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- Elon Musk has torched his advertising business since he bought Twitter in 2022.
- Now he would like some if it back, he tells advertisers.
- But the biggest problem advertisers have with Twitter is the guy who owns it. Hard to solve that one.
Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in the fall of 2022, he appeared to go out of his way to scare away advertisers from his platform, which used to generate nearly $5 billion a year from ad sales.
His anti-revenue campaign reached its peak/nadir last fall, when he literally told advertisers to "go fuck yourself."
Musk's anti-sales pitch worked quite well: In the first half of 2023, Twitter's revenue plummeted by 40%.
Now Musk would like advertisers to know that, actually, he would like their money. Kind of.
Musk showed up at the ad industry's main gathering spot at Cannes, France this week — an event he skipped last year — where he walked the town's main drag with one of his kids; met with some ad buyers in private; and in public, sat down for an interview with Mark Read, the CEO of ad giant WPP.
And that's where Musk explained that when he told advertisers to go fuck themselves last year, he didn't mean all advertisers. Just the ones that weren't advertising on his platform.
"It was with respect to freedom of speech," he told Read. He said that while advertisers were certainly in their rights not to run their messages next to content they found objectionable, he wasn't going to take that content down.
"What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform," he said.
But that message, which Musk and his lieutenants have been making for some time, misunderstands — maybe intentionally? — the problem advertisers have with Twitter, which he has renamed X.
Yes, some advertisers are quite concerned about the kind of people and content that have shown up on Twitter since Musk bought it. But advertisers spend money on all kinds of platforms that have content some people find objectionable. See YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, for starters.
The real problem advertisers have with Twitter is Musk himself, and the chaos he creates with his own actions and tweets.
Oliver Darcy at CNN has a brief catalog of some of Musk's most recent hits:
In just the last month, Musk has blasted the Associated Press as a supposed "far left propaganda machine," claimed "the left has become an extinctionist movement," advanced a version of the Great Replacement Theory by arguing that President Joe Biden's administration is engaged in "voter importation" from Mexico, assailed The Washington Post as a "far left propaganda publication," promoted the notion that the Democratic Party is engaged in "lawfare" against Republicans, contended that the conviction of Donald Trump was "abuse of the law for political purposes," and endorsed the notion that diversity and equity programs are making science dangerous, among other things.
Musk is perfectly free to express those positions, of course. And some of those arguments might find a lot of support in different corners of the country.
But, again, advertisers don't necessarily care about the specifics of Musk's content — they want clean, well-lit places. They don't want to deal with a mess — the kind Musk creates with his posts, and with his actions, like telling his clients to go fuck themselves.
And, most importantly, they don't have to. Twitter/X remains a subscale advertising platform, with reach and revenue that's a fraction of competitors like Google, Facebook and TikTok. That's why under Twitter's previous ownership, Twitter sales reps pitched the idea that advertisers could use it to reach an elite group of influential users.
Musk is now making that argument himself, and there's still some truth to it. While lots of high-profile users bailed on Twitter after he bought it, plenty are still there. Barack Obama, for instance, is using the platform to promote Joe Biden's immigration policies and call for social media regulations. Media chatterers, including me, still chatter there.
Meanwhile, the exodus of big brand advertisers has pushed Twitter ad rates way, way down. Which means they're now a worthwhile investment for some performance marketers — people who want you to click on a link and make a purchase. This explains why I constantly see ads for both Cheech and Chong's weed gummies and Puck, the newsletter pitched at Very Important People and People Who Like Them, whenever I open the app.
But for lots of advertisers, there's really no upside to gambling on Twitter. There just aren't enough people to make a difference, and there's a good chance that on any given day, the guy who owns the place is going to say something that some of your customers find odious. Why bother?
Twitter "has been destroyed," an ad executive told me this week, following Musk's presentation.
Maybe that's too strong. Maybe big advertisers would come back, if they didn't have to worry about the uncertainty that the proprietor creates.
But in order for that to happen, Musk himself would have to shut up, or at least restrain himself. And he made it clear that that's not happening.
"I mean, not every post I make is a banger. And I do shoot myself in the foot from time to time," he told Read. "But you know, at least you know, it's genuine. It's not some sort of PR department deciding things."
And that's one upside of being the world's richest man. You can say whatever you want, and you can drop $44 billion on a platform that lets you broadcast what you say to people all over the world.
But you can't force people to spend their money there.