This week, LinkedIn was awash with bad design examples
A few hours after Chat GPT announced GPT-4o with image generation features, LinkedIn feed was awash with posts showing a mediocre visual created with the tool.
Each promised a magical AI prompt in exchange for a comment. And thousands of people did sheepishly comment...
Let me give you the actual prompt used by the self-proclaimed "experts" (example) so you won't have to comment:
"Upload a screenshot of another brand's marketing creative and ask the AI to generate the same thing for your chosen brand."
If you thought a detailed Notion doc promised in a LI post did something inherently different, you were in for a disappointment.
Were the AI-generated creatives good?
Not really.
They were missing CTA buttons, and had suboptimal layouts.
The key takeaway?
You can save a lot of time with AI image generation – but to get 10/10 output you need expert-level knowledge of best practices.
The LinkedIn (a)(d) design mistakes made by... LinkedIn's marketing team
PS The reason for the weird () usage is that using the word-you-should-not-name in newsletters makes them more likely land in Spam.
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Know someone in LinkedIn's performance marketing team? Forward them this newsletter so they can fix their bad creatives.
Or pitch in to the conversation under this LI post.
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Here's the full story...
Searching for bad examples of LinkedIn creatives for my new marketing course, I ran against the wall.
There were so many good examples.
Part of my bad-examples-draught problem was that I’d been looking up the top B2B brands’ adv. directly in the LinkedIn (A)(d) Library.
Once I switched to my own LinkedIn feed, the quality of creatives dropped significantly.
Hurray, there are still plenty of B2B brands making awful mistakes, I thought.
Once my thumb stopped at a LinkedIn (a)(d) by LinkedIn itself, I knew I had hit the goldmine.
Consider the above three examples.
Not necessarily awful, you say?
Well, yes.
They look like something of a mediocre B2B brand’s creatives from 2010.
But once you’ve looked at some excellent LinkedIn (a)(d) design examples, you can see what I mean.
Not awful is not great.
No good performance marketer would accept a ROAS (return on (a)(d) spend) that’s “not awful.”
Adding insult to injury is the fact that Reddit is absolutely killing it with their LinkedIn creatives.
Can you tell the mistakes that LinkedIn's team is making?
My bet is that if they would fix these mistakes, their ROAS would improve 2x or more.
I wrote about LinkedIn's 10 key (a)(d) design mistakes in a blog article.
Check it out for more examples and the full list of errors you want to avoid.
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🪡 Needles in a haystack
Officially my favourite section of Marketing Fix.
Things that cut through the internet noise + what I've been reading, listening, watching, liking, thinking.
🪡 It's not brand vs. growth. It's brand for growth. In the latest issue of Growth Unhinged, Kira Klaas argues that in 2025, investing in brand-led marketing is a high-ROI growth strategy. "The most successful companies don't treat brand as separate from growth, or something they'll "do" later—they use it as their growth multiplier from day one."
🪡 How to become a LinkedIn guru? My go-to expert for Go-to-Market strategy, Maja Voje hit 60k followers on LinkedIn. In this post, she shares top growth levers and productivity hacks.
🪡 New LinkedIn post format idea. Continuing on the LinkedIn track, Saniya V. dropped an interesting new carousel post format this week. Her post features screenshots of 5 posts she liked + a commentary on each. By tagging the accounts with high follower numbers, she got them (including me) to like and comment. The result? Her post reached the other accounts' followers and helped her make new corporate-social-media friends of her own.
🪡 Free "Notion for Marketers" Bundle. Great content giveaways exist – and are one of the best ways to grow your subscriber base. Maria Ledentsova created a detailed Notion page template for marketing project management. If you're not yet using the tool for documentation, this is an excellent starting point.
Reading rec: Harper's Magazine + The New Yorker + The Drift. Do you subscribe to any physical magazines? The kind that show up in your (metal) mailbox (you haven't checked for weeks)... The kind that you can take to a cafe for a Sunday reading hour; to the airplane for the fastest-passing flight. Not only is it a pleasant weekly or monthly surprise to find them, but you'll also support high-quality journalism that's pretty much Red-Book-worthy these days.
Life rec (mixed feelings): 10-day work sprints. I just had one, staying strapped to the work-wheel over the weekend to get my marketing course like by April 1. After this, I went on 3h/day work mode while visiting my family in Estonia. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I finished the project much faster by being in tunnel-vision focus mode. On the other hand, I was utterly burned out after – literally incapable of looking at the screen.
I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences x high-intensity work periods.
Reply to this email with your story. Perhaps, there will be enough for a special newsletter issue on the subject. I'm down to writing one.
Off to eat my grandma's pancakes now. À la prochaine!
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Thanks for reading!
Have a good one, and stay (almost) clear of AI.
Karola
