LinkedIn Connected TV campaign setup: US and Canada, English only

To run a LinkedIn Connected TV ad you must create it in Campaign Manager with the Brand awareness objective, target the United States and Canada only, set the audience language to English, and leave bidding on Maximum delivery (auto-bidding). LinkedIn's Set up Connected TV ads in Campaign Manager page, read on 2026-10-03, states each of those as a requirement, not a recommendation.

The same page lists three more rules. The LinkedIn Audience Network is selected automatically and cannot be changed, though you can apply publisher allow and block lists and IAB category exclusions. The optimization goal is Impressions or Reach. And Dynamic Group Budget, the budget optimization feature at campaign level, must be turned off.

The setup rules in one table

Setup is the part teams find out about late, usually after the creative is already finished. Check it first.

What the setup page does not say

The setup page gives no minimum budget and no review process, so do not assume either. It also gives no numbers for the video itself: it sends you to the separate CTV Ads specifications page, covered in LinkedIn CTV ad video specs. LinkedIn's general video ads page adds one more point: for CTV ads you can use any video asset you have uploaded to Campaign Manager, so the page does not require a fresh upload; the clip still has to meet the CTV spec.

Cut one master into the lengths LinkedIn recommends

The CTV spec recommends 6, 15, 30 and 60 second lengths, and Brand awareness is the only objective, so several lengths of one spot are the natural variants to test. Make one 16:9 master, then cut the rest from it. Video trim takes one Sume-hosted clip and a start plus either an end or a duration and returns a new MP4. It is $0.02 per job, the source is untouched, and precision defaults to exact, a frame-accurate re-encode in H.264 with yuv420p. The output cap is 900 seconds, far above any CTV length.

Send one request per length, each with its own Idempotency-Key (the output block conforms the cut to 1920 x 1080 at 30 fps, so start from a 16:9 master), so a retry never queues a second cut. A trim returns a new artifact URL and duration_seconds; keep the one that matches your target and compare it to the number you asked for.

for d in 6 15 30; do
  curl -s -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Idempotency-Key: ctv-cut-$d" \
    -d "{\"video_url\":\"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/master.mp4\",\"start\":0,\"duration\":$d,\"output\":{\"width\":1920,\"height\":1080,\"fps\":30}}"
done

Poll the jobs, then check each cut

A trim defaults to mode: async, so the response is a job. Poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status, then read GET /v1/jobs/:id/result once it is ready, as described in Jobs and results. Check duration_seconds and any warnings[] (a trim_clamped_to_source warning means your master was shorter than you cut). A cut from a master that has no clean end is still a bad ad at 6 seconds, so choose each start on a beat, not by the clock.

Last, the audio. A trim keeps audio as AAC by default (audio: "keep"), and LinkedIn wants -23 integrated LUFS on a 2-channel track. Sume does not measure loudness, so verify each cut in your own meter before upload.