Advertiser Trust in X Deteriorates

It’s been exactly two years since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and to say that these two years have been turbulent would be a massive understatement. From mass layoffs to scrapping popular features and introducing new ones seemingly on a whim, Musk has not only turned Twitter upside down but he also changed its name to X, reportedly as a first step to turning it into the “everything app” the eccentric billionaire dreams of building one day.

Befitting of these deeply polarized times, the public is divided on whether or not Musk’s takeover, recently labeled as "the worst buyout since the Financial Crisis" by the Wall Street Journal, has made the platform better or worse. While some say that Musk has turned Twitter, or X for that matter, into the last bastion of free speech in a world that has widely succumbed to “wokeness”, others think that the lack of content moderation has turned it into a cesspool of disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate.

According to Kantar Media Reactions, an annual report on advertising and media trends, marketers appear to lean in the second direction. Kantar found that marketers’ trust in Twitter/X has eroded in recent years, with just 12 percent of marketing professionals saying they trust ads on the platform in 2024 and a net 26 percent of them planning to reduce ad spend on X next year. The main driver behind the advertiser exodus from X appears to be the lack of brand safety, as just 4 percent of respondents think that ads on the platform provide that.

“Advertisers have been moving their marketing spend away from X for several years. The stark acceleration of this trend in the past 12 months means a turnaround currently seems unlikely. Marketers are brand custodians and need to trust the platforms they use. X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next – it’s difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment,” Gonca Bubani, Global Thought Leadership Director – Media at Kantar, said in a statement.