Senior advertising executives have said they cannot imagine that after Elon Musk’s takeover and the resulting deterioration in brand safety, “brands will ever go back to X, the former Twitter.”
Musk took over Twitter in October 2022 and since then there have been a number of events that have led to a decline in trust in the platform’s content moderation.
Major brands such as Disney, Apple and Comcast left the platform in November 2023 after a The report showed that major brands appeared alongside pro-Nazi posts.
X also filed a lawsuit Earlier this month, the World Federation of Advertisers, Uniliver, Mars and others were sued, alleging that they conspired to withhold “billions of dollars” in advertising spending because they feared that X would “deviate from certain brand safety standards for advertising.”
After the lawsuit was filed, an agency executive shared that “almost none” of his clients work with X from a paid or organic perspective.
They said: “From the agency’s perspective, we recommend that there is little benefit to them being on the channel at the moment.”
The spokesperson added that the platform was full of “cheap inventory” that campaign that was reported on last year. (Campaign is PRWeek’s sister media company at Haymarket Media.)
At the time, media buyers said advertisers still using the platform benefited from cheaper CPMs and the platform’s “astronomical” reach.
Trust had also partially returned after X CEO Linda Yaccarino introduced neighborhood checks and brand safety partners DoubleVerify and IAS to the platform.
In September 2023, it said 90% of its top advertisers had returned in the previous 12 weeks.
But this news was quickly followed by a report from Media Matters for America that showed major brands alongside pro-Nazi posts.
Speaking to Campaign, another agency executive added that “most clients” had suspended their investments after Musk disbanded the Trust and Safety team nearly two years ago.
They said: “Nothing we have seen since then would change clients’ minds – quite the opposite. It is now difficult to imagine any of our clients including X in their media plan.”
“The issue of brand safety is now at the forefront: as the platform degenerates into what can now only be described as an internet cesspool on a daily basis, we cannot imagine the brands returning unless something fundamental changes at X.”
Another media buyer said that “more and more” clients are withdrawing ads from the platform, but that reach in sports is still “really good”.
They added that their agency would “never” recommend people not to be on X, but they do make brands aware of the risk.
When asked if it was the agencies or the clients pushing to abandon X, they replied it was “both,” but “(brands) are often nervous.”
Campaign also spoke to Brenda Imeson, Director of Strategy at Brave Bison. She said: “The context in which an ad appears is just as important as the message itself. The prospect of their ads appearing alongside toxic or harmful content is a risk most marketers are unwilling to take.”
In addition, following X’s lawsuit, the WFA’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media dissolved a few days later. WFA Managing Director Stephan Loerke wrote in an email to members: GARM was a non-profit organization with “limited resources.”
Imeson said that with this closure, “advertisers are once again faced with uncertainty about the security of their ad placements.”
This means, she said, that advertisers will stick with media partners and platforms they have built trust with over the years.
Imeson added: “The marketing community does not view this change as a ‘boycott,’ as X might perceive it, but rather as an exercise of ‘freedom of choice.'”
This story first appeared on Campaign UK.
