Advertiser Explains Why They Paused Their Giant Ad Spend On Twitter After Two Weeks

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.