X’s global head of marketing, Angela Zepeda, said that the new marketing push would promote newer features of the app, including its payments payments business X Money and X TV, according to a report by AdAge.
X owner Elon Musk famously once stated that he hates advertising and told advertisers who didn’t spend money on the social media platform to “go and f*** yourselves”.
The billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and other technology businesses has somewhat softened his views on advertising in the past couple of years and it appears that his social media platform X is about to launch a new marketing push.
Former Hyundai CMO Angela Zepeda, who joined Z last September to lead its marketing efforts, shared details of X’s campaign with the US advertising title AdAge.
She said that X wants to position itself as an “everything app” where users could use it to make payments, watch TV and, temporarily, share ads that are sympathetic to Adolf Hitler.
“You have all of these apps where you do all this stuff, but if you could just do it in one place it would be a lot easier,” Zepeda said. “That’ll be part of the messaging around these innovations, especially X Money, which is all about convenience.”
X Money has yet to launch but secured a partnership with Visa that will enable it to make payments and transfer money through Visa direct debit.
Zepeda wouldn’t share details of when the X campaign would launch, saying it was “imminent”, and that Stagwell’s Code and Theory was working on the creative and media strategy.
Notably, it will be X’s first marketing campaign since Musk bought the business in late 2022.
After gutting Twitter’s safety and moderation teams, advertisers fled X en masse, haemorrhaging about half of the platform’s advertising revenue.
X has made high profile appointments in advertising and marketing with former NBC Universal sales executive Linda Yaccarino brought in as CEO and Zepeda as its marketing chief.
More recently, it appears that X’s advertising business has stabilised with December revenue reportedly increasing by 123 per cent, the month after Donald Trump won the US election.
Musk and Yaccarino have previously touted that X would become much more than a social media platform.
In China, WeChat has also positioned itself as an “app for everything” that combines social media with payments and other functionality.
