Senior adland executives have said they can’t see “brands ever returning” to X, formerly known as Twitter, following Elon Musk’s takeover and a decline in brand safety.
Musk took over Twitter in October 2022 and since then, there has been a litany of events leading to declining trust in the platform’s content moderation.
Key brands such as Disney, Apple and Comcast left the platform in November 2023 after a report showed major brands appearing next to pro-Nazi posts.
X also filed a lawsuit earlier this month against the World Federation of Advertisers, Uniliever, Mars and others. The lawsuit alleged that they conspired to withhold “billions of dollars” in adspend over concerns that X would “deviate from certain brand safety standards for advertising”.
Following the lawsuit being filed, one agency leader shared that “almost none” of its clients is working with X from a paid or organic point of view.
They said: “From an agency perspective we’re recommending that there is little benefit to them being on the channel at the moment.”
The spokesperson added that the platform is full of “cheap inventory”, which Campaign reported on last year.
At the time, media buyers said that advertisers still working with the platform had benefitted from cheaper CPMs and the “astronomical” reach of the platform.
Trust had also somewhat returned after X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, introduced adjacency controls and brand safety partners DoubleVerify and IAS to the platform.
In September 2023, she said that 90% of its top advertisers had returned in the previous 12 weeks.
But this news was followed swiftly by Media Matters for America’s report which showed major brands next to pro-Nazi posts.
Speaking to Campaign, another agency leader added that “most clients” had paused investment after Musk dismantled the Trust and Safety team almost two years ago.
They said: “Nothing we’ve seen since then would change clients’ minds – in fact the opposite. It’s now difficult to imagine any of our clients putting X on the media plan.”
“The brand safety question is now front and centre: with the platform declining daily into what can only now be described as the cesspit of the internet, we can’t see brands ever returning unless something fundamental changes at X.”
Another media buyer said that “more and more” clients are pulling ads from the platform, but its reach still remains “really good” for sports.
They added that their agency would “never” recommend people to not be on X, but they make the risk clear to brands.
On whether it is the agencies or clients pushing to leave X, they said it was “both”, but “a lot of the time, [brands] are nervous”.
Campaign also spoke to Brenda Imeson, strategy director at Brave Bison. She said: “The context in which an ad appears is as important as the message itself. The prospect of their ads appearing next to toxic or harmful content is a risk that most marketers are unwilling to take.”
In addition, following X’s lawsuit, the WFA’S Global Alliance for Responsible Media dissolved days later, with WFA chief executive Stephan Loerke wriging in an email to members that GARM was a not-for-profit organisation with “limited resources”.
Imeson said that with this shutdown, “advertisers are once again facing uncertainty regarding the safety of their ad placements”.
This, she said, means advertisers will stick with media partners and platforms where they have built trust over a number of years.
Imeson added: “The marketing community views this shift not as a ‘boycott’, as X might perceive it, but rather as the exercise of ‘freedom of choice.”
This article originally appeared on Campaign US.
