Thought Leadership Ads

Thought Leadership Ads

Plan a paid campaign that amplifies a named person's own organic posts from that person's profile, under a paid-promotion label naming the sponsoring brand. The advertiser buys distribution for a post it does not own and cannot edit - every planning decision below follows from that constraint.

Scope and handoffs

This skill selects posts, sequences the campaign, designs the audience, sets governance, sizes budget, and defines measurement. It hands off neighbouring work:

• Writing or improving the featured person's posts - never done here. This skill only chooses among posts that already exist.
• Working conversion tracking is a prerequisite → verify via mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-conversion-tracking.
• The broader layered targeting plan → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-audience-targeting.
• The downstream retargeting sequence this campaign feeds → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@retargeting-funnel.
• Ad copy variants and creative briefs → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-copy-variants, mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-creative-brief.
• Which channels to run at all → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-platform-selection.
• Buying-committee role mapping → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-buyer-group-mapper.
• Total budget split across campaigns → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-spend-allocation.
• Ongoing decay monitoring after launch → mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-creative-fatigue.

If you draft any illustrative copy while explaining a step, route it through your preferred humanizer skill before the user ships it - AI-sounding text is a documented killer of this format (see Failure modes).

Interview

Ask one question at a time, multiple-choice where possible. Stop as soon as you can plan. Do not run the full list when early answers already settle later questions.

1. Business model: (a) B2B, (b) B2C / consumer, (c) hybrid?
2. Who are the candidate featured people: (a) founder/CEO only, (b) several executives, (c) employees beyond the exec team, (d) customers or external creators, (e) a mix?
3. Have those people already agreed to have their posts promoted: (a) yes, explicitly, (b) informally / assumed, (c) not asked yet?
4. Does a written agreement exist beyond platform click-to-approve: (a) yes, (b) no, (c) only for some people?
5. B2B: typical ACV and sales-cycle length? B2C: typical order value and purchase-decision time?
6. Does each candidate already post organically - roughly how often, and is there an engagement history to score against?
7. What downstream capture layer exists today: (a) retargeting audiences + conversion campaigns live, (b) tracking live but no retargeting built, (c) nothing yet?
8. Monthly budget for this format, and a rough size for the target audience or account list?
9. What does the account currently pay per landing-page click on brand-account ads to a comparable audience, and what pipeline-to-spend bar should the two-quarter review judge against? Both are gate inputs, not context:

• Without the first, the week-6 gate falls back to a provisional external bar.
• Without the second, the lagging verdict has nothing to be measured against.
• Agree the bar now, never at review time.

1. Regulated industry (financial services, health, or similar)?
2. Does the audience include the EEA or UK?
3. Date the result must land by: (a) inside this quarter, (b) two to four quarters out, (c) no fixed date?
4. One-off win or compounding asset: (a) clicks and pipeline from this flight, (b) a warm pool and a person-fronted channel that keeps paying?
5. Effort ceiling: hours per week available, and how much political capital - can you ask an executive to edit their own live post, and can you license a customer's content?

Re-rank every ordered menu below against answers 12-14, and say out loud which answer moved which option. Where an answer rules an option out entirely instead of merely lowering it, delete it by name rather than ranking it last.

• Answer 12 (date inside this quarter): fails the B2B trust layer at the eligibility gate and promotes the B2C direct-response shape.
• Answer 13 (compounding mandate): promotes trust-first sequencing, the multi-person roster, and the declared pool-builder link option.
• Answer 14 (low political-capital ceiling): promotes the pinned-comment link and employee-authored posts over an exec edit or a licensed customer post.

Every ordering in this skill is a default, not a law - it shifts with context and with who executes it. Re-rank against what you already know about the user - each of these invalidates an assumption the default order makes:

• A founder whose audience outranks the brand's.
• An in-house editor.
• A customer who has already licensed their content.
• A compliance team that clears a post in a day.

Eligibility gate

Do not produce a plan when any of these holds. Say which gate failed and what to do instead - a plan that dies at day 45 is worse than a refusal.

• No downstream capture layer. Retargeting is not retroactive: audiences not being captured today are gone forever, and this format's main output is a warm pool. Build tracking and the retargeting scaffold first (mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-conversion-tracking, then mbfinotti/advertising-skills@retargeting-funnel), then return.
• The featured person has not consented. Consent is per-post, personal, and revocable - marketing cannot run this unilaterally. Get explicit agreement (and the written agreement from Governance) before planning around anyone. Never treat "the CEO will probably say yes" as consent.
• Budget cannot sustain frequency against the audience. If the budget spread over the audience yields near-zero frequency, nobody changes their mind. Shrink the audience to fit the budget (see Audience). If the user refuses both, decline the format.
• B2B with low ACV. This is a slow-payback trust layer. Practitioners cite roughly $25k+ ACV with a narrow ICP as the justification bar (practitioner-cited, not a law). Far below that, route the budget to direct-response and retargeting instead, where payback is measurable within the quarter.

A single-person program is not a hard stop but flag it: one revocation or resignation ends it (see Governance).

Post selection

Select from what the person already publishes, never manufacture a post purely to be advertised - volunteer output beats mandated programs, and manufactured posts read as ads, which defeats the format.

1. Apply the organic-validation rule, and disclose that it is contested.

• Majority practice promotes posts that already earned organic engagement, because existing reactions and comments carry into the ad as visible social proof.
• A minority of practitioners argue performance comes from content quality, not pre-validation, and write posts intending to promote them.
• Both camps agree on one thing: a post with a dead comment thread inherits that dead thread.
• Default to validation. Note the minority view when the user has strong content but a small following.

1. Score relative to that account's own median, not an absolute bar.

• Rank each candidate post against the author's trailing posts (engagement rate, comments, shares). Promote from the top quartile.
• There is no defensible absolute threshold to hold every account to. One agency benchmark cites ~2-3% organic CTR as the candidate bar (agency-reported), usable as a cross-check only.

1. Check format eligibility as a concept.

• Networks typically allow single-asset posts (one image, one video, plain text, long-form article, newsletter, event) and reject multi-asset or interactive ones (carousels, polls, document posts, reshares, celebration posts).
• Platform documentation on this is internally inconsistent and changes often.
• If you can browse the web, verify the current list on the chosen network before finalizing.