Ad Land Shows Little Interest In Disruption

Michael Hedges November 7, 2022 Follow on Twitter

Brand safety has become a formidable call to action by advertising people and the brands they serve. Armed with reliable - and mostly proprietary - consumer data they know very well the fragility of the media sphere within which they ply their trade. It has become an existential task though scorned in certain quarters as "woke culture."

The reliably Happy Advertising People largely shrugged on Elon Musk’s accession to Chief Twit at social media platform Twitter. They’ve seen rich dilettantes before. They’ve seen them all. They’ve all seen Citizen Kane. The Chief Twit met - via Zoom - with about 100 ad land names on Wednesday. He has loans due this year for US$1 billion, and next year and the year after that.

This was before Chief Twit, on the run, fired nearly half the Twitter staff saying they were costing him US$4 million a day. Out the door with little or no notice were executives and staffers working on communications - two out of 100 remaining - and the entire ethics, transparency and accountability team disbanded. Firings were global; the US, UK, Ireland, France, Belgium and India. The Chief Twit said - on Twitter - he had “no choice.” His “blue check” subscription plan could take years to replace ad revenues, if ever.

A few big advertisers bolted as soon as Mr. Musk took over, General Motors noticeably the first. Following in rapid succession were Audi, VW, General Mills, Pfizer, L’Oréal and agency Mondelez International and Interpublic Group. Most are “temporarily suspending” their ad spending. “Clients don’t want conflict, they don’t want controversy,” said S4 Capital chairperson Martin Sorrell, former WPP chairperson, quoted by UK daily Telegraph
(November 5). “They want a stable environment, and what we’ve seen in the last week or so is too much inconsistency.”

“Protect the park,” instructed Walt Disney according to legend. It was spoken not simply to remind Disney Land grounds keepers to pick up the trash. To this day, every Disney employee knows it. “There’s been some quiet quitting going on,” said an ad land executive anonymously to the Financial Times (November 3).

Taken aback, perhaps, the Chief Twit promised “thermonuclear name and shame” for those advertisers taking a pausing, quoted by Business Insider (November 5). "Extremely messed up! They're trying to destroy free speech in America,” he continued blaming “activists” calling for boycotts. Citing “prolific surge” in anti-Semitic postings on Twitter since the ownership change, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), as part of a coalition of civil rights groups including the NAACP and Sleeping Giant, referenced “actions that make us fear that the worst is yet to come,” quoted by Rolling Stone (November 4), in calling for user and advertiser boycotts.

Mr. Musk embraces the very libertarian idea of a “digital town square” for Twitter where anything goes. It almost worked in the 19th century when real people hurled rotten tomatoes to drive the loonies from their towns. Now they proliferate online, particularly social media, with scant civil recourse. Content moderation became a serious subject for advertisers and their brands in the last decade, forcing digital content distributors to root out torture, violence, hate speech, disinformation, cyberbullying, child abuse and terrorism. Several hundred thousand content moderators were hired, often at the demand of governments.

When marketing trade association MMA Global president Lou Paskalis reached out to the Chief Twit on the relationship between brand safety and the firing of “75% of the moderation team,” he was summarily blocked from Twitter, noted The Wrap (November 5). “So for all the replies I received that content moderation = denial of freedom of speech (it doesn’t),what do you say about the fact that the Chief Twit just blocked me for exercising mine?” he replied.

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