Jamie Ray, co-founder of creator agency Buttermilk, said Bud Light’s fall from grace shows that brands need to be less performative with their allyship in 2024.
“If any brand exists in an egocentric echo chamber, not listening to their employees, peers or community of consumers, they will fail. Then, when they actively get anything wrong, who is going to save them?” he asked.
He added: “[Bud Light’s] mistake was made by marketing, and could and should have been rectified by marketing. It shows a lack of consumer and cultural understanding.”
2. X’s Advertiser Exodus
What happened?
The New York Times has forecast X could lose as much as $75 million in advertising revenue by the 2023, thanks to dozens of major brands pausing their marketing campaigns.
It’s hard to know where to begin unraveling the story of how Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of X (formerly Twitter) has resulted in a brand exodus. So it might be best to begin at the end.
In November, Musk delivered a message to advertisers: “Go f*ck yourselves.” The explicit dispatch came during a public conversation with the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, where Musk said he wouldn’t be “blackmailed” by advertisers.
The blunt response followed 12 months of brands publicly pulling out of ads on X due to concerns over Musk’s public tirades, as well hateful and extremist content and misinformation.
Clients who have halted spend over brand safety concerns include Apple, Comcast, Disney, IBM, Lions Gate Entertainment, NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Warner Bros Discovery.
Not even the appointment of former NBCU exec Linda Yaccarino as CEO has been enough to woo brands back, leaving X facing a very real revenue gap in 2024.
Lesson learned:
Musk seems intent on charging ahead with his “free speech absolutism” and turning X into an “everything app” at any cost.
However, if 2023 has taught the industry anything it’s that advertisers now have quick responses in place when it comes to brand safety and adjacency, and they’re not afraid to put their money where their mouths are.
“The latest comments continue to reinforce the now widely held view that Musk isn’t fit to lead a platform that’s a safe place for brands to be a part of,” Mobbie Nazir, chief strategy officer at We Are Social, told Adweek in November. “It’s not a big reach to say that if Musk doesn’t get his act together, X could fade into obscurity.”
