How Much AI Can Thought Leadership Take?－By Nat Ives, WSJ Leadership Institute

Good morning. LinkedIn is trying to stem the flow of artificially-produced “thought leadership” and other AI slop in its feed, the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Patrick Coffee reports this morning.

Nearly every social platform has taken steps to constrain the rapid growth of AI-generated content, primarily through automated labeling tools with uneven track records . But the issue is more critical for LinkedIn than social-media firms that focus on entertainment and familiar connections, because the company positions itself as an invaluable source of information and career opportunities for its 1 billion-plus members.

LinkedIn last month started letting users report suspiciously generic posts with a “seems like AI slop” button and ended its “enhance your post” feature. It plans to “nudge” people when others flag their posts as AI-like. And, crucially for executives relying on AI to scale up their commentary, it says it catches and limits the distribution of the vast majority of generative content.

Certain red flags have nonetheless become too familiar, says Dan Roth , LinkedIn’s editor in chief and vice president of content: recycling-bin emojis paired with engagement bait, chatbot speech patterns (“not this, but that”), dramatic line-break “broetry” and articulate comments that merely summarize the original post.

“A lot of this content ends up in the uncanny valley of ‘Sounds like humans, but isn’t quite human, and this is giving me a bad feeling,’” Roth says.

I asked Patrick where “enhancing” posts gets counterproductive.

Everybody is looking for ways to capitalize on AI tools, myself included. What’s so bad about a business or an executive using generative AI to polish up their LinkedIn drafts?

Patrick: In theory, nothing! Many brands and executives have some array of comms people, ghostwriters and social media managers helping to shape what they post. The problem is that when people have reason to suspect that at least some of your stuff was written by a bot, they’re less likely to take anything else they see under your name seriously.

Brendan Gahan runs a LinkedIn-only influencer agency, and he told me the most important thing to do on the platform is to share a legitimately held opinion or passion instead of just posting whatever you think will be palatable to your audience. But even then, other people’s AI overuse could become an issue. It’s hard to stay credible when everyone’s looking for signs that the things they’re seeing and reading weren’t made by humans.

As someone who sees a lot of marketing writing on LinkedIn, I have to ask: How do CMOs stack up against other corporate leaders when it comes to AI posting?

Patrick: While reporting this story, I asked around for marketing leaders who would acknowledge a lot of AI in their LinkedIn presence. LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman has done it a few times, most recently with an AI-generated song about April Fool’s that I’ll let you judge for yourself. But I couldn’t find any marketers doing that, unless you count the posts from people selling related gen AI services.

But I did wonder whether marketing is more AI-prone than other topics—I don’t think I’ll offend anyone by saying that a lot of marketing talk is not compelling to people who aren’t already deep in the weeds.

So AI-detection startup Originality.ai tested about 5,000 posts in ten categories and found that only climate change ranked lower than marketing/advertising/PR in terms of probable, more-than-moderate AI use. The AI was much thicker in subject areas like crypto, leadership and the winner, data analytics.

Beating Expectations

WPP shares surged after the advertising group said its key top-line metric fell less sharply last quarter, with CEO Cindy Rose crediting her turnaround plan with driving a run of account wins, Adrià Calatayud writes.

The owner of ad agencies including Ogilvy and AKQA said revenue less pass-through costs fell 2.8% on a like-for-like basis in the second quarter, an improvement compared with the 6.7% drop WPP reported for the first quarter and better than analysts’ expectations of a 6.3% decline.

The company attributed the recovery to better trends at its WPP Media business.

Rose said on a call with analysts that the result mainly reflected past account losses, but that recent account wins and retention of assignments with existing clients pointed to momentum building across the business.

“In terms of what’s driving our new business momentum, I would say our clients are responding very well to our integration and simplification,” Rose said on the call in response to a question. “And that’s good because all the changes we made were in direct response to client feedback.”

WPP this year has won accounts from clients including Heineken and Estee Lauder , which named WPP its first global media agency . WPP also held on to existing relationships with other clients like Skechers and Huawei.

The Magic Number

Ad impressions that Teads alleges in a lawsuit it lost because of Google’s ad-tech practices. Google called the suit “meritless.”

Two Paths Taken

Two travel booking platforms just talked up marketing discipline on their latest earnings calls, but described very different ways of pursuing it.

Expedia Group called out tech and emerging AI channels in its quest for efficiency, while Trivago is cashing in on past brand investments to bring down the cost of acquiring customers.

Expedia Group consumer bookings rose 8% while marketing spending grew just 1%, CEO Ariane Gorin said on the company’s call on Wednesday. She attributed the results to “pulling on all of the levers of the marketplace,” including optimizing the checkout on Vrbo, cutting inefficient marketing channels and redirecting spending to more productive ones.

“The team is also doing some really fantastic work around using technology to be more effective,” Gorin said, noting that the company is developing agentic systems to create personalized ads on a large scale.

And Expedia is investing in social media marketing and so-called answer engine optimization to better reach consumers as they start planning trips. “AEO and Social are two of our fastest-growing channels, and while agentic traffic remains small, it’s a promising channel with high purchase consideration,” Gorin said.

Trivago meanwhile suggested that it was ready to harvest the benefits of its brand-building effort, slowing its ad-spending growth to 10% in the first half of this year from 20% in 2025.

“Through brand marketing, we bring more people on our platform,” CEO Johannes Thomas said. “We see branded users are more sticky, have a higher probability to return than people coming from performance marketing channels.”

They also can be converted into registered Trivago users, Thomas said, letting the company reach them through email and push notifications “at no dedicated marketing cost.”

That kind of customer-retention marketing is “still rather small in terms of revenue,” he added, “but it is becoming a relevant profit contributor with revenue more than doubling compared to last year.”