I can reason for Kanye being dropped by the brands after saying unhinged things, as they directly engage with him but in the context of web advertisement what is the mechanics of unrelated content damaging the brand?
Brand teams at big companies, especially those in regulated industries, are incredibly risk averse. With Twitter typically being a small minority in a marketing mix, there’s a quickly diminishing benefit to sticking it out.
Add in a buggy ad platform that can steal your money? Lol nope.
The content is similar to right-wing Twitter, someone says how the Woke are letting Indians replacing the whites of America and the others reply to these with counter claims. Typical alt-right BS is everywhere and this is just one example from a recent popular topic.
The website is pretty much what Musk promised for free-speech: Anything legal goes. Of course a lot of anti-govt stuff is removed all the time because, Turkey. But stuff like this stays and all kind of brands have no problem advertising here. The website is alive and well since 1999 and the founder is very well known person who moved to California for good(probably was afraid from the Turkish govt, they were arresting media bosses all the time).
My point is, that brand safety stuff might not be absolute. I get your reasoning but that reasoning doesn't seem to apply everywhere and I wonder why Twitter wouldn't get an exception too.
What you're missing is that Twitter is not a top-tier advertising channel.
They are a very distant 3rd behind Facebook and Google and getting worse by the day. So it's not like advertisers are desperate to run ads on Twitter. In fact it has been the opposite. Twitter had to go out of their way to convince advertisers to come e.g. brand safety teams, account managers etc.
And now that those teams are gone the status quo is actually for advertisers to not run ads.
This isn't the case, not really. No one believes that Henry Ford has personally reviewed and approved every social media post that has an ad for Ford trucks next to it. That's just not how online advertisements work. (Consider that Gmail shows ads in your inbox, and that doesn't mean Ford is reading your mail.)
But activists and old-media and the like have managed to convince a lot of advertisers that it is the case. This happened relatively recently; the YouTube "ad-pocalypse" is less than ten years old. It'll be interesting to see how this perception changes in the future.
Because he died in 1947?
Advertisers are the ones with the power here. It is their money and there is a wide array of choices for them to spend that money. And they have made clear over many years that brand safety is important to them.
So if Twitter doesn't want to listen to them then they will suffer not the advertisers.
If it helps, the situation is similar to Donald Trump's presidency. The man had power, but he frequently made poor decisions based on his incorrect beliefs.
This seems like a serious concern.
Twitter advertisers never had control over the tweets that an ad appears between. That's pretty random. But the replies to promoted tweets are different matter, and they stick to the ad wherever it's seen.
It reflects their world view which is all that matters when they hold all the cards.
And not sure where you are getting the idea brand safety is a recent concept. According to this [1] aligning content and brand has been an issue for over 70 years.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/05/19/...
Not sure if Henry Ford who was spreading antisemitic hoaxes is good example here.
(Incidentally, I just went to twitter to try to confirm my impression that they're always/nearly always interactive... It's no longer serving me ads. A couple of days ago it was at least showing me ads for online gambling and GPT-3-looking spam articles...)