“X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next.”
Xodus
Advertisers, and the precious revenue they bring, have been fleeing X-formerly-Twitter ever since Elon Musk took it over in October 2022, bringing with him a groundswell of hate speech, misinformation, and racist rhetoric — a lot of which has come from his own account.
Now the site’s marketing prognosis, already dire, is about to get worse. New research from the data firm Kantar indicates that a record 26 percent of advertisers plan to cut spending on Twitter next year, which could be a death sentence for a site whose revenues were already in freefall.
As CNN reports, this would be the biggest withdrawal from a major ad platform on record.
“Marketers are brand custodians and need to trust the platforms they use,” Gonca Bubani, a director of global thought leadership at Kantar, said in a statement, as quoted by The Guardian.
“X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next,” she added. “It is difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment.”
Turn Tables
The metrics add to the climate of uncertainty surrounding Twitter’s future, which is probably what’s driving advertisers away more than anything: they want stability, not volatility.
According to the report, which was compiled by interviewing 1,000 senior marketers and 18,000 consumers across the globe, just four percent of marketers think Twitter ads provide brand safety, whereas Google enjoys considerably more trust at 39 percent.
The general attitude towards the platform has also soured. In 2022, 15 percent of marketers were favorable towards Twitter ads. It has since undergone a complete reversal: now 21 percent of marketers are unfavorable.
“Advertisers have been moving their marketing spend away from X for several years,” Bubani said, per The Guardian. “The stark acceleration of this trend in the past 12 months means a turnaround seems unlikely.”
Conversely, consumer ad preference has actually gone up, since they’re happier to see fewer ads. The user base is dwindling, though, and we suspect that this boost would be offset by the sheer number of bots plaguing the platform.
Musk Meddling
Musk’s personal interventions into the situation have done little to stop the bleeding.
If anything, he poked the bear by telling advertisers “Go fuck yourself,” during an onstage tirade in November 2023 — which is now looking like a legendary blunder, because those advertising dollars have dried up, bringing an astonishing 53 percent drop in revenue in the second quarter from the same period last year.
A humbled Musk tried to walk back his comments this June, begging the advertisers to come back. Then he changed his tune again the next month, suing them for not buying ads on his platform, and declaring “war” for good measure. All-in-all, not the kind of leadership that inspires faith in the site being a stable place at which to throw ad money.
A Twitter spokesperson said that “advertisers know that X now offers stronger brand safety, performance and analytics capabilities than ever before, while seeing all-time-high levels of usage,” per The Guardian. “Our brand safety rate is on average 99 percent as validated by DoubleVerify and Integral Ads Science, which is reflected by the fact that the majority of advertisers are increasing their investment in X, as shown by Kantar’s data.”
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