A financial services company has paused its AU$1.1 million per month Twitter ad campaign after Elon Musk’s takeover due to concerns around brand safety.
The advertiser told users on Blind, an app that provides an anonymous forum and community for verified employees to discuss work issues, that their financial services company had been receiving “dozens” of screenshots of its ads next to “awful content.”
“Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged,” they added.
The user, a director at a medium-sized B2B tech company, said that it was spending around US$80 million in Twitter ad spend per year and that the platform accounted for between eight and 10 per cent of its media mix.
“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 [sic] reasons),” they said in the post.
Alongside brand safety concerns, the user said that performance also dropped:
“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,” they said.
Compounding the issues, the user said that the company’s 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,” they explained.
What’s more, Twitter’s tech seems to have been hampering the ad posting altogether. The UI, apparently, is “very buggy” and log-in with single sign-on and two-factor authentication are “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.”
Twitter has no communications department to handle requests for comment.
