LinkedIn is now using its Thought Leader ads as a way of making branded content promotion, while at the same time opening it up to all businesses to promote any piece of content that has been created from anybody in the application, regardless of whether it's the employee or not.

Up until now, brands have been able to leverage the power of Thought Leader ads in converting posts from verified employees of their organization to promotions. Now businesses will also be able to promote non-employee posts as well, if they choose.
Here's how LinkedIn explains it:

Almost 73% of decision-makers regard that thought-leadership content is a more trustworthy source to evaluate an organization's capacities and capabilities than marketing material and product sheets. Additionally, the supporters of the brands may be the employees or the customers or industry influencers. The expansion of our Thought Leader Ads format that will allow the brands' voice other than their own employee's voice will open for them a new door to engage with their target audience with the relevant information, which may include a testimonial of a customer, for instance.

You will be able to create your Thought Leadership campaigns through LinkedIn Campaign Manager, now equipped with specific search tools to enhance Thought Leadership promotions.

Once you are logged in, you can search for the person-by name1st or 2nd degree connection-or by post-by URL-for the content that you want to sponsor. The search will yield a list of posts from that member that your business is able to promote.

Thought Leadership ads are only available for brand awareness or engagement campaigns and only for single image or video posts so you can't use straight text updates, polls, or slide show style PDF uploads at this stage.
Once you've selected the post you want to promote, the creator will then get a notification so they can "approve" or "deny" that specific request.

So it's going to allow them to opt out of brand promos, but if the partnership is a good one, and the member doesn't have a problem with a brand making use of their comments, then brands can now take any testimonial, review, comment, any image/video post, and convert it into a promoted post.

Of course, the fact that the post creator is not being paid to have their post featured in a Thought Leader campaign shouldn't be overlooked here. It almost seems as if it will be a potential way for LinkedIn to monetize in the future but so far the creator gets nothing but more app promotions.
 
Users will see that this is promoted content with a transparency tag above the post text.

It's an interesting expansion, which could potentially make it a bigger consideration to use organic content and endorsements to maximize your LinkedIn reach.

Though, as noted, it does seem like there should be revenue-share system in place too. When it was just employee content that could be promoted, is made sense that this wouldn't include compensation for the creator, but now, it seems like there should be an incentive system of some kind in place.

Either way, it's another consideration for your LinkedIn promotions, which could be another way of getting more out of your marketing efforts.