It wasn’t that long ago that Elon Musk was
struggling to survive. Back in 2008, Tesla had him on the verge of bankruptcy. But the car owners loved the cars, even if they didn’t love the missed delivery dates. And SpaceX had a customer
base of one, the U.S. government. Still, it appears the government loved Musk’s rocket ships, their reliability, and their solid engineering.
Here’s the thing, Twitter only
has two customers. It has advertisers, yes of course. But the advertisers have no philosophical alignment with Twitter, any more than they are aligned with NBC or The New York Times or
YouTube. Their needs are measurable, and their budgets have pretty definable objectives. They want to be efficient, meaning to reach audiences at the lowest cost possible, and they don’t want to
be near anything that could align their clients with controversy.
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When I was selling advertising, the phrase was “a clean, well-lit space” -- and, as someone once explained it to
me, “The Donna Reed Show," “only even more squeaky clean." No client ever says to their agency, “Can you put me near content that is controversial, and likely to align us with
divisive and uncomfortable topics?” That happens absolutely NEVER.
A far from complete list of advertisers who “paused” campaigns on Twitter: L'Oreal, General Motors,
Volkswagen, Audi, Pfizer, General Mills, Apple, Best Buy, Coca-Cola, Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, Capital One, CBS, CenturyLink, Comcast, Disney, Google, HBO, IBM, Merck, Meta, PepsiCo, Procter &
Gamble, Unilever and Verizon.
Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, wrote (on Twitter): “If Twitter wants to keep the ad $ flowing then they’re going to need access to even
more data and targeting… Twitter’s investments and prioritization of trusted brands, higher quality media, and commitment to moderation is precisely what made advertisers comfortable
investing their budgets and even more so trusting their brands in an environment built mostly on user-generated content."
And with that, Kint hits the nail on the head: “Ultimately
he’s causing chaos without any clear public message…I cut Musk slack for disruption but not the strategy fail. The problem is no one around him seems to understand media so they’re
engineering a platform directly at odds with the future and twitter’s advertising clients. This is a spiral of death by chasing old models. Bye.”
Musk has been reaching out to
advertisers, trying to build trust with a few Zoom calls. Lou Paskalis, the president of the trade group Mobile Marketing Association,
comprised of over 800 members including Amazon, AT&T, and GM, was on one of the calls. Afterward, Paskalis tweeted: "Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior
advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the
moderation team!"
But it appears t Musk isn’t listening. Instead, he’s embarking on a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign to try and force advertisers back
onto the platform to support “free speech.” Can anyone name a time when that plan has ever worked?
As I tweeted over the weekend: toilets are one of the highest "reach and frequency" places in any building. Yet toilet advertising has never really taken off...
They tried, Maarten. I recall attending a pitch where it was proposed that Campbell's Soup advertise on the inside door position of the men's and ladies' room toilet rooms as this was a ideally "compatible" environment for any food or beverage advertiser---"what goes in goes out". was, I believe, their slogan. They were setting up a serious "network" of buildings in major markets serious, offering all sorts of perks, a great CPM, etc. but we didn't feel that this was a great idea for our client. Frustrated, they tried to "go over our heads" and sell direct to the client---but that didn't go so well either.