Elon Musk is trying to find new sources of income for Twitter, from paid blue ticks to videos. But the advertising remains the primary source of revenue e GroupMthe most important company in the sector, would have advised its customers against buying “High-risk” advertising space on Twitter after the latest discoveries of Elon Musk. In the meantime, he fired an employee who had corrected his statement on the social network.
Buying advertising space on Twitter has been a “high risk” since Elon Musk
GroupM is part of WPP and manages the advertising of companies such as Google, L’Oréal, Bayer, Nestle, Unilever, Coca-Cola e Mars. Some of the leading companies in the world, which have a huge list of products and sub-brands. And GroupM also advised its customers against buying Twitter ad space, after that too IPG e Omnicom Media Group have recommended doing the same in recent days.
Nothing official, but both Platformer and Digiday report having been able to view a document that GroupM has shared with its largest customers. Where they report several activities of Elon Musk after the acquisition of Twitter, which worries the company. Like the firing of several managers, especially in key areas such as security and compliance. And the fact that paid blue checks make it easier to impersonate a company or celebrity on the social platform.
What Twitter should do to recover advertisers
The document found by Digiday and shared by a partner on Slack to Platformer also reports the ‘advice’ that GroupM would give to Twitter to recover its status and stop being considered “at risk”. In other words, the conditions necessary for the group to return to work on the platform are:
- And “return to basic levels of NSFW”, acronym of “Not Safe For Work”. GroupM would like the platform to return to pre-Musk moderation
- Hiring new IT security, privacy and security executives
- “Establish internal controls” (a formal critique of decisions made via tweets)
- Greater transparency regarding the protection of users and brands, in particular the dissemination of content moderation guidelines
- Commitment to enforce the rules of the platform on moderation.
All requests that seem to be the bare minimum for a brand to decide to buy advertising space on Twitter. Above all, the insistence on the theme of moderation is something that many users immediately reported, without being marketing experts: companies won’t stay on Twitter if it hurts their reputation. If any user can create a verified account of a big brand and tweet conspiracies, incite hatred and spread fake news for hours before someone takes action, it is difficult to convince the brand to stay on the social network.
And as much as Musk wants to decrease advertisers’ influence on the platform, he can’t afford to be without it right now. Musk himself said that the platform burns 4 million dollars every day, more than Twitter Blue subscriptions can currently guarantee. Not counting his expenses after the $ 44 billion acquisition of the social network. But the billionaire does not seem interested in hearing the opinion of others on his work.
Meanwhile, Musk fires his online critics
In the last few hours, Elon Musk does not seem to want to respect the GroupM handbook to make his platform more attractive. While it has blocked Twitter Blue signups while they figure out how to handle new paid verified accountsseems unwilling to either increase restraint or hire new executives. Indeed, the opposite.
The CEO tweeted that in many countries Twitter’s response times are slow because the social network has to respond to “more than 1,200 poorly implemented remote procedures”. An employee, Eric FrohnhoeferMusk retweeted that six of them have been working on the social media’s Android app, and that his new boss is wrong: the number is closer to 200. This has generated an argument between the two that follows several threads on the social media, with Musk eventually tweeting in response to a commenter saying maybe the developer should fix it privately, saying “he’s fired”.
Another employee, Sasha Solomon, commented saying that “you can’t fire almost all of our infrastructure and then make stinging comments on how we manage the services”. This time Musk did not respond. But after the weekend, Solomon tweeted that he too was fired.
This news adds to reports of how Musk ignored internal teams trying to explain why paid blue checks would cause problems. Giving an image of a man alone in charge who doesn’t want to listen to criticism right now. Something that perhaps some supporters of the billionaire will appreciate, but which for the moment seems to alienate advertisers even more.