Musk tries to reassure advertisers about his takeover moves
Elon Musk sought to reassure big companies that advertise on Twitter on Wednesday that his chaotic takeover of the social media platform won’t harm their brands, acknowledging that some “dumb things” might happen on his way to creating what he says will be a better, safer user experience.
The latest erratic move on the minds of major advertisers that the company depends on for revenue was Musk’s decision to abolish a new “official” label on high-profile Twitter accounts just hours after introducing it.
Twitter began adding the gray labels to prominent accounts Wednesday, including brands such as Coca-cola, Nike and Apple, to indicate that they are authentic. A few hours later, the labels started disappearing.
“Apart from being an aesthetic nightmare when looking at the Twitter feed, it was simply another way of creating a two-class system,” the billionaire Tesla CEO told advertisers in an hour-long conversation broadcast live on Twitter. “It wasn’t addressing the core problem.”
Musk’s comments were his most expansive about Twitter’s future since he closed a $44 billion deal to buy the company late last month, dismissed its top executives almost immediately and, on Friday, fired roughly half of its workforce.
Major brands including General Motors, United Airlines, General Mills and others have temporarily halted buying ads on the platform as they watch whether Musk’s plans to loosen its guardrails against hate speech will lead to a rise in online toxicity.
Musk said he’s still planning a “content moderation council” representing diverse viewpoints that will tackle inappropriate content and reassure advertisers but it would take “a few months” to put together.
Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media, said the briefing raised questions that will likely leave Fortune 500 advertisers uneasy.
The biggest concern for big advertisers is brand safety and risk avoidance, he said. And Musk seems uninterested in reigning in his Twitter persona that can be divisive.
“To come out like Elon did … and say ‘vote Republican since there’s a Democrat in the White House’ — I don’t know what marketer wants to go near that,” he said.
Musk had earlier threatened by tweet a “thermonuclear name & shame” on advertisers that quit Twitter. But he took a more measured approach Wednesday, asking them to “give it a minute and kind of see how things are evolving.”
“The best way to understand what’s going on with Twitter is use Twitter,” he told the group, which was represented mostly by the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association.
However, the confusion on Twitter continued Wednesday. The rollout hours earlier of the “official” labels appeared arbitrary, with some politicians, news outlets and well-known personalities getting the label and others not. In some cases, whether users could see an account’s “official” label appeared to depend on what country they were in.
Then the labels started disappearing.
The site’s current system of using “blue checks” to confirm an account’s authenticity will soon go away for those who don’t pay a monthly fee.
The checkmarks will be available at a yet-to-be-announced date for anyone willing to pay a $7.99-a-month subscription, which will also include some bonus features, such as fewer ads and the ability to have tweets given greater visibility than those coming from non-subscribers.