BOTW: What if Elon is (slightly) correct about advertisers?; Media’s $1bn+ inflation hole
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly edited on Friday on a beautiful first day of summer at Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Happy World Pear Day.
Today: Elon gets sick of giving advertisers the time of day; Will the SMI data stop the chatterers from talking about an advertising downturn?; and The Unmade Index is dragged back into the 600-point black hole.
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Given ‘X’ is hardly an essential component of a schedule for major brands and it’s so fraught with risk from an adjacency POV, surely it’s not worth the bother?
Advertising from a performance contribution perspective is irrelevant unless you’re ’My Pillow’, an erectile dysfunction scammer, or a local tradesman / Chinese mass-producer of landfill who doesn’t give a f*ck about such sensibilities in any case.
If you are after hearts and minds, advertising per se is similarly peripheral at best. Let’s take, say, a political party wishing to tear down a rival’s position. It’s just easier, more effective and consequence free to buy bots and arm the trolls with memes produced by a friendly lobby group.
Twitter/ X will require revenue, but it looks like Musk has figured that the branded manufacturers are unreliable supporters of his radical free speech project. It’s easy to imagine Musk sees them as pearl-clutching, virtue-signalling, blow-in-the-wind brands who announce boycotts with self-serving fanfare only to slink back once the afterglow of self-righteousness has detumesced.
Not the sort of people he’d allow on his Escape Ark to Mars in any case, so ‘f*ck ‘em.’