01 / Why You Should Care
In a world flooded with AI-generated everything — the brands that stand out are the ones that still feel real. Building authenticity into your message through creators, through your partnerships, and through your executives and employees. Real voices from real people. That's what's going to matter.
Jessica Jensen — Chief Marketing Officer, LinkedIn · IAB NewFronts 2026
LinkedIn's own CMO reframed authenticity from a brand attribute into a discovery strategy.
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That distinction is the whole point of this guide. When large language models recommend companies, they prioritise credible sources, expert perspectives and professional dialogue. Authenticity is no longer a tone-of-voice preference — it is the raw material that decides whether you appear in the answer at all.
02 / The Problem
WARC, LinkedIn and LIONS Advisory analysed more than 700 award-nominated B2B campaigns — the WARC database 2010–2025, including entries and winners from Cannes Lions' B2B category, the Effies and the WARC Effectiveness Awards.
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First, what the research actually measures. Buyability is not a score for how clever or well-made a campaign is. It measures whether the campaign gives a buying group the confidence to choose you. The seven signals are things a marketer deliberately engineers into the campaign — a named customer, a peer reference, a use case that mirrors the buyer's own situation. Their effect is that buying groups feel safer committing. So the question the research answers is this: when a campaign carries more of these signals, are buyers more likely to buy from that brand?
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They are. The same research then found that almost nobody stacks the signals:
Among the campaigns that do stack them, the commercial difference is large. High-Buyability campaigns were:
How to read these numbers accurately. They are comparative: campaigns scoring high on Buyability were more likely to report these uplifts than campaigns scoring low. They are not a guarantee that adding signals produces a set percentage, and the low-signal group was not measured as a "less ROI" control.
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The most defensible reading comes from Turner herself, answering the obvious objection that this is simply good work beating bad: "Out of a bunch of great campaigns, the ones that score more Buyability signals did significantly better." The correlation is strong, it is consistent across brand and commercial measures, and it holds among campaigns that were already award-nominated.
03 / The Framework
The Buyability Signals
Mimi Turner, Head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn, groups the seven signals into three that a team can carry into a creative brief: Recommendations, Relationships and Relatability.
Recommendations
01 Customer validation
Named clients saying you solved their problem — not logos or aggregate stats.
Relationships
04 Familiarity & ways-of-working alignment
Evidence your process, pace and priorities match how the buyer's team already operates.
Relatability
07 Category leadership
Credible standing in the category — earned through the six signals above, not claimed.
Recommendations
02 Peer & expert validation
A reference from someone in a similar role and company size. Peers outweigh experts.
Relationships
05 Long-term partnership
Demonstrated willingness to stay past the first engagement — retainers, renewals, multi-year arcs.
Recommendations
03 Celebrity & influencer validation
A recognisable third-party voice lending credibility you cannot self-declare.
Relatability
06 Built for companies like yours
Real customer situations and use cases the buyer recognises as their own.
04 / Search Evidence — APAC
You now know which signals a creative campaign needs to raise the likelihood of a buyer choosing the brand. The next question is the practical one: where do those signals actually get seen?
A signal only counts if a buyer meets it, and buyers no longer meet information only at the point of purchase. Recommendations, Relationships and Relatability have to be present across the touchpoints a buying group moves through — the comparison page they read before speaking to anyone, the case study a peer forwards internally, the expert commentary that surfaces when someone asks an assistant what to consider. Visibility, in other words, is how the signals travel. And the place where most of that research now happens is AI.
The APAC Read
Authenticity and Buyability are not two programmes — they are one, and neither belongs to branding or lead acquisition alone. Both are fed by content. Branding needs authority-building content to be recognised for something: lead acquisition needs substantiated content to clear a buying group's risk test. Authenticity is the raw material that fuels both — it is what makes a customer reference sound like a person rather than a testimonial, and what makes a comparison page credible enough to be repeated by someone else. That is why the brands that compound peer validation and third-party proof are the ones that turn up in the answer layer when a buyer asks. Which brings us to the mechanism behind it.
The Asia-Pacific data makes that case on its own:
05 / The Solution
Turner's central claim is that these two jobs are no longer separate:
B2B marketers have got to solve for two problems now. How to get buying groups to agree and how to get recommended by an LLM. The seven signals are built to solve for both.
Mimi Turner — Head of Marketplace Innovation, LinkedIn
A campaign engineered for one, she notes, tends to score on the other without trying.
An LLM assembling a recommendation looks for exactly what a cautious buyer looks for: authoritative voices that broadly agree.
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The signal layer AI retrieval systems use — customer proof, peer recommendation, expert endorsement, relevance to a specific buying situation — is the same layer that gives a buying group the confidence to commit. The two systems are structurally coupled, and both compound over time.
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Turner's proof point is human, and it is the whole argument in one sentence:
"Nobody in our research ever bought anything without phoning somebody and asking, 'What did you think?'"
06 / Conclusion
The priority is authority, not mentions
A successful brand campaign that increases Buyability — and the ROI that follows — is no longer won on quantity or budget. It is won on authenticity in branding and authority-building content.
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Authority is what earns citations. Citations are what carry the seven signals outward. And leads now receive those signals filtered through AI, which is where the majority of buying research happens.
The chain, in order
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Authenticity in branding and authority-building content replace volume and budget as the growth levers.
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Authority raises the likelihood of citations from credible third parties.
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Those citations are how the seven Buyability signals reach a buying group — customer proof, peer and expert validation, category context.
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The majority of leads receive that evidence filtered through AI, inside the answer layer, before they ever speak to a seller.
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So the priority stays where it has always mattered most: crawlable, well-structured, genuinely authoritative pages — not chasing mentions. Citations are a byproduct of authority, and the AI Overview link itself converts poorly.
07 / Where JTCM Comes In
One content strategy. Two problems solved.
Joyce Tsang Content Marketing helps brands devise a content strategy with a clear key messaging platform — the kind that fuels peer validation and third-party proof, and in turn drives discoverability in AI models.
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This is why the seven signals are worth building into the platform from the start. The same work gives your buying group consensus they can defend internally, and gives the LLM the authoritative, agreeing voices it needs to recommend you.
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LinkedIn's framing and AI-search visibility are not two strategies. They are one — a single content platform that carries authenticity into every touchpoint, so that Recommendations, Relationships and Relatability reach the buying group wherever they are researching. That is the bridge between your LinkedIn work and your AI visibility.
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Let's map the signal gaps in your current content platform — Book a call with me today.
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WARC × LinkedIn × LIONS Advisory, Unlocking the seven drivers of advertising "buyability" in B2B — warc.com; reported by The Drum (25 Jun 2026), thedrum.com; Communicate Online (16 Sep 2026), communicateonline.me; MediaNews4U (26 Jun 2026), medianews4u.com; BestMediaInfo (25 Jun 2026).
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Jessica Jensen, CMO LinkedIn, IAB NewFronts 2026 — via the LinkedIn Marketing Blog, NewFronts 2026 Recap.
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Mimi Turner, Head of Marketplace Innovation, LinkedIn — keynote "Cracking B2B Creativity: The Buyability Levers That Power Successful Campaigns", Cannes Lions 2026; quoted in The Drum (25 Jun 2026) and MediaNews4U (26 Jun 2026).
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Imaad Ahmed, Thought Leadership Director, LIONS Advisory and WARC — quoted in Communicate Online (16 Sep 2026) and MediaNews4U (26 Jun 2026).
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Tenten GEO, 2026 GEO Trend Report — geo.tenten.co/en/resources/2026-geo-report
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LeapOut Digital, Ranked But Bypassed (18 Jun 2026) — leapoutdigital.com
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Green Hat × 6sense, APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research 2025
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Forrester, Buyers' Journey Survey 2025 (APAC) — reported by eCommerceNews Asia (22 Jan 2026), ecommercenews.asia
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LinkedIn × Bain & Company, Buyability research — reported by ppc.land (28 Jun 2026), ppc.land
Signal labels are as described in published coverage of the WARC × LinkedIn × LIONS Advisory research. LinkedIn's full signal chart is published inside the report.