Report Analysis

Invisible Influence

By July 30th, 2026No Comments

What the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report means for video strategy in New Zealand medium and enterprise businesses

Letter from Kaushik

We make video for a living, so let me declare the interest before making the argument.

When Edelman and LinkedIn released the 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, we read it expecting confirmation of things we already say to clients. What we found was more specific than that. The report never sets out to make a case for video. It surveys 1,934 business executives about thought leadership in general, across every format from research reports to social posts to webinars to live presentations (pp.4, 5). Yet when it describes what the most powerful and least reachable audience in a buying group actually wants, it describes video almost line by line without naming it.

That audience is what the report calls hidden buyers. Internal stakeholders who hold real influence over a purchase without being the primary user of what you sell. Finance, operations, legal, compliance, procurement and others who represent a function rather than the specialist need (p.4). More than 40% of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment inside the buying group (p.2), and these are usually the people the misalignment sits with.

Here is what they say they want. Content with a distinctive format and style, which 60% of them treat as a marker of quality, against 51% of target buyers (p.28). Quick takeaways over dense academic material, preferred by 57% (p.29). A human, less formal tone over an even toned intellectual voice, preferred by 65% (p.30). And critically, 73% say an organisation’s thought leadership is one of the best ways to get a sense of the type and calibre of thinking it is likely to deliver to clients (p.19).

Distinctive, digestible, human, and a demonstration of how you think. There is one format that does all four at once, and it is a person on camera explaining something they know deeply.

Over the past year we’ve spoken with more than 50 business leaders across New Zealand in professional services, technology, healthcare, engineering, recruitment and construction. Most have a video programme of some kind. Almost all of it is aimed at the wrong person. Brand films for the market in general, product explainers for the technical evaluator, culture content for recruitment. Very little of it speaks to the finance director or operations manager who will quietly decide whether the deal proceeds.

This isn’t a summary of Edelman and LinkedIn’s research, nor a replacement for it. It’s our interpretation of what the findings mean for New Zealand organisations that already own cameras, budgets and good intentions, and want their video to reach the room where the decision is actually made. We present the findings with page references back to the original, then explain what we believe they mean for your video strategy.

Kaushik Kumar, Commercial Director, Dark Matter

Executive Brief: The report in five minutes

If you read one section, read this.

The report makes one argument with unusual force. A meaningful share of every significant purchase is decided by people your sales team cannot reach, and those people form their view of you through content. For video specifically, that turns the strategic question from “what should our next video be about?” into “which member of the buying group has never heard from us on camera?”

The defining tension: the people most able to stop your deal are the least available to your sales team and the least interested in your documents. 71% of hidden decision makers report relatively little or no interaction with sales representatives (p.11), yet 95% say consistently high quality thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach (p.12). The door is shut to selling and open to being taught, and the format they most associate with quality is not a whitepaper.

Five takeaways for decision makers:

  1. Video is thought leadership, by the report’s own definition. The study explicitly counts videos, webinars and live presentations as thought leadership, alongside written formats, provided the content offers expertise or a distinct point of view rather than describing your products (p.4). This matters, because it means every finding about trust and advocacy in the report applies directly to what you put on camera.
  2. Hidden buyers are watching, whether or not you are talking to them. 63% of hidden decision makers spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership, essentially the same as the 64% of target decision makers who do (p.7). 55% use it to vet potential vendors, against 56% of target buyers (p.8). Your video audience is larger and more senior than your analytics dashboard suggests.
  3. Video wins the comparison your capability deck is losing. 71% of hidden decision makers agree thought leadership is more effective than conventional marketing or sales materials at demonstrating a vendor’s potential value, and 64% consider it a more trustworthy basis for judging capability than marketing materials and product sheets (p.13). A managing director explaining a hard problem clearly outperforms a beautifully designed brochure with this audience.
  4. They want to be challenged on camera, not reassured. 91% say a hallmark of quality is content that helps them uncover a challenge or need they hadn’t recognised, against 81% of target buyers (p.17), and 86% prefer ideas that challenge their assumptions over content that validates their existing thinking (p.18). Video with no position in it is expensive wallpaper.
  5. Video is how a stranger becomes your internal advocate. 79% of hidden decision makers say they are more likely to champion an RFP proposal from a company that consistently produces high quality thought leadership (p.25), and 53% of buyers say strong thought leadership reduces how much brand recognition matters (p.23). For a New Zealand firm competing against a bigger name, that is the whole opportunity.

Why this matters commercially. New Zealand medium and enterprise businesses win on expertise rather than scale, which means we are usually the less familiar name on the shortlist. The report’s finding that recognition is negotiable while thinking is not gives us a route around the brand gap. And video is the fastest way for a stranger to assess thinking, because 51% of hidden decision influencers say strong thought leadership helps them convince C-suite executives to back their preferred vendor, and 52% say it helps them convince others in the vetting process (p.24). Somebody inside your prospect will have to argue for you. A three minute video of your expert being genuinely useful is far easier to forward than a forty page PDF nobody will open.

Chapter 1: Why video is the format the report describes without naming it

The biggest mistake a leadership team could make after reading this report is to commission more video. That isn’t what the data says. It says commission different video, for a different person.

Most corporate video is built for the market in general. Brand films, capability overviews, product explainers, event recaps. It is made to be broadcast, and it assumes the viewer is either already interested or can be made interested by production value. The report describes a viewer who is neither. The hidden buyer is not browsing your channel. They are forming a private judgement about whether your organisation is competent and safe to recommend, and they are doing it in professional feeds, in their own time, without telling anyone.

Four findings, read together, describe a specific kind of video.

Take the format signal first. 60% of hidden decision makers say a unique format or style, something that looks different from the thought leadership they usually see, is a characteristic of above average or highest quality content. Only 51% of target buyers say the same (p.28). This is a meaningful gap. The audience with the least technical knowledge of your field leans hardest on craft as a proxy for quality. Fairly or not, they read the way something is made as evidence of how you work.

Then the length and density signal. 57% favour primer style content with quick takeaways designed for a general audience over academic style content thoroughly researched for experts (p.29). Your hidden buyer is not the specialist. They do not want the deep technical treatment, and a video that opens at expert level loses them in the first fifteen seconds.

Then tone. 65% prefer a more human, less formal tone of voice over an even toned intellectual one (p.30). The report’s own summary of this section is that hidden buyers want content that is stylish, straightforward and human (p.27), and its recommendation to producers is to use distinct, creative formats and a human tone to break through (p.32).

And finally the purpose. 73% say thought leadership is one of the best ways to get a sense of the type and calibre of thinking a company is likely to deliver to clients (p.19).

Put those together and the specification is clear. A distinctive looking, briefly stated, humanly delivered demonstration of judgement. Written content can achieve three of those. Video is the only format that delivers all four simultaneously, because tone and calibre of thinking are not claims you make in video, they are things the viewer observes directly. When your technical director explains why a certain project approach fails, the viewer is not evaluating a claim about expertise. They are watching expertise happen.

Executive insight. Hidden buyers use content to audit your judgement. Video is the only format where judgement is visible rather than asserted.

This also explains why so much B2B video underperforms. If the viewer is auditing thinking, then video with no thinking in it fails regardless of budget. The polished brand film with a voiceover and drone footage says nothing about how you solve problems. The product walkthrough answers a question the hidden buyer never asked. The slide deck read aloud on camera demonstrates that nobody was willing to have an opinion. All three can be beautifully produced and still leave the deciding function with nothing to go on.

Questions for your leadership team:

  • In our last five stalled deals, who raised the objection that stopped it, and have they ever seen one of our people on camera?
  • Which functions can veto our sale, and what video have we ever made that speaks to their concerns?
  • Would a finance director watching two minutes of our content learn how we think, or only what we sell?
  • Does our video look meaningfully different from our competitors’, or interchangeable with it?

Chapter 2: Five videos that speak to the people you never meet

This is the practical translation. Each format below maps to a specific finding in the report and a specific function inside the buying group.

1. The position piece. A senior person stating a clear, contestable view about your industry, in sixty to ninety seconds. This exists because 86% of hidden decision makers want perspectives that challenge their assumptions rather than validate their thinking (p.18). The test is simple: if a competent competitor could not reasonably disagree with what was said, there is no position in it. New Zealand’s cultural instinct to hedge is the enemy here. Balanced content reads as no content to this audience.

2. The uncovered problem video. Three to five minutes explaining a risk, cost or opportunity your prospects do not yet know they have. This is aimed directly at the single strongest finding in the report: 91% of hidden decision makers say quality thought leadership helps them see a challenge or need they had been missing, against 81% of target buyers (p.17). It also happens to be the highest ranked factor in the final vendor decision, with 85% naming understanding of their business’s challenges and needs as important, well ahead of being the safest choice at 41% (p.22). This is the single most valuable video most New Zealand businesses are not making.

3. The objection answer. A short, direct video addressing one specific concern raised late in your deals by someone you had not met. Finance asking about the true cost. Operations asking about disruption. Compliance asking about risk. Legal asking about liability. These videos are not for your website’s home page. They exist to be forwarded at the moment the question is asked, which is where the 79% advocacy finding becomes operational (p.25).

4. The recorded briefing. Twenty to thirty minutes of genuine substance, either a live session made available afterwards or a studio recording. Its job is depth and credibility for the person doing due diligence on you quietly, and it feeds the 55% who use thought leadership as part of their vetting process (p.8). Long form does not contradict the preference for quick takeaways at 57% (p.29), because these serve different moments. Short content earns the initial attention, long content satisfies the person who has decided to look properly.

5. The client story told as a problem, not a testimonial. Structured around the decision, the constraint and what was learned, rather than around praise for your organisation. The report is explicit that thought leadership excludes content primarily focused on describing your products or services (p.4), and a testimonial that only says you were great is functionally a product claim. A client story that teaches somebody how to think about a similar decision is thought leadership, and it is the most persuasive form of it for a sceptical function.

Applied across industries, the shift is the same: film for the function that can say no.

  • Professional services. Your specialists already publish for peers. Add a video series for the finance and risk functions on the commercial consequences of getting the technical decisions wrong.
  • Technology. The technical evaluator wants the product demo. Operations and compliance want to see somebody address implementation failure, change management burden and integration risk honestly on camera. That video wins the deal the demo cannot.
  • Recruitment and people services. Hiring managers care about candidate quality. Finance cares about the cost of a mis hire and the true cost of an unfilled role. Film the second one and you become useful to the person signing the contract.
  • Engineering and construction. Procurement is deciding under uncertainty. A short video explaining which early decisions drive later cost variation makes your expertise legible to the person who has never read a drawing.
  • Healthcare. Clinical audiences want evidence. Boards and administrators want risk, continuity and compliance addressed by a credible human face. Both need to exist.

Common mistakes: making brand films when the buying group needs explanations; filming the specialist for the specialist; scripting the position out of the video during approvals; treating a testimonial as thought leadership; publishing polished video with no argument in it.

Recommended actions:

  1. List the functions that can veto your sale. Commission at least one video per function this quarter, addressed to their concerns in their language.
  2. For the next three videos, require a claim that a competent competitor could contest. If everyone agrees, reshoot the brief.
  3. Make one uncovered problem video about the risk your clients most consistently underestimate. Judge it on whether prospects mention it, not on views.

Chapter 3: Video as ammunition for your internal champion

The most commercially useful section of the report has nothing to do with awareness. It is about advocacy, and it changes what video is for.

Hidden buyers will argue for you if you give them something to argue with. 79% of hidden decision makers say that during an RFP process they are more likely to advocate for, or champion, proposals from companies that consistently produce high quality thought leadership (p.25). Among hidden decision influencers, the people who manage evaluations and present recommendations to those with final purchasing authority (p.24), 51% say a strong thought leadership programme helps them convince C-suite executives to support their preferred vendor and 52% say it helps them convince others in the vetting process (p.24). Influence runs downward too: 35% of hidden and 41% of target decision makers say a C-suite executive has encouraged them to consider a vendor after engaging with that vendor’s thought leadership (p.14).

Somebody inside your prospect is going to defend the decision to choose you, in a meeting, against a more familiar competitor, without you in the room. Video’s advantage here is practical. A link gets opened. A three minute video of your expert being useful gets watched to the end and remembered. A capability document gets skimmed at best. If you want your champion to win an internal argument, give them the asset with the highest chance of actually being consumed by the person who doubts you.

Executive insight. Your most valuable video is not the one that generates enquiries. It is the one your champion forwards to the person who can stop the deal.

Build the objection library. Rather than briefing video by campaign, brief it against the specific resistance that stalls your deals.

  1. Collect. Ask your sales team for every late stage question raised by someone they had not previously met. That list is rarely written down and is unusually valuable.
  2. Attribute. Sort it into finance, operations, compliance, legal and procurement concerns.
  3. Film. One short video per objection, addressed to that function, with a real answer rather than a reassurance.
  4. Make it forwardable. Self contained, understandable by someone with no context on your business, watchable in under five minutes, captioned for silent viewing.
  5. Deploy deliberately. Give sales a simple map of which video answers which objection, and make sending it a standard step rather than an improvisation.
  6. Learn. The videos champions forward repeatedly are telling you exactly where your market’s internal resistance sits.

The economics work because objections are structural, not situational. The question that stalled last quarter’s deal will stall the next one. One well made video answers it permanently, which turns video from a marketing cost into sales infrastructure.

A caution the report states plainly, and which matters more for video than for writing. Alongside the benefits of strong thought leadership, the research points to tangible risks from publishing low quality content (p.2). Take that seriously in a visual medium. If hidden buyers treat your content as a work sample of your thinking, and 60% treat format and craft as a quality signal (p.28), then a badly made video is not neutral. It is evidence, delivered directly to the person you cannot see.

Two specific traps. The first is volume without substance: a full content calendar of forgettable clips actively argues that your organisation has nothing to say. The second is synthetic delivery. Given that 65% of this audience explicitly prefers a human tone (p.30) and 73% are using your content to judge the calibre of your thinking (p.19), an AI presenter or an avatar reading a script removes the exact thing the format is being used to assess. If the point is to prove there is real judgement in your business, the judgement needs a real face attached to it.

Common mistakes: measuring video only by lead generation; producing volume without a position; leaving champions with nothing forwardable; making videos that require your presence to explain; assuming the worst outcome of weak video is that it gets ignored.

Recommended actions:

  1. Write down the five objections most likely to be raised by someone you have never met. Film one video for each.
  2. Ask your last three champions what they had to argue against internally. Their answers are your production schedule.
  3. Set a quality floor and hold it. With this audience, six strong videos beat thirty forgettable ones.

Chapter 4: The 90 day video playbook

Most reports are easy to agree with and hard to act on. This chapter is the opposite. It is a sequence a medium or enterprise business can start on Monday, with existing budget and no restructure.

Days 1 to 30: map the room, then plan the shoot. The first month is discovery, not production.

  • Reconstruct your buying groups. Take your last ten significant opportunities, won and lost, and list everyone known to have been involved, plus the functions you suspect were involved but never met. Most teams find the group is wider than their CRM suggests and that entire functions have never been addressed by anything they’ve published.
  • Audit your existing video against that group. Sort every asset by which function it serves. The usual finding is that eighty percent or more speaks to the specialist evaluator or to the market in general, and that finance, operations and compliance have never been addressed once.
  • Identify who should be on camera. Not just the chief executive. Ask who inside the business people go to for answers. Technical directors, senior consultants, operations leads and client service leaders are often more credible to a sceptical function than the person whose job title implies selling.
  • Choose the first six topics. Draw them from the objection list and from recurring client questions, not from the marketing calendar.

Executive insight. Don’t start with a shot list. Start with a list of the people who can stop your deals and everything you have never said to them on camera.

Days 31 to 60: shoot in batches and build the system. The objective is a small library of genuinely useful assets, produced efficiently.

  • Run interview led capture. Do not script your experts word for word. Interview them, because 65% of this audience prefers a human, less formal tone (p.30) and reading a script destroys exactly that quality. Useful prompts: “What do finance directors usually get wrong about work like this?” “What risk do clients consistently underestimate?” “What do we believe that most of our competitors don’t?”
  • Batch the production. One well planned shoot day with two or three experts should yield a flagship explainer, several short position pieces and a set of objection answers. The cost of getting people in front of a camera does not change with the number of topics covered, so the leverage sits in planning the outputs before you record.
  • Invest in a distinctive look and hold it. With 60% of hidden buyers reading unique format and style as a quality signal (p.28), a consistent visual system for your thought leadership video is a commercial decision, not a design preference. It should be recognisable as yours after three seconds.
  • Design every asset to be forwarded. Self contained, no required context, captioned as standard, and produced in the aspect ratios your distribution actually needs rather than resized as an afterthought.

Days 61 to 90: distribute where they are and make it a rhythm. The report’s recommendation is to focus on professional feeds and meet hidden buyers where they already consume content (p.32). In New Zealand that means LinkedIn, and specifically the personal profiles of your senior people rather than the company page alone. Content from a named human outperforms content from a logo with an audience that is trying to assess humans.

Then set the cadence and close the loop with sales. A fortnightly publishing rhythm from two or three named experts, a monthly review of which objections remain unaddressed, and a briefing so the sales team knows which video answers which question.

Measure what matters to the business. Views and engagement have their place, but the leading indicators for this mechanism are different. Are late stage surprise objections becoming less frequent. Are prospects arriving already understanding your position. Are people you never pitched to appearing in conversations. Are champions telling you they shared something internally. Watch time on a single serious video is worth more than reach across ten weak ones, because 73% of this audience is using the content to judge your thinking (p.19) and judgement requires them to actually watch.

After 90 days you should have: a documented map of the functions inside your buying groups; a written objection library; six to ten published videos addressed to functions you previously ignored; a recognisable visual system; a fortnightly rhythm from named experts; a distribution habit centred on professional feeds; and a sales process that hands champions something to argue with.

Chapter 5: Looking ahead and the cost of doing nothing

The report is a snapshot of how buying groups behave now. It is also a reasonable signal of where this is heading, and the direction favours businesses willing to put real people on camera.

Access will keep narrowing while buying groups keep widening. More functions are being drawn into significant purchases through governance, procurement discipline and risk oversight, while direct access to those functions is not improving. 71% of hidden buyers already report little or no interaction with sales (p.11). The gap between who decides and who you can reach is widening, and content is the only bridge that scales.

As text becomes abundant, visible human judgement becomes the differentiator. Written content is now trivially cheap to produce at volume, which erodes its value as proof of anything. What cannot be mass produced is a credible person answering a hard question well, unscripted, on the record. With 71% of hidden buyers already finding thought leadership more effective than conventional sales materials at demonstrating value (p.13), the premium will keep shifting towards formats where competence is demonstrated rather than described.

Executive visibility will be understood as risk reduction, not personal branding. When 35% of hidden and 41% of target decision makers have been pointed towards a vendor by a C-suite executive who engaged with its thought leadership (p.14), the commercial logic of getting your senior people on camera stops being a matter of preference. Businesses whose expertise lives entirely in unrecorded conversations are carrying an avoidable commercial risk.

Brand size will keep mattering, but less than thinking. 53% of buyers say strong thought leadership reduces how much brand recognition matters (p.23) and 79% of hidden buyers will champion proposals from consistent thought leaders (p.25). For a New Zealand firm with deep expertise and a modest marketing budget, that is a genuine and durable advantage. It is not a shortcut. It requires video good enough that a stranger will stake their internal credibility on you.

The cost of inaction is gradual, then sudden. Businesses that keep making video for the market in general will keep experiencing the same pattern: strong first meetings, enthusiastic champions, deals that stall for reasons nobody can name, and a slow conclusion that the market is tough. Their expertise stays invisible to the functions that decide. Their champions keep going into internal meetings empty handed. Meanwhile competitors publishing clear, human, well made explanations become the familiar and quotable option, and the gap widens quietly before it widens obviously.

The encouraging part is that this is a leadership challenge rather than a production one. The arguments already exist inside your business. Your people already know what finance gets wrong, what operations fears and what procurement should be asking. Those conversations happen every week and then disappear, because nobody was recording.

A question for your next board meeting. The person with the power to say no to us will probably never meet us. What have we filmed that would change their mind? If the answer is nothing, our biggest commercial gap isn’t lead generation. It’s that our thinking has never left the building in a form anyone can watch.

References

Primary source: Edelman and LinkedIn. (2025). Invisible Influence: Unlocking the Power of Hidden Buyers. 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. Based on an online survey of 1,934 business executives conducted via the LinkedIn platform in the United States, fielded 17 March to 3 April 2025, margin of error +/- 2.0%, with sub samples of target decision makers, hidden decision makers and hidden decision influencers. Seventh annual collaboration in the series (pp.2, 5).

  • More than 40% of B2B deals stall due to internal misalignment within buying groups, citing Matt Dixon, The JOLT Effect, 2022, and the tangible risks of publishing low quality content (p.2)
  • Definitions of hidden and target decision makers, and the study’s definition of thought leadership, which explicitly includes videos, webinars and live presentations while excluding content primarily describing products or services (p.4)
  • Definition of hidden decision influencers (p.24)
  • 63% of hidden and 64% of target decision makers spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership (p.7)
  • 55% of hidden and 56% of target decision makers use thought leadership to vet vendors (p.8)
  • 71% of hidden decision makers report relatively little or no interaction with sales representatives (p.11)
  • 95% of hidden decision makers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach (p.12)
  • 71% of hidden decision makers find thought leadership more effective than conventional marketing or sales materials at demonstrating value, 73% for target buyers; 64% trust it more than marketing materials and product sheets, 65% for target buyers (p.13)
  • 35% of hidden and 41% of target decision makers have been encouraged by a C-suite executive to consider a vendor after that executive engaged with its thought leadership (p.14)
  • 91% of hidden decision makers, against 81% of target decision makers, say quality thought leadership helps them uncover challenges or needs they had not recognised (p.17)
  • 86% of hidden decision makers prefer provocative ideas that challenge their assumptions (p.18)
  • 73% of hidden decision makers say thought leadership is one of the best ways to sense the type and calibre of thinking a company delivers to clients (p.19)
  • Final RFP decision factors for hidden decision makers: understanding of business challenges and needs 85%, understanding of industry trends 76%, leading expert in the relevant area 74%, strategic fit 68%, cultural fit 56%, safest choice 41% (p.22)
  • 53% of both audiences agree that high quality thought leadership reduces how much brand recognition matters (p.23)
  • 51% of hidden decision influencers say thought leadership helps them convince C-suite executives, 52% say it helps them convince others in the vetting process (p.24)
  • 79% of hidden decision makers are more likely to champion RFP proposals from consistent producers of high quality thought leadership (p.25)
  • Hidden buyers want content that is stylish, straightforward and human (p.27)
  • 60% of hidden decision makers, against 51% of target decision makers, treat a unique format or style as a quality signal (p.28)
  • 57% of hidden decision makers favour quick takeaways over academic style content (p.29)
  • 65% of hidden decision makers prefer a more human, less formal tone (p.30)
  • Recommendations for winning over hidden buyers, including distinct creative formats, a human tone, and focusing on professional feeds (p.32)

Companion reading: our analysis of the Wistia State of Video Report 2026, which found that 81% of B2B teams rank LinkedIn as their top channel for sharing video and that the main constraint on production is capacity rather than ideas.

About Dark Matter. Dark Matter helps medium and enterprise organisations turn internal expertise into video that builds trust, strengthens positioning and shortens the path to commercial conversations. We believe every organisation already holds enough knowledge to become the obvious choice in its market. The challenge isn’t creating more expertise. It’s making the expertise you already have visible, including to the people you never get to meet.

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