No. of Recommendations: 8
Were woke about principle, Instagram and TikTok would have been dumped a long time ago. But they haven't been. Why?
Because it's not about woke.
Mid- and upper-level advertising executives in major companies are deeply concerned with protecting their brands. Not about advancing a woke agenda, not about The Message - they want to keep their jobs and get promotions and (to do that) help their companies make more money.
So they are going to be reluctant to advertise on a platform if their brand can get caught up in a shotstorm. If their specific brands and logos get placed next to toxic content. If the de facto CEO is personally posting toxic content. If the company demonstrates over and over again that it is indifferent, possibly even hostile, to advertisers' business concerns about these issues.
Other platforms have their own issues - but Mark Zuckerberg and Liang Rubo aren't personally posting favorable comments about anti-semitic contents. At least they have policies and rules that are efforts to throw Hateful Content (and the users that regularly promote it) off their sites. So that if something goes wrong and the VP for internet advertising gets hauled into the CMO's office to explain what happened, he's got something he can point to.
Look at it this way - the advertisers that are leaving now are among the least sensitive to issues of 'wokeness' in their social media platform buys, because these are the ones that stayed with Musk for more than a year. Most of the advertisers that left the site did so last year, after Musk changed all the content policies and gutted the safety teams that were in place to protect advertisers. The ones that were left were the ones that were willing to give him a chance, to see if his "speech not reach" policy wouldn't blow up in his face. But it did, and when they got concerned about it he told them to f- off, so now they're gone.
Must needs to contain the brand damage somehow, so he's pivoting to position this as a "woke" thing. Which (again) doesn't make a lick of sense, because these are the advertisers that stayed with him, so it's both a "woke" thing and a "hypocrisy" thing, because these advertisers didn't and haven't act like they were concerned about woke.
