Many German companies continue to advertise on the short message service

Dusseldorf According to Volkswagen, Allianz also no longer wants to use Twitter for advertising activities for the time being. The insurer announced this on Monday in a survey by the Handelsblatt among the 40 Dax companies, half of which responded.

On Friday, carmaker Volkswagen had already recommended its brand subsidiaries such as Audi, Porsche, Skoda and Seat to stop advertising on Twitter for the time being.

Since the takeover of the platform by Tesla boss Elon Musk, many companies worldwide have been concerned about Twitter’s so-called “content moderation”. The team removes tweets that spread conspiracy theories, incitement to violence and hate speech, and suspends the authors’ accounts.

As the first official act of the takeover, Musk had laid off around half of the 7,500 employees and announced that he would restore a supposedly restricted freedom of speech on Twitter.

However, many Dax companies have not yet decided how they want to deal with their advertising expenditure on the short message service. The pharmaceutical and chemical group Bayer considers a decision to be “significantly premature”, the health care group Fresenius currently sees “no reason to completely forgo Twitter advertising”. Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telekom, Henkel and Covestro also want to initially monitor further developments.

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Andrea Malgara, Managing Partner at the large media agency Mediaplus, recommends companies to suspend all advertising activities on Twitter for the time being and to monitor the current situation. “Especially on digital media, the environment has a strong influence on how the actual advertising is perceived.” Over the weekend, observers noticed that more users who had previously been blocked have registered again, and the number of polarizing and extremist tweets has increased.

International corporations such as General Motors, Mondelez and Pfizer no longer advertise on Twitter. This hits the platform hard: Of the $5.1 billion in sales in 2021, the company made 89 percent with ads.

Twitter is a less relevant advertising platform for German companies

For companies, on the other hand, the procedure is easy: Twitter accounts for less than one percent of the global digital advertising budget of a total of 521 billion dollars, according to figures from the US industry service E-Marketer. “People who address advertisers particularly well via Twitter can also reach the companies via other platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok or Meta,” says advertising specialist Malgara.

For many Dax companies, Twitter has little advertising importance. Allianz itself only advertises “to a small extent” on Twitter, as does Continental. Nivea producer Beiersdorf only spends one percent of its marketing spend on Twitter ads. Deutsche Bank “does not pursue any affordable activities” on the platform, and even before the Musk takeover, Daimler Truck, Zalando, Heidelberg Materials, MTU, Symrise and Brenntag did not advertise on Twitter. According to estimates, only three to five percent of people in Germany use Twitter. In the US there are significantly more.

The comparatively minor importance of Twitter makes it easier for companies to pause or reconsider their activities. It would be different with Facebook or Google. Their parent companies Meta and Alphabet together dominate the advertising market with a market share of 62 percent and are indispensable advertising platforms for many companies.

Previous advertising boycotts did not last long

However, the past shows that a boycott of advertising platforms such as Facebook or Google, which are much more important in Germany, does not have to last forever. In 2020, around 1,000 companies reduced their advertising spend on Facebook, including Adidas, Coca-Cola and Volkswagen. They followed the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which accused the social network of not doing enough to stop hate speech.

But the Facebook boycott that followed didn’t last long and had little impact. Spending by the top 100 advertisers in July 2020 fell just 12 percent to $221 million, according to advertising platform Pathmatics.

Although Facebook reacted by introducing warnings under posts, the initiators of the boycott wrote in an analysis a year later that there had been no major structural changes. By then, the advertisers had long since returned.

Advertising expert Andrea Malgara believes that this could be repeated on Twitter: “If the situation on Twitter calms down again so that brands find a safe environment, the platform will continue to have a right to exist for advertisers in the long term.”

To do this, Twitter must get a grip on hate speech on its own platform. This is also important to the Dax companies: Eon only wants to get involved in “environments that consistently encounter hate speech”. “Guidelines that promote a respectful and constructive exchange” are also important to Covestro.

Twitter security chief Yoel Roth tried to reassure advertisers accordingly: In his department, only 15 percent of the workforce had been laid off, “more than 80 percent of our content moderation continues to run completely unaffected by the changes.”

More: Musk threatens advertisers after VW pulls out

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