• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, August 16, 2024

In November 2022, Elon Musk wrote a letter to the ad industry when he took over Twitter. It was – surprisingly – a good letter, which outlined several promising principles he wanted Twitter to be based as an ad medium.

I responded via my own letter to him here, in which I stated that the lofty goals were much appreciated but the proof was going to be in the pudding. A year later, in November of 2023, I revisited my “Dear Elon” letter on its one-year anniversary.

My conclusion was that, despite the ambitions Elon Musk had outlined for renamed X, formerly Twitter, he had made a mess of things. The word “hellscape,” which he himself had coined, was an apt description.

Brand safety teams were disbanded. Bans for most providers of god-awful, untruthful and vile content were reversed. Musk, himself, actively participated in the distribution of falsehoods and hate speech.

Most marketers had seen enough. Former Twitter and now X were never a “must have” in the media mix to begin with. But in the current context, X had become and continues to be an environment where most brands have absolutely no reason to be present. So, they were not.

Most CMOs and other marketers, as well as most advertising agency planners and buyers, are rational people. If given the choice between placing an ad next to a pile of s**t or a gaggle of joyful playing puppies, they know where to place it. They don’t need GARM, the Interactive Advertising Bureau or Nielsen data to understand that X was not adding much, if anything to the mix. And they perfectly understood that including X could easily trigger controversy, something that most brands do not want.

It is in this same context that we should review the very recent Adalytics report showcasing that advertisers were seen in equally unsuitable environments on Fandom, Tumblr, Metacritic, Dailymotion and other websites that are, like X, a collection of mostly user-generated content. The conclusion was that many DSPs, and the main providers of brand safety tools like IAS and Double Verify, simply did not provide the level of brand safety they were touting.

There is a complex set of reasons why this is the case. In the end, however, it comes down to advertisers NOT being diligent and consistent in their execution of their own rules. Just as much as advertisers can see that the X environment is not suitable for most brands, it should be equally clear that other platforms that allow a large degree of unmoderated user-generated freedoms are most likely unsuitable, too.

The real reason for the “slippage” was that advertisers are often chasing cheap or capped CPMs, and the systems that make nano-second budget decisions look for CPMs that qualify but do not differentiate too much on content. The brand safety-tools have only limited “pull” in these decisions -- a point that was not widely understood or communicated.

I imagine that most affected advertisers mentioned in the Adalytics report are actively seeking solutions for the newly discovered content hellscapes. This will most likely lead to more advertiser bans for some of these platforms. Elon Musk, with his lawsuit, has, in effect, sued the ad industry for being rational adults trying to prevent damage to their brands. I doubt his suit has merit, but I also predict that some of the affected hellscapes might join him in his pursuit.