Twitter's top advertisers have pulled out of the platform
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
> A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000
This group of activists have a lot of power to enforce their agenda wrapped in a cloak of "safety standards", which is defined however they want. They pressure companies to fall in line.
> Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, said the meeting with Musk “seemed productive” but she is not “encouraged enough” to pull back on the campaign that civil rights groups launched asking advertisers to suspend their ads on Twitter if Musk doesn’t commit to enforcing safety standards.
> “I think we need to keep the pressure on and make sure that his actions meet his words,” González told The Hill.
> Musk met with the groups after Free Press and Media Matters led nearly 50 civil society groups in a letter Tuesday calling for Twitter’s top 20 advertisers to pull their ads if he didn’t enforce safety standards. Advertising giant IPG later reportedly issued a recommendation to its clients, which include Johnson and Johnson, Coca Cola and American Express, to pause paid advertising on Twitter.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3717711-civil-rights-g...
Elon was initially playing ball with them, as most companies do because they are afraid of the consequences. He announced the council, they weren't satisfied, and he said screw it, I'll deal with the consequences.
If Elon and his fans can't see why advertisers would be concerned about his actions Twitter really is toast as a sustainable business.
If someone were a fan of Elon Musk maybe they would feel upset that advertisers are being persuaded to not place their products next to poorly curated content. If so, I would tell them that there are many conservative organizations who are working to persuade advertisers to take the opposite position along with a small army of dedicated social media trolls who work tirelessly and without pay to spread the good news of "real free speech" under the watchful eye of Mr. Musk. So take solace in that.
Some activists have certainly asked advertisers to pause. They've done so before, and will do so again. If the ad product is great, the advertisers will largely ignore them.
The reality is Twitter has never been a good ad platform (recently: $5B-ish from ads, vs Google's $210B or Facebooks > $100B, numbers off the top of my head but reasonably accurate), they've never commanded premium rates, etc. Brands are very sensitive to not appearing next to the hateful content that Musk is not just allowing but high fiving (eg open anti-semitism from Kanye, etc). Ads, for everything but the best platforms (Google and FB) are also a relationship business. Musk has shown he's very unreliable, fired the people with the relationships, driven out the people running Trust and Safety, and generally been a terrible partner. Twitter's ads platform has also been buggy and is even buggier now (see recent reports of paused/stopped campaign reactivation, many multiple years old.)
Additionally, Twitter's business has been swimming against long-term trends in the ads marketplace related to privacy and data movement.
Twitter isn't much more than commodity pageviews that can easily be sourced elsewhere, from more reliable partners with way less brand safety risk. Musk has also made Twitter an unreliable partner and doing business with them very difficult -- see repeated reports of agencies / brands unable to even contact their CSMs. And without an idiot allowing rampant impersonalization of brands (Nintendo verified account w/ Mario flipping the bird, Eli Lilly verified account saying Insulin is free, etc etc) with no apparent plan to stop that.
Doing business with Twitter now means constantly being ready to react to whatever dumb stuff Musk decides to do despite multiple people (that he has a habit of firing) warning him about. I would probably prepared to suck it up and deal if it were Google or FB, but not for Twitter.
Some activists who attended the meeting tweeted to confirm that they never made such a deal with Musk, including Free Press co-CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who helped drive a #StopToxicTwitter coalition pressuring Twitter's top 20 advertisers to boycott the platform.
“Not sure who Musk is talking about here, but I met with him a few weeks ago with civil rights leaders, and I also co-lead the #StopToxicTwitter coalition that is calling on advertisers to pause ads until he rights the ship,” Gonzalez tweeted. “I never made any such deal.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson backed Gonzalez in his own tweet denying activists made a deal with Musk.
“We would never make such a deal,” Johnson tweeted. “Democracy always comes first. The decisions being made at Twitter are dangerous, and it is our duty, as it has been since our founding, to speak out against threats to our democracy. Hate speech and violent conspiracies can have no safe harbor.”
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-breaks-prom...
Just musk being musk
I take that you are referring to the content moderation council (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792). I don't think he formed it though. And note that he never meant it anyways as he has been reinstating banned accounts without any council in place. In case of Trump's reinstatement, he even did an online Twitter poll.
1. He met with them.
2. He agreed to set up a council.
3. He announced the council.
4. They kept pressuring advertisers.
5. He felt that broke the agreement, so he called off the council and moved forward with unbanning users.
All of this is confirmed by both sides except for #5. There's disagreement about whether there was any kind of "deal". But clearly Elon was under the perhaps false impression it was an agreement of some sort otherwise he would not have agreed to the council idea. The point was to stop pressuring advertisers.
Everyone else came out and said that those promises were never made in the first place and quite frankly why would they just take his word on it given he has developed a long reputation as a liar.
As with the Russian claims about a deal for NATO to permanently not expand in Eastern Europe, this is easy to show is unlikely to be true:
(1) In either case, these are things that would be recognized of utmost significance by all sides.
(2) In either case, the allegedly aggrieved parties (or their relevant predecessors in interests) were sophisticated actors, long used to working in an environment where durable binding agreements, particularly ones of great significance, were memorialized in writing affirmed by all parties, with copies retained by all parties, to assure that the terms are clear, fixed, and that evidence can be produced of them in the event of any public or private dispute.
(3) In neither case can the allegedly aggrieved party produce the writing memorializing the agreement, or any explanation as to why they (or their predecessor in interest) would not, as a condition for what they were giving up in the agreement, insist upon the common step of memorializing the agreement in writing,
(4) Therefore, it is highly improbable that the narrative of the aggrieved party is accurate.
"After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia."
But you’d have to be incredibly dishonest to present something that explicitly describes the former as showing the latter.
Especially when the article you cite also says that the Soviets chose not to seek a binding commitment largely because they could not imagine a situation coming into existence where it would matter, given the then-current continued existence of the Warsaw Pact, and that the Western powers were disclaiming immediate intentions but in their own discussions had deferred anything longer term. So, in short, its clear that the USSR didn’t imagine the need for a long term commitment and didn’t seek one, and that the West would not have been prepared to offer one, and so no agreement incorporating such a commitment was discussed or made, verbally or otherwise.
I don't think you have enough expertise on digital ads these days. Allocation and execution of advertising budget is a highly data driven process. Those activists cannot really make any dents if a platform can deliver consistent, predictable and high performances. But nowadays no one thinks the word "predictable" accurately describes the status quo of Twitter so many advertisers pulled their budget to avoid hassles.
Still the platform is supposed to be performing well thanks to how digital auction works. Big budgets are gone, less competitions on the auction so you're supposed to get more slots at lower costs, right? In this case, the loss should be minimal and advertisers will quickly return. But the problem is that its advertising platform is not working smoothly as before. Its ads frequency has increased significantly (1 per 5 tweets recently), which is a usual playbook for advertising networks when it needs to quickly cover significant performance loss. And Twitter was known to be one of the weakest advertising networks and it's even demonstrating a weaker performance.
Okay, it might not be that problem if Elon is willing to fix all the issues. And Elon is known to be a prominent hater of digital ads and has explicitly expressed that he wants to move the major revenue stream to other products (like Twitter Blue), so it's fairly natural to conclude that its investments on advertising will deteriorate even in the longer term. I don't see any reasons for advertisers to remain on platform. Stop blaming those "activists" or whatever you (and Elon) don't like. This is a conscious decision made by Elon, he just didn't know the consequence.
They considered it worth the spend prior to activist pressure.
If Twitter's ad performance was best in class, they would be less likely to fold.
We seem to be in agreement about how this works?
I promise you it has nothing to do with “activist groups” and everything to do with erratic and unpredictable management that is scaring them away.
Or.. something.
Or maybe it's just, you know, shocking incompetence and being surprised at the consequences of being a tool.
We have a set of independent private companies making decisions in the interest of their brand and performance.
The "coalitions" they're in are several large ad agencies many of them participate in, but it's the job of those ad agencies to know where it's safe to run ads and where it's not. They're not political, not social, and not activists. They're advertising professionals.
I guess nobody has told him that pressuring advertisers is also a form of free speech.
Musk is doing everything he can to drive away big corporations who enjoy reliability. He's summarily fired >66% of the workforce. He's implemented seemingly random policy changes, none of which have worked, many of which resulted in immediate obvious damage to the brand image of said advertisers. None of the things he has promised to do which advertisers might like have happened, and on several, he's reneged without explaining why.
What large corporation trying to remain politically neutral-ish* while appeasing a wide base of customers wants any part of this?
* Politically neutral-ish in my view means "so anodyne and vague in our behavior that moderate people of the left and right both think we're with them, and extremists from either side can be ignored."
50 of Twitter's top 100 advertisers have pulled out of the platform since Elon Musk took over, report says
Half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers have stopped promoting on the platform, per Media Matters.
Since 2020, those 50 companies have spent $2 billion on Twitter advertising.
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So that's ~$300M drop in annual spend.
It's interesting that you think we're supposed to take a side at all.
Other firms, certainly must question the value and efficacy of their advertising budget, a real threat to the advertisement industry, not "brand safety."
I'd bet if Tesla did advertise; advertisement agencies wouldn't recommend their other clients pull their money from Twitter so hastily.
This is a case of biting the hand that doesn't feed them.
I don't really care about Musk or Twitter, but I'm hoping this whole debacle will result in less reliance on advertising for services like these. It's already resulted in more interest in the fediverse.
I couldn’t even begin to describe the power imbalance here. Twitter need them much more than they need Twitter. It’s not even close.
Like, what advertisements on Social Media actually get things done? Google Adsense, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, Apple Play store, Google Play store. Etc. etc.
Yeah, a lot of repeats (Google, Youtube, Google Play. Amazon/Twitch, etc. etc.), but the big advertisers have multiple locations that really draw a lot of eyeballs. Twitch is _TINY_ compared to everyone else.
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Advertisers are also super worried about the (possible) upcoming recession and are cutting advertising dollars significantly. There was a chance Twitter was always somewhat doomed, but actively pissing off the Advertiser base and accelerating the Advertiser exodus certainly doesn't help.
Twitter has gone from "Small advertiser" into "actively hostile advertiser". Twitter was always going to lose a chunk of ad revenue in this economic time, but now they're skyrocketing to the top of the list of ad-partners to cut.
I guess Twitter doesn't need these specific advertisers, but there isn't much out there to replace them. The companies leaving have huge marketing budgets, and I'm not even sure if it's possible to build a list of new companies with a combined marketing spend equal to them willing to do business with Twitter. Heck, just making a list of companies with an equal combined marketing spend is tricky.
> ... more than they need Twitter
Certainly Twitter needs them more. Those brands advertise with the current world cup, on TV, Meta, all over the place. They have a lot of advertising dollars and a lot of places to sink them.
Like, Summer of 2024, Twitter usage will be driven by the Olympics. Coca-Cola will have a bigger presence at the Olympics than Twitter will.
> The ones that remain that couldn't quite make the list will become their new "top advertisers" and reap the benefits.
Yes. It is good for the people still advertising on Twitter. They will give Twitter no more money yet become a bigger % of Twitters ad revenue and can probably demand more ad views. This is not good for Twitter itself.
> I doubt they are in any danger of running out of companies that want to advertise on their service.
Maybe they aren't. But companies aren't equal. How many small companies that make stuff you would see on shark tank would it take to equal the advertising spend of Coca-Cola?
It is also worth noting that the cost of customer acquisition for all of these smaller accounts is larger; it takes more effort for Twitter to scoop up buckets of pennies than it does to pick up hundred dollar bills.
Unless you think Twitter is advertising its advertising to small companies.
I guess it's up for each of us individually to make a judgement about which side is right.
> Media Matters was founded in 2004 by journalist and activist David Brock to "systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation...every day, in real time.
Or for an example of people may dislike media matters: https://www.dailywire.com/news/media-matters-defends-wapo-sm...