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Elon Musk Has Driven Away Half Of Twitter's Top Advertisers Already

Elon Musk Has Driven Away Half Of Twitter's Top Advertisers Already

In recent weeks, 50 of the top 100 advertisers have either announced or seemingly stopped advertising on Twitter. These advertisers have accounted for nearly $2 billion in spending on the platform since 2020, and over $750 million in advertising in 2022 alone.

In addition to advertisers that have seemingly stopped all advertising on Twitter as of November 21, there are an additional seven advertisers that appear to be slowing the rate of their advertising on the platform to almost nothing. Since 2020, these seven advertisers have accounted for over $255 million in spending on Twitter, and nearly $118 million in advertising in 2022.

  • An asterisk indicates a company has issued a statement or was publicly reported as stopping its ads on Twitter and subsequently confirmed. Otherwise, companies identified on this list are “quiet quitters,” based on a Media Matters analysis of Pathmatics data. These companies were previously advertising on Twitter, but then stopped for a significant period of time following direct outreach, controversies, and warnings from media buyers.
  • Abbott Laboratories
  • Allstate Corporation
  • AMC Networks
  • American Express Company
  • AT&T
  • Big Heart Petcare
  • BlackRock, Inc.
  • BlueTriton Brands, Inc.
  • Boston Beer Company
  • CA Lottery (California State Lottery)
  • CenturyLink (Lumen Technologies, Inc.)
  • Chanel
  • Chevrolet*
  • Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.*
  • Citigroup, Inc.
  • CNN
  • Dell
  • Diageo
  • DirecTV
  • Discover Financial Services
  • Fidelity
  • First National Realty Partners
  • Ford*
  • Heineken N.V.
  • Hewlett-Packard (HP)
  • Hilton Worldwide
  • Inspire Brands, Inc.
  • Jeep*
  • Kellogg Company
  • Kohl's Department Stores, Inc.
  • Kyndryl*
  • LinkedIn Corporation
  • MailChimp (The Rocket Science Group)
  • Marriott International, Inc.
  • Mars Petcare
  • Mars, Incorporated
  • Merck & Co. (Merck Sharp & Dohme MSD)*
  • Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook, Inc.)
  • MoneyWise (Wise Publishing, Inc.)
  • Nestle
  • Novartis AG*
  • Pernod Ricard
  • PlayPass
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • The Kraft Heinz Company
  • Tire Rack
  • Verizon
  • Wells Fargo
  • Whole Foods Market IP
  • Yum! Brands

Despite these advertising losses, Elon Musk (who acquired the platform in late October) has continued his rash of brand unsafe actions — including amplifying conspiracy theories, unilaterally reinstating banned accounts such as that of former President Donald Trump, courting and engaging with far-right accounts, and instituting a haphazard verification scheme that allowed extremists and scammers to purchase a blue check. This last move, in particular, opened the platform up to a variety of fraud and brand imitations.

(Snack food company Mondelez International has also reportedly stopped advertising on Twitter citing concerns about hate speech on the platform. However, ads for two of Mondelez’s major brands – Oreo and Ritz – have recently been running at high volume, accounting for approximately $600,000 in ad spending since November 9.)

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

tear gas, Trump campaign

Trump Campaign Denies What America Watched In Horror

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

The Trump campaign sent the following request to Media Matters:

Hope you all are doing well, staying healthy and safe.
Saw your piece this morning on the use of tear gas at Lafayette Square. Wanted to make sure you saw our official statement on the false reports and would appreciate it if you would retract and correct your piece.
As always, happy to be a resource for you.

You can read the full statement from the campaign here.

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Fox News Sales Chief Admits Advertisers Are Fleeing

Fox News Sales Chief Admits Advertisers Are Fleeing

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

A new report published by Politico examines the rejection that Fox News’ most prominent programs are experiencing from advertisers.

Just how bad is it?

According to the article, Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s advertiser base has effectively evaporated. Most national “blue-chip” advertisers won’t advertise on her show. Her advertiser base, which had included 229 brands prior to April 2018, has shrunk down to 85, with many of those either being short-burst political advertisers or less desirable direct-response ads.

In late March 2018, Ingraham publicly ridiculed Parkland mass-shooting survivor David Hogg for not being accepted to a college he had applied to attend. Hogg and online activists responded by showing Ingraham’s history of attacks to her advertisers. Advertisers fled her program in droves, with many publicly announcing their decision and many more quietly removing their ads. Advertisers publicly exited her show a second time a few months later after Ingraham compared immigrant children detention centers to summer camps.

As Politico observes, Fox News responded to this diminished advertiser inventory by reducing the commercial time on Ingraham’s show by about one-third — from around 15 minutes per show to a bit more than 10 minutes per show.

But this time statistic alone doesn’t capture the full scope of the damage, because it includes unpaid ads (like promos for Fox News programs).

If you look at paid ads alone, Ingraham’s show has about 50 percent less ads per show now than she did before advertisers started to flee. According to a Media Matters analysis, Ingraham averaged 31 paid ads per show prior to advertisers fleeing her show in late March and now averages 17 paid ads per show.

With most blue-chip advertisers refusing to run on Ingraham’s show, the companies filling the available slots are direct-response advertisers that “often look to buy leftover space at discounted rates and are less picky about where their ads appear,” Politico noted. Over time, this trend has the net effect of driving down the ad rates for a show. (The exact same thing happened with Glenn Beck’s Fox program, as I chronicled here in great detail.)

In dollars and cents, Kantar Media’s Jon Swallen tells Politico, Ingraham’s advertising revenue could be down a staggering 15-30 percent!

The advertiser problems aren’t limited to Ingraham’s show either. Dozens of companies have removed their ads from Sean Hannity’s program, and even more have told me that they block Hannity and other more extreme Fox News programs so their ads never appear in the first place.

Fox News’ head of ad sales, Marianne Gambelli, blamed Media Matters and activists for making advertisers uncomfortable with aligning with certain content.

Gambelli’s assessment is partially correct. Activists have been a potent force here. And, I admit, Media Matters has doggedly chronicled Fox News, and we have spent considerable time over the past year warning advertisers and media buyers about Fox News’ intensifying extremism and the risks of associating with it.

But Gambelli ignores the bigger cause of Fox News’ growing advertiser problem: the channel’s own talent.

Fox News’ most prominent shows — the ones that are supposed to be most palatable for advertisers — are also defined by bigotry, extremism, conspiracy theories, and outright volatility. From a business perspective, they’re a bad bet.

Additionally, those shows and the network as a whole often function as an extension of the White House’s communications operation. It’s one thing for a show to have an ideological or political perspective, but much of Fox News’ programming these days is more akin to a political propaganda operation. That puts advertisers in the position of not just aligning with an ideology, but actively participating in politics — something just about every advertiser is loathe to do.

Earlier this month, I tweeted out this observation following a series of recent conversations with media buyers:

In the past two weeks, I’ve spoken pretty extensively [with] media buyers that place a lot of ads on Fox News. There is deep anxiety brewing that they will need to shift their clients’ ads away from Fox News before a massive controversy forces them to after causing reputation damage.

After a then Fox News contributor tweeted that Prof. Blasey Ford was a “skank,” one buyer who I had been pushing on for some time reached out to me saying, “This is what you’ve been warning about. Thank god for advertisers this didn’t happen on air.”

But what that buyer missed and I pointed out is: It just as easily could have happened on air because that kind of stuff is not abnormal for Fox News, it’s actually the norm. And you can see similar odious comments daily.

Those sentiments I was hearing were echoed by the advertising executive quoted in the Politico report:

One advertising executive said that most brands he works with find it easier to steer clear of the Fox News prime-time block. He said CNN and MSNBC are not subject to the same concerns, since those networks’ hosts have not courted controversy at the same level.

“Those prime-time personalities for the most part have proven themselves over time to be more trouble than they’re worth,” the executive said of Fox News.

Indeed. The advertising industry has ample reason to feel this way.

Last fall, Fox News viewers began smashing their Keurig machines at Sean Hannity’s behest after the company advised me that it would remove its ads from Hannity’s show:

Fox News basically let the situation unfold for days before seemingly intervering and pressuring Hannity to tamp down the boycott of his former advertiser. But the business damage was done, as more media buyers recognized that the best way to protect their clients from the inevitable next outrage was just to keep their ads off the program in the first place.

There’s been a steady stream of reminders, too.

For example, Tucker Carlson courted controversy earlier this summer when he began effectively promoting an ethnonationalist ideal of people living with their own kind by arguing that diversity actually makes society weaker.

Just a few weeks ago, citing an increase in non-white people in America, Laura Ingraham lamented that “in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.”

And there are plenty more where those two examples came from.

The bottom-line takeaway from this latest Politico piece is consistent with what I have been saying for some time now: A portion of Fox News’ programming is increasingly toxic to advertisers due to its extremism or volatility, and those shows are experiencing deep and sustained advertiser losses.

It’s clear that Fox News isn’t going to change or address the issues either. So those advertiser problems are about to get even worse.

Header image by Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Fox News Revenue Plummets As Advertisers Drop Hannity

Fox News Revenue Plummets As Advertisers Drop Hannity

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox News’ role as a secondary communications shop for Donald Trump and host Sean Hannity’s advertiser troubles are apparently starting to affect the network’s bottom line.

In September 2017, Fox News’ ad revenue dropped a whopping 17 percent as compared to September 2016, while CNN’s dipped 1 percent and MSNBC’s increased 2 percent.

To be fair, modest fluctuations in advertising revenue between presidential election years and off years are absolutely normal and expected; typically, year-to-year revenue will decline in off years compared to presidential election years.

You can see those typical fluctuations reflected in MSNBC’s minor gain and CNN’s minor decline. Fox News’ decline, though, is sharp and wildly out of whack with its cable rivals.

The relative disproportion of Fox’s 17 percent loss means that it can’t be attributed merely to normal market fluctuations. If the market as a whole was the primary cause, then you’d see larger changes at CNN and MSNBC too. Accordingly, this massive loss indicates that there are other factors unique to Fox that are driving the drop.

The single biggest factor likely driving this decline is the fallout from advertisers leaving Sean Hannity’s program.

Yes: Sean Hannity is losing advertisers! And, as we have seen before, when advertisers start leaving, revenue begins to decline.

Advertisers first became skittish about Hannity’s program in May of 2017 after he began promoting conspiracy theories about the July 2016 murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer. The conspiracy theory drew widespread backlash, including from the victim’s family, journalists, and even others at Fox News. Yet Hannity carried on peddling the conspiracy theory, and he actually started lashing out at Fox News and its advertisers.

Hannity signaled that he was volatile and that his volatility could prove bad for business. So advertisers started paying attention. At this time, I also started to hear rumblings about advertisers dropping Hannity’s program.

As the weeks went on, Hannity’s conspiracy theories, smears, and attacks intensified. In early August, Media Matters responded to Hannity’s escalating extremism by launching an effort to educate advertisers about his conspiracy theory peddling, his collaboration with the White House to advance Trump’s interests, his efforts to undermine the rule of law, and the odious and reckless nature of his claims.

In early September, the Associated Press looked at the first few weeks of the Stop Hannity campaign. Its resulting report included a public statement from Cadillac about why the company had stopped advertising on Hannity’s program; it also pointed out that Media Matters had heard from over a dozen companies that had similarly ceased advertising on Hannity’s show.

Based on my extensive experience with these kinds of campaigns, my sense is that Hannity’s advertiser losses are more significant than the dozen or so large companies that have provided explicit statements. Rather, Hannity’s volatility has become so widely recognized that media buyers, out of concern for their clients, are simply excluding Hannity’s program from their selections from the outset in order to avoid getting sucked up into one of his conspiracy theories or contemptible attacks.

Hannity’s recent collaboration with and defenses of serial sexual predator Bill O’Reilly will only make advertisers more wary about associating with him. And the fact that Fox News eagerly embraced this collaboration and actively promoted it will validate advertisers’ concerns about the Fox News brand as a whole. Rightfully so!

The timing of Fox News’ massive ad revenue loss lines up almost exactly with Hannity’s loss of advertisers. It’s safe to say that it’s more than mere coincidence. They’re connected.

Sean Hannity is costing Fox News. Fox News accepts this either out of the goodness of its executives’ hearts, or, more likely, because the network prioritizes advancing a political agenda and Hannity helps advance that agenda. Those political priorities create an additional contributing factor to Fox News’ revenue drop: the bigotry, vitriol, lies, and rank partisan machinations that have come to define Fox News’ brand.

Aside from the Fox News lies that are put on full display for all every time Trump parrots a Fox & Friends segment, a look at the network’s coverage of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, back in August tells you all you need to know about Fox News’ maleficence. On that day, a protestor was run over and killed by a white supremacist. Instead of covering the tragic death for what it was, Fox News spent several hours maligning the people protesting white supremacists and repeatedly suggesting that the white supremacist driver was acting out of self-defense — needless obfuscation from Fox News that seemingly contributed to Trump’s initial “both sides” comment.

That’s not an outlier. There’s a list a mile long of examples just like that, because it’s the Fox News brand.

Mostly driven by concerns around digital advertising, companies are becoming increasingly mindful about brand safety and intentionality in that advertising. And that mindfulness is starting to influence other advertising decisions as well, like television sponsorships.

Companies do not want their advertising to be associated with rank partisanship, bigotry, or deceit. They recognize that it’s bad for business. But Fox News continues to offer all three in spades, and as a result, I suspect it is beginning to have a downward effect on the network’s commercial viability as a whole.

Bottom line is this: Fox News’ ad revenue plummeted. It’s likely largely attributable to Hannity’s growing advertiser losses. And it also appears to reflect a deeper vulnerability in Fox News’ business model of bigotry, deceit, and partisanship.

Angelo Carusone is the president of Media Matters for America.