What About Those LinkedIn Ads?

By Erica and Karen

We have been LinkedIn subscribers for decades. We were lawyers for many of those decades, and then we retired and started Lustre. We work out of a WeWork office in New York City.

Imagine how bewildered we were as we rode up the elevator to our office a couple of days ago when we saw, on the elevator screen, an ad for LinkedIn showing an older woman being interrogated by someone sounding like a supercilious young man about what her son does for a living. She said her son worked with the cloud, and the script required that she say extremely dumb things about the cloud, as if she knew nothing about where data is stored.

Then we saw another ad, in which a middle-aged man was saying he had no idea what his daughter did. He did not know what B2B meant. The copy running with the ad said:

Parents dont get b2b. If you’re a B2B marketer, it feels like no one knows what you do. Your friends, your parents, your partner, just don’t seem to “get” it. The good news? LinkedIn has the people who do…and the tools to help you reach them.

And:

B2B might as well be gibberish to your loved ones.

Not everyone gets it, but LinkedIn has 70 million decision makers who do. #ThePlaceToB2B

We are in our seventies, and yes, we are parents. We lived through the birth of the cloud, and all of the other current technologies, and our business is dependent on all of them. Many of the people at WeWork are younger than we are, but many are not, and most treat us as if we have brains anyway. Very likely many of us are among the 70 million decision makers LinkedIn touts. So what was LinkedIn trying to say to those of us with businesses at WeWork?

We decided to write about these ads, which we found odd. And offensive. But then, as we checked the links for this post, we saw that the links no longer worked. The ads had been removed. You can’t see them. You have to take it on faith that we saw what we saw.

And we have to commend LinkedIn for finally realizing how neanderthal these ads sounded. Better late than never.