Aside from using it to school advertisers on "relevancy," the timing of his flippant message -- coming as the nation's biggest marketers meet for their annual conference at the Association of National Advertisers conference this week -- might have been better if he came to Orlando in person, hat in hand, with the other one holding a bidet.
If Musk is serious about courting ad budgets, he should act a little more seriously -- especially following months of on-again, off-again moves to buy Twitter, coupled with -- how shall I say this -- less-than-transparent signals about how he plans to clean up its act.
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Twitter was never the most brand-safe environment to be in, and imagine most of its revenue comes not from the kind of big brands he was targeting with his letter, but from the long-tail of smaller businesses that probably are not as sensitive about the environment in which they advertise in -- so long as it converts.
But if you want the world's most relevant brands to be your customer, tell them how you are going to make it a clean, well-lit place for their ads to show up on.
That should be true for any well-intentioned brand, whether it is one of Procter & Gamble's or even Kohler's or American Standard's.
But as long as we're schooling people on advertising, I'd like to offer Musk some advice that might really help him get the attention -- and budgets -- of big brands. The flip-side to relevancy in branding is differentiation.
And at a time when questionable owners are taking control of the underbelly of social media platforms -- you know Parler, Truth Social, etc. -- maybe it's time for Twitter to differentiate itself as an alternative to toxic narcissism.
Hey, it's worth a try. At the very least, you would stand out.
Tune in next week when Mandese tells Elon how to build a better rocket!