing with a global sample of around six million people, about three-quarters scored one star or less on a five-point scale. Not one earned five. That is not an aesthetic complaint. On System1’s scale, a one-star ad is forecast to contribute nothing to long-term market share.
Key takeaways
- Around 75% of tested B2B ads scored one star or less for emotional response (LinkedIn B2B Institute and System1).
- Ads rated creative showed a 40% higher likelihood of purchase consideration (LinkedIn and Magna, August 2024).
- 64% of business decision-makers said B2B advertising lacks humour; 60% said it lacks emotional appeal.
- LinkedIn passed 1.3 billion members and expanded BrandLink and CTV buying in March 2026.
The measured problem, not the anecdotal one
The case against dull B2B work rests on data rather than on creative-director opinion. System1’s FaceTrace method asks viewers to pick the facial expression matching how an ad made them feel, and converts those responses into a star rating that correlates with long-term brand growth. Across that 1,600-ad set, the distribution was heavily bunched at the bottom.
What makes the result useful is the direction of the failure. These ads were not offensive or confusing. They were neutral, and neutrality is the expensive outcome, because it consumes the same media budget as work that lands and returns none of the memory effect that budget was bought for.
Why “boring” is a commercial problem rather than a taste problem
The reason emotion matters more in B2B than the sector’s self-image suggests comes down to timing. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, set out what became known as the 95:5 rule: up to 95% of business customers are not in the market for a given product or service at any one time. The underlying logic is purchase frequency, with typical B2B renewal cycles running to several years.
Follow that through and the job of most impressions changes. You are not persuading a buyer, you are depositing something retrievable in the memory of someone who will need it in eighteen months. Rational feature comparison does not survive eighteen months. Distinctive, emotionally coded work has a better chance, and that is the entire commercial argument for making B2B creative less flat.
What the buyers themselves say is missing
Business decision-makers are unusually specific about the gap when asked. LinkedIn’s study with Magna, published in August 2024, tested 67 LinkedIn ads with 1,700 business decision-makers and produced both a diagnosis and an effect size.
| Finding | Reading |
|---|---|
| B2B ads lack humour | 64% of business decision-makers |
| B2B ads lack emotional appeal | 60% |
| B2B ads lack relatable characters | 59% |
| Purchase consideration, creative vs non-creative ads | 40% higher likelihood |
The same study reported smaller but consistent lifts for creative work on brand favourability and research intent. Note the sample: 1,700 respondents on 67 ads is a solid read on direction and a thin one on magnitude, and we would treat the 40% figure as evidence that creativity pays rather than as a coefficient to put in a forecast.
Where LinkedIn’s ad surface has moved since 2024
The platform has changed enough since 2024 that creative decisions made then are worth revisiting. LinkedIn passed 1.3 billion members and reported $19.8bn in annual revenue with 12% year-on-year growth in its most recent full year. Two format changes matter for anyone planning work.
- BrandLink, announced as an expansion in March 2026, places video advertising alongside premium publisher and creator content, with a self-serve route through Campaign Manager for selected customers. It is a context play: your video runs next to editorial the audience came for, rather than interrupting a scroll.
- Connected TV inventory, now buyable either directly in Campaign Manager or programmatically through The Trade Desk via Microsoft Monetize, carries LinkedIn’s professional targeting into a living-room format. Creative built for a muted phone feed will not survive that transfer.
Both changes push in the same direction: longer attention, larger screens, less tolerance for a slide deck converted into a video.
A working brief for LinkedIn creative
What follows is the brief we would use, ordered by how much difference each item makes to the memory outcome described above.
- Decide what the ad is for before deciding what it says. Reaching the 95% who are out of market and converting the 5% who are in it require different work, and combining them produces something that does neither well.
- Put a recognisable asset in the first second. Not the logo card at the end. A colour, a character, a device, a sound, something that survives being half-watched. This is the mechanism through which memory gets attached to a brand rather than to a category.
- Use a person, not a persona. Nearly six in ten decision-makers said relatable characters are missing. Real employees, customers or a consistent invented character all outperform abstract stock imagery of handshakes.
- Write for sound-off, then check it sounds right with sound on. The feed is muted and the CTV placement is not. The same asset now has to work both ways or be cut twice.
- Test emotional response separately from click metrics. An ad can generate clicks and no memory. Our note on the psychology behind scroll-stopping ads covers the attention half of this in more detail.
What we are not going to promise
None of this guarantees a result, and we would distrust anyone who says otherwise. The studies above measure emotional response and stated consideration in test conditions, not revenue in your pipeline. Category, price point, sales cycle and existing brand familiarity all move the outcome more than execution does. What the evidence supports is a probability shift, and a large one relative to the cost of making the same asset less flat.
Questions we get on this
Does humour work in a regulated or high-risk category?
Sometimes, but humour is one route to emotional response rather than the route. Warmth, tension, craft and a genuinely distinctive visual world all achieve the same encoding effect and carry far less approval risk in finance, healthcare or security.
Should thought leadership content replace advertising?
They do different jobs. Thought leadership tends to reach people already paying attention to your category, which is closer to the 5%. Broad, distinctive advertising is how you get into the memory of the rest.
How long before creative changes show up in results?
Longer than a quarterly review comfortably allows, which is the practical reason so much B2B work stays safe. If the buying cycle runs several years, the memory effect cannot show up inside one, and short-term response metrics will keep favouring the flat version.
The uncomfortable part of this evidence is that it removes the usual excuse. B2B advertising is not dull because business buyers are rational, immune to feeling or too busy. It is dull because dull is easier to approve, and the cost of that approval is deferred long enough that nobody has to own it.
Curious what happens when brands do take the swing?
The campaigns people still talk about are rarely the ones that tested safest.
Sources: LinkedIn B2B Institute and System1, emotional testing of approximately 1,600 B2B advertisements using the FaceTrace method, as reported in trade press; LinkedIn and Magna, B2B creative effectiveness study of 67 LinkedIn ads with 1,700 business decision-makers, August 2024; John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the 95:5 rule, published with the LinkedIn B2B Institute; LinkedIn corporate statistics on membership and revenue, fiscal year 2026; LinkedIn advertising announcements on BrandLink and Connected TV buying, March 2026. Star ratings and stated-consideration measures are test-condition indicators, not revenue outcomes. Updated August 2026.
