Elon Musk and Twitter Inc.’s new Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino won’t be at the advertising industry’s biggest annual event this week, even as the social networking company works to win back spending on the platform.
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk and Twitter Inc.’s new Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino won’t be at the advertising industry’s biggest annual event this week, even as the social networking company works to win back spending on the platform.
A Twitter spokesman confirmed that neither executive will be at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a week-long event in the South of France that attracts the industry’s most influential executives as well as key advertisers and platforms.
The social media company did announce on Tuesday that it will explore solutions from companies that specialize in tracking the quality of ads, such as DoubleVerify Holdings Inc. and Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. Twitter said it would start this process to improve “brand safety and suitability controls.”
Read More: Managing Musk Will Be New Twitter CEO’s Biggest Challenge
Advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue, have been spooked by Musk’s cavalier attitude toward speech and content moderation since he bought the company last year. In March, Musk said Twitter’s ad intake had dropped by 50% in a matter of months. Fidelity cut its private valuation of the company by a third.
Yaccarino, an industry veteran who was running advertising sales at NBCUniversal, started as CEO earlier this month as part of a push to stop the bleeding. Last week, at an event in Paris, Musk said that “almost all the advertisers have said they have either come back, or they will come back.”
Yaccarino has provided “some reassurance that the advertiser would have a bigger voice at the company,” Mark Read, the CEO of WPP Plc, said in an interview from the show. “We’ll have to see how that goes.”
Read, who runs the world’s largest advertising firm, said that some of his clients have returned to spending on Twitter. Others haven’t. His advice to them hasn’t changed. “It remains: proceed with caution,” he said.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.