When Jessica Jensen, LinkedIn’s chief marketing officer, explained in an interview with Maryam Banikarim for The Wall Street Journal why the platform is pushing video, she first gave the obvious reason. Gen Z, she said, “eat video for breakfast, lunch, and dinner”. Text will not reach people who think in video.
LinkedIn has more than a billion accounts, and a growing share of them are young and digitally native. The platform has therefore reoriented its feed towards video distribution and built a marketplace linking brands with creators. The number of people who added the word “creator” to their profiles has recently jumped by 90%.
That is the version of the story most people will repeat. It is true, but it is not the part that matters most.
Video as a carrier of trust
When Jensen was pressed on the core of the shift, she kept returning to one word. It was not reach. It was trust. Video is, in her view, the most effective way to carry it. When someone sees a person often enough, they start to feel they know that person’s personality and opinions. That feeling is the capital. The format is just the delivery mechanism.
100 million verified profiles
Here LinkedIn’s position looks different from that of other platforms chasing the same Gen Z attention. Instagram from Meta, TikTok from ByteDance and YouTube from Google all build on video for young audiences, but none of them has verified professional identity at such a scale. LinkedIn passed the 100 million verified members mark in December 2025, meaning real names tied to real professional reputations.
According to the platform’s own data, verified members have up to 60% more profile views and up to 50% more interactions on their posts, while verified company pages get 10.9 times the views and 7.7 times the followers. Jensen added that identity follows a person on LinkedIn, so people behave better, and that the platform actively removes AI clutter and AI comments.
When these two facts are set side by side, the real thesis emerges. The internet is flooded with synthetic everything: faces, voices, comments and “thought leadership” written by a model at two in the morning. In such an environment, content is not the scarce resource. What is scarce is a credible signal that a real, traceable person stands behind it. A verified identity tied to professional stakes is exactly that signal, and it is the one thing a competitor cannot switch on with autoplay.
Video and the verification machine are not two strategies. They are one. Video is the way trust shows itself, and verified identity is what makes that trust valuable.
The AI Act and labelling of AI content
For European brands, this logic comes with a hard deadline. From 2 August 2026, the transparency obligations of Article 50 of the EU AI Act begin to apply. Outputs of generative systems must be marked in a machine-readable format as artificially generated or manipulated, and deepfake content must be disclosed as such. The more AI content must be labelled, the more valuable an environment becomes where you can verify that a named person stands behind a post. How much impact this will have depends on how regulators interpret and enforce the rules.
“The same delicious soup”
The most quoted line of the interview was also the most strategically loaded. Asked about the old scepticism of the tech business towards brands, Jensen replied that the war is over. Brand and performance are, in her words, “the same delicious soup”. Good brand marketing can, she said, make performance marketing work “3 to 5 times harder”, and it was this maths that finally moved finance directors. She drew on her earlier experience as chief marketing officer at Nextdoor.
Between rawness and traceability
Jensen also advises nervous executives to pick up their phone, film themselves and be “messy”, citing Gary Vaynerchuk and his ‘it’s okay to be messy’. The tension is that “be messy” and 100 million verified identities pull in opposite directions. One wants raw, the other traceable. LinkedIn’s bet is that these forces stabilise each other. A post without a real name behind it is noise. A real name without any human touch is a corporate brochure.
Jensen says the strategy also has organic roots, because athletes arrive on the platform of their own accord. She mentioned a recent case in which a team from the World Cup found a player through LinkedIn, without the company having anything to do with it. When an audience starts using a product for results nobody designed, it becomes a platform, not a campaign.
LinkedIn is telling the market what it believes the next era of brand building rests on. It rests on credible human presence at scale, with video as the format and verified identity as its “moat”. For brands, this draws a new dividing line: whether you can tell from the video that a real person stands behind it.
Comments