Dive Brief:

• LinkedIn will offer programmatic sales of desktop display ads, a feature it has been testing the feature since Q3 last year.
• Marketers will be able to use first- and third-party data and LinkedIn audience segments to target their ads.
• The programmatic buying will be available through open auctions as well as LinkedIn's own private auctions.

Dive Insight:

After Microsoft surprised the business world with its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, there has been much speculation (including in this publication) about what the deal means for marketers. Many B2B marketers today rely on the platform for a number of services, particularly its professional groups and advertising opportunities. 

LinkedIn's first major product announcement since the Microsoft acquisition may not reveal much about the company's product strategy going forward—the programmatic buying feature has been in beta since last year, after all—but it does strengthen LinkedIn's existing advertising business. 

Programmatic display ads are a popular category with marketers: April research from eMarketer found spending is expected to reach $22.1 billion in 2016, accounting for 67% of total display spending. That number is only set to grow, with the same report forecasting programmatic display spend to hit $27.47 billion in 2017, accounting for 72% of spending.

"We don't want to reinvent the wheel," Russell Glass, LinkedIn's head of products, told Adweek. "We want to build table stakes capabilities into our platform in a way that highlights our differences, but is kind of what marketers have come to expect."

The new automated ad marketplace is part of a multi-year program at LinkedIn to simplify and extend advertising on the B2B social media platform, Glass said. Another part of the program is its Account Targeting product, which rolled out in March, giving marketers the ability to target user profiles with native ad campaigns. LinkedIn had already been offering programmatic buying of sponsored content inventory.