thought-leadership-ads

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: thought-leadership-ads
description: "Plan a campaign that promotes an executive's or founder's existing organic posts as paid person-fronted ads - post selection, sequencing, audience and exclusions, permission and governance, budget, and measurement. Use whenever the user mentions thought leader ads, promoting a founder's or CEO's post, sponsoring an employee's or a creator's post, executive content amplification, running ads from a personal profile, or B2B trust ads - even if they never say 'thought leadership'. Covers B2B trust-layer campaigns on professional networks with pipeline-lens measurement, and B2C founder-led brands with direct-response measurement. Plans the campaign only, never the featured person's content: ad copy is mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-copy-variants."
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: Maya-Beth Finotti
  version: "1.3.9"
---

# 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,