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“It’s a trainwreck sometimes.”
That’s how Elon Musk reportedly summed up his experience so far as Chief Twit to a room full of advertisers in Miami. Musk was speaking onstage with Linda Yaccarino, NBCU’s chair of global advertising and partnerships, at the inaugural Possible conference hosted by digital marketing trade group MMA Global.
Like seemingly everything Elon-related, his appearance at the conference involved some advertiser turmoil. MMA members including McDonald’s and Colgate-Palmolive privately raised concerns about Musk’s appearance, per Semafor.
Before his keynote, a collection of progressive advocacy groups, including Free Press and Media Matters, paid for an aerial banner that said “Brands deserve better #STOPTOXICTWITTER” to fly over Miami.
So, was the fireside…fiery? AdExchanger described it as a “a strange mélange of jokes, offhanded commentary and a selection of very particular, facetious and in some cases arguably spurious POVs.”
Musk said he’s interested in hearing “legitimate concerns” from advertisers. “Things should be discussed in an open forum,” Musk remarked, emphasizing the importance of free speech on the platform.
“It’s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places of Twitter and not in other places,” he said, per the Wall Street Journal. “But it is not cool to say what Twitter will do. And if that means losing advertising dollars, we’ll lose them. But freedom of speech is paramount.”
Though Musk is pushing a subscription tier, Twitter Blue, ad sales made up 92% of the platform’s Q2 2022 earnings. Twitter’s ad revenue is expected to decline 27.9% in 2023, a drop from $4.14 billion to $2.98 billion, according to estimates from Insider Intelligence.
The site’s traffic isn’t doing so hot, either. Visits to twitter.com fell 7.3% year over year last month, according to Similarweb, marking a third month of declines.
+1: Yesterday, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) found that Twitter had amended its Hateful Conduct Policy to remove protections against transgender users.