Advertiser Explains Why They Paused Their Giant Ad Spend On Twitter After Two Weeks
from the how-to-kill-a-website-in-four-easy-steps dept
There was an interesting post on Blind recently from an advertiser who said that, while some big name advertisers had quickly paused their advertising on Twitter while they waited to see what Elon Musk’s plans for the site were, they’ve decided to pause their $750k per month ad spend on the site after seeing what happened in the first two weeks of the Musk run Twitter. The post notes that Twitter represented about 8 to 10% of their company’s ad spend, and they just couldn’t justify it any more:
I had my team keep our campaigns live for 2 weeks post-takeover on the bet that efficiency would improve with fewer advertisers and the risks were managed and probably overblown. I was wrong and I think the things we saw in these last 2 weeks means many more advertisers will bail on the platform in the coming weeks (for non-ideological or virtue signaling reasons):
- Performance fell significantly. CPMs didn’t drop but our engagement went way down. Maybe it’s a shift in users on the platform, maybe it’s ad serving related.
- Serious brand safety issues. Our organic social and CS teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content. Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged.
- Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
- Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
This seems fairly enlightening in many ways. Most people in the advertising community have been talking about point number two around brand safety, which is certainly a key issue for brands with advertising budgets. However, the other three should be concerning to Musk as well if he actually expects the site to continue making any revenue.
In theory, the third point might settle down, though apparently on Sunday night Musk fired a bunch more people in the sales department… before then announcing on Monday that they needed to hire new sales people.
But the first and fourth points may be the most serious. In the end, as nebulous as “brand safety” can sound, it is the economics that are driving advertisers to pull out (and what drives all websites to do some level of content moderation). Brand safety can’t always be quantified. But.. ad metrics can be. If the engagement is dropping, that’s not good. And that’s especially true since advertisers have long complained that ad engagement on Twitter was already much lower than on other sites prior to Musk’s takeover. To hear that they’ve fallen even lower is going to send advertisers running for the hills.
Buggy UI and having SSO (single sign on) and 2FA (two factor authentication) break is… also worrying. But having paused campaigns reactivated borders on fraud. Depending on how widespread that was, I could certainly see advertisers demanding money back from Twitter or threatening lawsuits.
Finally, in the comments, the same user adds one more problem that they forgot to include in the original post:
Forgot another one: our analytics team is finding discrepancies between campaign data from the Twitter Ads API and the UI. Can’t figure out which is correct anymore since we don’t have a team.
And that’s how you absolutely destroy trust with advertisers, and, again, risk demands for money back and threats for lawsuit.
No matter what you think of how Musk is handling other aspects of the Twitter revamp, from disastrously bad product rollouts, to clueless approaches to content moderation, fucking up the main source of revenue immediately, and doing it this incompetently, is impressive.
Filed Under: advertising, elon musk
Companies: twitter
Comments on “Advertiser Explains Why They Paused Their Giant Ad Spend On Twitter After Two Weeks”
What’s fucked up about all this: Elon won’t care about any of this unless he’s personally put on the hook for it.
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And even then, it’s not his fault, it’s the fault of (((activists))) deliberately sabotaging him.
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I don’t see the ‘/s’ sarcasm tag. Did I miss it? The sabotage of twitter is being done by Elon.
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I think Thad meant that Elon would say that, not that he believes it himself.
I guess $750,000 / month doesn't get you much on twitter
Perhaps I’m not familiar with the multi-million dollar per month world of ad budgets, but the least you should be able to get is a modern working UI to sign on and upload your ad campaigns…
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All these morons care about is “owning the libs”: https://archive.ph/RMPx7
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All these morons care about is “owning the libs”: https://archive.ph/RMPx7
Hubris? Revenge for dumping Donald?
At this point, it seems almost intentional on Musk’s part. Buy a leaky boat, fire half the crew and punch more holes in it. Then, when things look bleak, fire more crew for letting you know you are doing it wrong.
The USS Twitter is sinking and the remaining crew are eyeing the lifeboats…
At this point, how hard would it be for someone to just recreate Twitter? You could hire all of the fired engineers and sales people and have your version done right when Twitter is on its last legs. Show that it has competent leadership and it wouldn’t be too hard to get most people to move over, especially if it works almost the same as this version does.
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A lot of people see Mastodon as their ersatz-Twitter. I’m one of them.
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Re: Re: Mastodon will not be different
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/11/21/mastodons-content-moderation-growing-pains/
It’s already seeing the same sort of woke vs. truth conflict that’s present everywhere else.
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… said nobody mentally competent, ever.
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The Fediverse has its growing pains, yes.
But they have slightly better tools to deal with things like VACCINE DISINFORMATION, ANTISEMITISM AND (WHITE) TERRORISM PROMOTION.
And the best part is, it’s an ongoing conversation. Not like the heavily moderated conservative spaces, where the only voice that gets to be spoken is the site owner’s.
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The problem is, Twitter wasn’t really profitable. While it may have been useful*, who — especially now — will want to invest in recreating it? Even Musk didn’t really want to and having failed to weasel out of it, he’s smashing it in a temper tantrum. (And also probably turning over logs to oppressive governments and all other sorts of craptastic stuff)
*Not to me though; I never used Twitter and a minor regret I have now is that I can’t close my account because I never had one.
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Define “profitable.” Define “fraud”
Let’s start here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ftx-operated-as-sam-bankman-frieds-personal-fiefdom-company-lawyers-admit/ar-AA14qyYl
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I think you’re underestimating this part. How do you get millions of people to move over to a social network service that has no users? Generally that takes a long time.
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Yeah-point number two: how racist Jews manipulate social media for profit, claiming victimhood as they stalk, harass, blackball, terrorize, deplatform, and cancel people who point out that ONE simple fact.
Go Kanye. Go Elon. And, fuch Jonathan Greenblatt.
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… said nobody not explicitly admitting to a hallucinogen abuse habit, ever.
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Could you not project so hard just this once…?
Though you don’t care as you lie through your teeth like your new white supremacist pal Elon.
Not the sort of association you want for your brand
Serious brand safety issues. Our organic social and CS teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content. Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged.
Who would have thought that canning a bunch of staff and throwing open the doors to terrible people would result in a bunch of horrid content and no-one available to take it down?
Drives off users thanks in part to welcoming terrible people, drives off advertisers thanks to the same and firing the people necessary to communicate with them… Elon may be desperate to secure a source of income for the platform but damn if he’s not working overtime to ensure that he won’t be able to.
Trump's Revenge
Just curious, but has anyone considered that Musk is doing all this on purpose – literally to kill Twitter.
After all, Musk is a Republitwink too right. Maybe this is Trumps’ Revenge!
Just saying…
Re: Sometimes it's malice, sometimes it's just overwhelming stupidity
He does seem to be petty and stupid enough for a stunt like that but deliberately tanking a multi-billion dollar deal still seems less likely than someone who’s not as smart as he thinks he is letting his ego run rampant and destroying the platform as a result.
Re: Trump's Revenge
Considering, but that is a real stretch. Remember that he did not have the full $44B kicking around in petty cash. He had to borrow about $13B according to the reports.
What chance that thelenders of the $13B asked for a personal guarantee? Even if not, he had to toast a bunch of other assets to raise the $31B. That is going to hurt.
All that said, it certainly is predictable that Twitter will not prosper under his leadership.