Volkswagen says all brands have halted paid activities on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen says all brands have halted paid activities on Twitter

reuters.com

76 pointsmfiguiere68 comments

As an automotive company I would also divert my ad spending from plattforms that are controlled by the ceo of one of my competitors...

I think General Motors is another one very publicly making the same kind of announcement. It does seem like a competitive decision motivated by the car business.

But that’s not the reason why, chaos is, though I imagine it didn’t give them pause. We all can speculate about what comes next. My guess is Elon saying he “inherited a mess” much more “broken” than he could have imagined. I also notice bots aren’t much part of the conversation any longer.

He certainly doesn't want to sue himself for fraud...

Like Walmart not running their services on AWS.

Volkswagen was very close to Musk in the past.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

Musk and Diess were close, but as far as I know there was never any cooperation between the companies.

I can think of multiple distinct reasons not to run any ads on Twitter right now. Which is frankly making me really sad, as I liked Twitter, and had some respect for Elon:

- The CEO also owns/leads a primary competitors (as you said).

- The political turmoil attracts a lot of bad-for-brand content on the platform.

- Having ads on Twitter makes it seem like you support what Elon's doing.

- Elon firing 85% of the staff means the platform's behavior, security and results are unreliable and can't be trusted.

- Looming bankruptcy of Twitter (announced by the CEO himself).

What respect did you have for musk?

He's rich

Pushing at businesses everyone said are a stupid idea and will fail. People forget what the status quo was. Oh, I know he didn't found Tesla, and I know he didn't personally build the rockets in Space X. But such initiatives still need champions.

I think asking people why people have respect for "X" is acting like it's not okay to have an opinion? There are tons of people that like(d) Elon Musk for various reasons. It's just an opinion, not something that has to be validated to a random internet person.

Bold of you to attack the act of asking "why" on a site dedicated to gratifying intellectual curiosity.

twitter was my favorite next to reddit. Now it's dying and that sucks. The controlled chaos is what made it strong, kind of like reddit. Now that Musk is trying to put it into a straight jacket of his ego, brings in the worst of the worst banned twitter accounts, it's doomed, or will become so diminished it doesn't matter any more like digg.

Woah, digg still exists?

Oh, it's garbage now. Neat.

Advertisers working together like this can have a massive impact on a company... Remember when advertiser's did this to YouTube, and immediately YouTube management folded and started demonetizing anything advertisers had any objections to like LGBT content?

Can anyone why ELI5 please? The discussion on Twitter isn’t very … analytical.

Twitter's Advertisement teams have been decimated, possibly to the point of non-existence. I've seen online advertisers complaining that their emails / issues are not getting any responses in the past two weeks, despite concerns about advertisements + brands being shown next to pornographic material (which is the fastest growing section of Twitter this year, even before Musk).

While porn has been on the rise on Twitter, the uptick of branding next to pornography is a recent issue. I'm guessing that a lot of those services Mr. Musk turned off in the past two weeks were related to brand-protection that these advertisers cared about.

Its no secret that lots of social media sites have pornography sections. But what brands want is assurances that their advertisements are isolated away from those corners, especially for brands like Kellogg's, Mars, and other brands that want to build a strong brand with children.

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I'm not sure what Volkswagen is worried about: it could be that Volkswagen just doesn't want to give money to Twitter when its obviously going to just be funneled to Elon Musk / TSLA eventually.

Still, the loss of Volkswagen is yet another papercut in this slew of advertisers that have left Twitter.

Thanks, that helps.

Also worth nothing that about 4/5 of the content moderation team were laid off, so anything that involves a human in the loop will be compromised (more ML processes than you might think have a manual review phase).

Furthermore, Brand Safety is a standard requirement for ALL serious advertisers. They have lists of topics and keywords to avoid, and if you can’t ensure that (or at least send a rep to apologize and fix it when the prevention mechanism is imperfect), they won’t run with you.

This isn’t new or complicated. The only person who doesn’t seem to understand it is Musk.

Musk hasn't needed to understand that, ever. Every one of the companies he doesn't do actual work for he could just spare a small loan of a billion emerald dollars and be fine. He could do the same with twitter but i think he wants it to fail because he never intended on actually going through with the purchase and just wanted to pump and dump the stock.

Yes, also anyone spending money with a company and can afford not to, expects to be treated like a king. They expect a real person to pick up the phone and kiss their ass.

The pornographic content became noticeable for me at some point in the summer. It was strange, almost all in Spanish and with no clear connection to the 4ish subjects I followed on twitter with that account. That account ran its course otherwise I'd go back on and check if that is still happening.

In general I wonder what levers get connected to ad targeting. Several years ago I started to get substantial personalized ads in Spanish somewhere else (maybe youtube?) after a year it went back to English. I also had an account that had a 50-50 mix of German and English for a while.

1) Why enrich the CEO of a competitor car company?

2) Why do business with a company whose CEO makes public posts like a 9-year-old edgelord?

3) Why even bother? Twitter can't have been more than 1% of VW's ad budget.

It’s a toxic (racist/sexist) place now I assume.

I can assure you, it's exactly like it was before, the rules of engagement weren't changed. The only thing I notice is that there is more activity now.

Amoungst other things, Twitter is now far less willing to deal with hate speech. Brands hardly want to be seen near that type of content.

Musk’s companies are famous for spending $0 on traditional marketing and PR. It’s not surprising he doesn’t understand how to keep marketers happy now that they’re his customers.

Well at least that was true until recently

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-buys-ad-campaign-t...

If corporations have a duty to bring profit to shareholders, I hope all these companies have done proper analysis/testing to determine if showing their ads next to porn is unprofitable. Just saying...

Market distortions tend to fix themselves over time. Either Twitter's ad rates drop so supply and demand get back into balance, or someone will gladly take the eyeballs VW was getting at the current rate.

People are considering this possibility and investing accordingly. One guy has tracked the performance of some of these companies openly proclaiming their anti-Twitter position and claims that they've been underperforming the stock market. This means there's a chance to short them.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/anti-twitter-advertisers-h...

The guy telling you how to invest to hurt companies that "hate free speech" doesn't really seem like a reliable source of market tips.

Still thinking about this. This bit really struck me:

> ...those companies have reportedly pulled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising from the social media platform (despite Musk's insistence that "Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.")

I wanna say, but you know that's a lie. You love Musk because it's a lie. The whole reason you cheer for him is that he promised to stop banning the people you like. Who are you trying to convince by claiming Twitter's moderation policy is unchanged? The left isn't fooled and the right doesn't care.

The different companies buying ads are not interchangeable. Brands, who typically have the biggest budgets, all care about brand management (where their brand is shown, what it's shown next to, before and after), which can't be done effectively now that the staff that handles these things has been gutted. There's no way to get those advertisers back without rebuilding that part of the business and there's no other type of advertiser that can step in to fill the size of that gap.

If anything, the reduced quality of the performance marketers who move in to buy ads for scammy weight loss, skin care, get rich quick offers are going to drive away any big brand advertisers who are actually trying to stay on Twitter and weather the storm.

As a user I welcome the removal of brand advertising. Smaller companies offering products can introduce you to products you might never have seen. Seeing Volkswagen spend 50,000 on an ad telling me how edgy they are creates a toxic fake plastic world that I hope they keep to themselves.

Same here. Looking at a list of companies who have paused advertising on Twitter; I have zero interest in many of them. Like the California Lottery or DirecTV.

While I dislike advertising in general, if I have to see ads I hope it's an opportunity for smaller businesses to promote actually useful products for me.

You won't get "small business ads" anyway, just rock bottom scam and click bait ads.

I’ve actually noticed a lot more sponsored posts that are nearly indistinguishable from a quote tweet. They don’t appear to be scams, more like somebody threw a couple bucks at Twitter to boost their opinion or something.

Clicking through to the thread usually has the same person taking up the first reply with a request to follow them but other than that I’m not seeing any real marketing activity.

This so much. Can't wait for scamming and malware infested ads on twitter. Just another nail for the coffin.

soon it'll just be my pillow and other weird scam stuff

Or your local hardware store. The one walmart doesn't want you to know about it so they push brand ads that play a catchy song. Let's bring back smaller companies and smaller products. Do you really need to learn how Volkswagen is changing the world (while trying to make you forget when they faked those environmental standards a few years back)?

Local hardware stores died out years ago. They can't compete with the supply chains of the big box stores and online stores.

I’m not sure where you are but they are all over the Bay Area.

I wish I was naive as you and I am sincerely hoping this will happen.

i can assure you, if my local hardware store has ads on racist/fascist content, they’re not only not getting my business, i will be sure to use the power of word-of-mouth, and anyone who knows anything about retail knows that word-of-mouth is far more powerful than any ad, ever.

disclaimer to add: my local hardware store owner would be horrified if their ads were on racist content—he’s a pretty rad person, which is why he gets so much business.

Sure, obviously twitter will be full of corner store and gardening ads. That's everywhere without big brand ads, not scams and crypto right?

Twitter is a very weak advertising channel. It's not going to move the needle in the broader advertising market.

Twitter was never a good advertising stream (besides product placement) so this is a win win for companies.

It was a 5 billion business.

Calling a drop in price a market distortion is fairly loaded language.

This is the market, demand rises and falls. Currently the demand is falling and prices will have to drop to match. That’s not a distortion, it’s normal market behavior.

It’s fascinating that Volkswagen is presenting itself as a paragon of virtue, having spent years actively deceiving regulators over its cars’ emissions.

Can you elaborate? I'm not seeing VW present itself as a paragon of virtue, just not advertising on a platform which no longer has teams capable of managing advertising (e.g. ensuring that you're not showing your advertising next to pornography or white nationalism).

No one is playing the virtue card here, it's just practical business.

In the past, VW celebrated the diesel engines in their cars because of the higher mileage. The emissions, though, weren't so great and they were caught deceiving the regulators who try to stop air pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

I think these events are pretty separate and independent.

Looks like the regulators failed. Where are the clean diesels now? Gone because the NOx limits created by the aforementioned regulators set the bar too high.

Instead we’re now only making ICEs that are gasoline-powered for passenger vehicles. Burning 1.5-2x the carbon for the same distance as clean diesel. IMO VW and the others who have since quietly withdrawn their clean diesels from the market hoped regulators would pull their heads out of their asses and get real on NOx limits. Cars like the TDI line were about 1/16th the NOx emission of a standard diesel-powered box truck.

I agree with you, but lying is not the solution.

There is a very entertaining group of people that ostensibly view any business decision made around any business that is associated with Elon Musk to be wholly due to liking or disliking him personally. They also tend to be voluminous posters.

Which is also funny because I'm the past Volkswagen made a point to associate with Musk more closely.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

None of the advertisers reducing or eliminating their Twitter spend are paragons of virtue (or have presented themselves as such). You'll see more and more companies allocating their advertising budget elsewhere until Musk can prove to agencies that he's capable of ensuring rudimentary brand safety.

I don't think this is virtue signaling - it's just walking away from a business partner that is in a period of extreme chaos.

It's both and a bit of free brand advertising. I fear I won't be able to tell my kids how Volkswagen is changing the world without these brand ads

I’ll take some virtue over none.

Why would VW pay for ads in a company owned by Musk? It makes no sense at all.

But... I guess there will be a lot of companies in the renewable energies industry that will be very interested into be represented in twitter from now on.

This is a win for Twitter. Why allow yourself to be a hostage to advertisers?

90%+ of their revenue comes from ads, how could they not care about advertisers?

You should care, but not become a hostage to them.

Advertisers will need Twitter much more than Twitter will need them, soon.

If I have to ban 5% of shitty accounts to reduce as much hate speech as possible and have some infrastructure to keep out trollbots whilst becoming rich I would have no problem with that. Twitter is a platform, not a government. No one has any right to speech on there other than that which the platform chooses to allow. Musk seems to value racist and bigoted speech on his platform. No one is going to pay for that and no one is going to advertise on it.

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