Elon Musk Gets Pilloried By Top Ad Exec Over Rift With Sponsors: He’s ‘Petulant and Thoughtless’
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New Twitter owner Elon Musk “charmed” advertising executives on a conference call last Thursday but then “undermined his own progress the next day” with his own “petulant and thoughtless” behavior, according to one of the marketers on that call.
Last Friday — the same day that Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter’s workforce — the self-proclaimed “Chief Twit” complained about “activist groups pressuring advertisers” causing “a massive drop in revenue,” claiming “nothing has changed with content moderation” and blaming these activists for “trying to destroy free speech in America.”
Lou Paskalis, a longtime ad executive and the former head of global media for Bank of America, replied to Musk’s tweet with two tweets of his own.
Paskalis referenced the “[g]reat chat” on Thursday, in which senior advertisers had “overwhelmingly” agreed that “the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY.”
“You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!” he added. In the next tweet, he shot down Musk’s claim that advertisers were being “manipulated” by activist groups. The truth, Paskalis insisted, was that companies have “established principles” around what other companies with which they want to partner. “These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability.”
According to screenshots Paskalis posted, Musk blocked him in response to his tweets, although he unblocked him a few hours later.
Paskalis’ views were echoed by members of the Facebook Oversight Board who participated in an Axios panel at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Friday. “You can’t piss off the advertisers,” was one member’s blunt advice, or constantly change your mind about the content moderation rules.
Concerns have also been raised about the messages sent by Musk’s own tweets, including promoting a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi (a tweet that he later deleted after vociferous backlash) and sparring with his critics and banning multiple blue check accounts that had changed their Twitter profiles to mock him.
Sunday evening, Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith reported on a brief conversation he had with Paskalis about Musk’s “influence council meeting” call on Thursday and how advertisers were viewing his leadership at Twitter so far.
“What should marketers learn from your run-in last week with Elon?” Smith asked.
Paskalis replied that he personally had “gone from wanting to dislike him for the way he treated some of my good friends at Twitter, to being charmed by him” on the Thursday call and believing that his “intentions were noble” but “then watching him hack away at the foundation he established the previous day by being petulant and thoughtless.”
Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity for Twitter and one of the few top execs to survive Musk’s purge, is trusted by advertisers, Paskalis added, but the mass layoffs left them “unsure” about what “capacity and ecosystem” remain at the social media giant. “That introduces a great deal of risk and will drive many, if not most fortune 500 advertisers to pause their investments on the platform for at least the next 90 days in my opinion.”
With a global recession looming, many companies were already considering cutting back on their digital advertising budgets, Smith pointed out, making it an especially inopportune time for Musk to have “alienated the company’s main customers.”
As Semafor tech editor Reed Albergotti noted, “Musk’s tweet about the Pelosi hammer attack is probably the most expensive tweet in the history of [T]witter.”
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