Elon Musk is yelling about Apple today (I'm not going to quote-tweet him, he's getting too much attention as it is). Instead, I'll highlight an interesting commentary which points out functional, not political, issues that are deterring advertisers on Twitter. /1

The commentary comes from an advertising director who manages a $80m/year advertising budget for a tech company, $9m of which formerly went to Twitter. S/he highlights a number of issues that would be critical concerns for any advertiser: /2

⚠️ Performance (user engagement with adverts) is way down - too few people are clicking through now

⚠️ Brand safety is terrible now – ads are appearing next to porn and antisemitic posts.

⚠️ Nobody at Twitter is responding to complaints from advertisers /3

⚠️ Entire advertising management teams at Twitter have been laid off - advertisers have nobody to talk to any more

⚠️ The interface for advertisers is broken and no longer works properly, preventing them from running campaigns /4

⚠️ Discrepancies are appearing between campaign data from the Twitter Ads API and the UI – they can't get accurate data about campaign performance. Advertisers can't figure out which is correct anymore since they can't contact anyone at Twitter. /5

None of these have anything to do with "wokery" or "activism" or "censorship" – they're basic issues of customer service. (Twitter's real customers are the advertisers, not us users). They appear to be going unaddressed and clearly result from the recent mass layoffs. /6

Put simply, advertisers won't return if they think advertising on Twitter will harm their reputation, they're not getting the response from consumers they want, they can't post or analyse their campaigns, and they can't speak to anyone at Twitter. This is utterly basic stuff. /7

Going forward, the best metric for how serious Musk is about getting Twitter back on an even keel is how quickly (or if at all) he fixes the problems above. Given how he seems to be picking fights with advertisers, I'm not sure that he's even aware of these issues. /8

Go read the advertising director's post here:
www.teamblind.com/post/I-told-my-team-to-pause-our-750Kmonth-Twitter-ads-budget-last-week-4dnbo1Ft

Follow-up thread here: