It is less than a year since Elon Musk told advertisers who were shunning his social media site, X, that they could take their business elsewhere permanently. In fact, he encouraged them to do so. “Don’t advertise,” he said, amid a backlash over his endorsement of an antisemitic tweet. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.”
The instruction had the virtue of clarity. Everybody knew where they stood. Advertisers who took the view that X has become a poisonous sewer under Musk’s ownership – or even just those who merely regarded the site as the wrong place to promote soap and suchlike – could seek other venues. And X would thrive or fail without them.
Now Musk has had a change of heart. X has launched a lawsuit in Texas claiming it is the victim of an “illegal boycott” by advertisers. Unilever and Mars, the consumer goods groups, Danish windfarm operator Ørsted, and American healthcare group CVS Health are the targets, alongside a body called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (Garm). The companies, supposedly, withheld “billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from X in a malicious conspiracy that violated US antitrust law.
It is probably unwise to predict what a US court may decide, but this case deserves to be thrown out for being ridiculous.
“No small group of people should be able to monopolise what gets monetised,” argued X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, as if companies should be compelled – by who? – to advertise on certain media outlets. Come on, you’re running a profit-seeking business, like most of the rest of the media world. If you can’t make the revenues stack up, that’s your problem. If anyone is guilty of showing monopolistic tendencies here, it is X in believing it deserves to be protected from everyday commercial pressures.
To see how advertisers think in practice, read the testimony from Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA, who explained in detail to a US House of Representatives committee last month how the company allocates its advertising dollars.
Unilever was stung by an early case on Facebook of ads for its Dove soap being placed adjacent to posts glorifying rape and domestic violence. The company drew the understandable lesson that it wanted to deal with “responsible” platforms that took more care. “Similarly, the Unilever brands that are trusted and appeal broadly to all Americans are not served by content that is divisive or politically polarising,” Patel wrote. In 2020 – long before Musk bought Twitter, as it was then– Unilever “pulled back” from social media advertising.
These days, he said, only 20% of the company’s advertising goes on social media platforms, and less than 1% to digital news. The bulk of the digital spend is directed at the websites of Amazon, Walmart and Target and so on for the boring reason that shoppers there are close to making buying decisions. That is not a conspiracy; it is an advertiser assessing its commercial interest.
The House judiciary committee somehow swallowed the Musk-friendly line that members of Garm were engaged in antitrust behaviour, but it’s hard to see how that conclusion fits the facts. Garm is mostly concerned with allowing companies to know where their digital advertising appears. The choice of where to spend remains with the company. “Unilever, and Unilever alone, controls our advertising spending,” said Patel – a statement that, again, should be entirely unremarkable.
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There really isn’t a mystery about why X’s revenues may be falling. Trust levels with advertisers are low, and the likes of Amazon deliver a bigger bang for the same buck. You can see the same process in the UK, where big supermarket chains are investing heavily in “retail media” and sharing data insights from their online operations with brand companies. X is being outcompeted on the advertising front.
The company could try helping itself by investing in content moderators. But it’s all competition in action. Even if X, miraculously, were to win its attention-seeking lawsuit, advertisers will still form their own views on where they get the best returns and where they have “brand safety”, as they put it. A “free speech absolutist”, you’d think, would understand that.