Since Elon Musk announced he was going to pay a princely sum for the platform formerly known as Twitter, we’ve been seeing stories of its demise. For almost as long, Musk has been asking, “Why do we scream at each other?” The next three days are going to seem like forty for Twitter. At the end of the flood of cool news and big ideas, we’re going to learn if Twitter ads will rebound in 2024.
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The consumer electronics show (CES) is one of the biggest deals of year. Every company with a consumer product or idea for one from Apple to Zomba shows off how tech is going to change your life. It’s break, make, or make it big for tinkerers at brands. The people who think up hepa filters at Dyson for our earbuds need to be the needle media uses AI to find in a high-tech haystack.
The biggest brand whose rep is riding on CES is Twitter. It’s been raining a long time. The platform is adrift. Musk needs to know if there’s life out there.
Twitter has always been a collective. A collection of sub-audiences. That’s been its hidden strength. Sports fans, political junkies, tech bros, VC, finance, media, tech, and medical folks can here to find their peeps or find them annoying. Either way, they followed their leaders and quipped their brains out.
Some of it started to unravel before Musk bought it. I’ve been tracking medical activity on Twitter for years. It peaked three five years ago. While the decline accelerated under Musk’s ownership, it’s not clear if that’s causal or correlation.
Years ago, if you had something cool at CES, you tweeted about it. If you want to find the next cool thing you found it on Twitter. What trended on Twitter got storified on CNBC and on other even more mainstream media. Twitter was the diving rod to success.
CES runs January 8-11. For those three days, brands will be posting on Twitter. They will want to see that people see their stuff, like it, get enthused, share it with friends. Ideally, BMW will want to see that people Google its self-painting car and they will use all sorts of fuzzy logic tech to connect that hype cycle to Twitter.
If that happens, Twitter will have a story for advertisers. We are the place where cool things trend. It won’t be easy. Those same brands will be posting on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and everywhere else.
I took a quick look at the CES feed on Twitter at the end of the first morning sesh. So far, I’ve seen American Psychology Association, Bloomberg, Bosch, Brunswick, NASDAQ, Samsung, and Walmart posting about their innovations. LG is posting their brains out.
For its part, Twitter is doing what it can. The CES stuff is at the top of the trend stack — that’s a premium ad spot. There’s a video atop the feed. When you scroll down, the video stays pinned to the bottom, right (on desktop). They have reminders on the feed. They know this matters. CES is their Super Bowl. In fact, it’s bigger than their Super Bowl. CES intersects most of Twitter’s historically big and active audiences: gizmos, gadgets, and gewgaws.
What I haven’t see in the CES — so far — is a single paid ad. Not one. That tells me that Twitter couldn’t get a big-name brand to pay for ads in its CES experience. That means no pre-sales. Which is pretty damning. To put it in context, Peloton put out a press release when they attached their brand to the made for advertising #TikTokFitness hashtag and called it a partnership.
To be fair, I didn’t do an exhaustive analysis of Twitter’s CES ads. But, I can tell you when I’m on Twitter, I see an ad among the first few posts in any feed and an ad every dozen or so posts. I’ve scrolled through CES stuff on Twitter enough that I should have seen several ads.
Now, Twitter may have opted not to put their inventory of mostly schlocky ads in their premium CES feed. Those ads look awful and make the platform look like a public access cable channel in 1982. That may be even more damning.
So, instead of quoting an anonymous Musk-hater who says Twitter servers will go dark. Or, cherry picking data that lets me write gloom and doom. Or, citing a stock analyst who gets press for saying Twitter is worth 92.6% less than when Musk bought it, I figured I write this.
It’s been raining a long time. Musk’s plaform is adrift. When CES is over, Musk will either have an olive branch for advertisers in ’24 or he’ll know what it sounds like when doves cry.
P.S.
Dang. I should have gone with Three Days of the Condor. What was I thinking. :(