Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X (formerly Twitter) has hailed its upcoming Trend Genius feature as the “Holy Grail” of digital advertising.
The Trend Genius feature automatically boosts ad campaigns on X when linked to a trending topic.
“Since acquisition we have rolled out and shipped over 250 product innovations, more than in the last 10 years at the company. One of those things, one of the best product innovations—I actually refer to it as maybe the Holy Grail of advertising products—is called trend genius because it’s something that only X can do,” Yaccarino told former CBS reported Catherine Herridge during an on-stage interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“The product we developed, when a trend picks up on X and it hits a certain altitude or is really on fire, what’s designed with advertisers that we have an agreement with, their ad campaign gets fired up and starts to take advantage of those trends,” continued Yaccarino.
“For example, during a Taylor Swift concert, Bradley Cooper was spotted with Travis Kelce in one of the boxes, he starts singing a Taylor Swift song—oh my god, Bradley Cooper is now a Swiftie so it starts trending on the platform”.
Yaccarino said that as it has an advertising partnership with LVMH, its campaign starring Bradley Cooper started up in real time.
“For the marketers in the room, [it’s] the Holy Grail: right ad, right place, right time. But now you’re adding global scale in the conversation. The most important thing about it is because of the uniqueness of trends, maximum efficiency. I mean, [you can] knock every KPI out of the park with something like Trend Genius because when the trend starts to cool down, then your campaign pauses.”
While the feature is not available to advertisers on the platform yet, Yaccarino said that it has been beta tested.
However, X has had some very well-documented struggles with advertisers since Elon Musk acquired the company for some $70 billion in 2022.
A 2024 Kantar study found that more than a quarter of marketers are planning to cut their spend on the platform in the next 12 months. Only 4 per cent of marketers now think X ads provide brand safety, which pales in comparison with the likes of Google (36 per cent).
Marketers’ overall trust for X ads has fallen from 22 per cent to 12 per cent since 2022. A net 15 per cent of marketers were favourable towards X ads in 2022, now a net 21 per cent of marketers are unfavourable.
Yaccarino also claimed that “90 per cent” of the advertisers who had left X following Musk’s takeover have returned are back.
“It’s really about three things. It’s about safety, we’ve already talked about community notes, it’s about product innovation and then it’s about that there’s absolutely no surrogate for X,” she said.
“If you start with the safety part, where you talk about the massive, massive success of community notes but we also rolled out a suite of tools that didn’t exist prior to acquisition. All the tools marketers in this room care about, controls and settings that let you engage on the platform as you wish. Brand safety and suitability partnerships, industry certifications—check the box we did all the work.”
You can watch the full interview here, if you want:
Thrilled to join @lindayaX @CES after the Zuckerberg / Meta / Community Notes announcement..
And what’s ahead @x in 2025!https://t.co/mlBz97ZYzU
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) January 7, 2025
