Hello, OptiMIST People!
Back at it again with KaMIST! Your weekly dose of insights into the latest marketing trends. In this week’s KaMIST we’ll dive into Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.
Whether it’s from his wealth, making space rockets or Teslas, you obviously know the name Elon Musk. The world’s richest man recently announced his $44bn (£38.1bn) takeover of Twitter through his tweet “the bird is freed”. Musk declared in a tweet that his aim of purchasing Twitter was not to make more money but to help humanity.
It didn’t take long for Elon Musk to implement significant changes in Twitter. It was reported that Elon Musk fired several top executives including Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and Twitter’s head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde. The dismissal of Twitter’s executives is mainly due to Musk’s goal to cut-costs.
Elon Musk also wanted to lessen the platform’s reliance on advertising. Based on his tweet on April 9th, 2022, he tweeted, “And no Ads. The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive”. As stated, Musk aims to remove ads from Twitter which would impact the marketing approaches by many brands. However, Musk has said, “I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you”. Hence, regardless of removing ad spaces, he still believes advertising is important for the platform when it’s done right. It is still unclear how exactly Elon Musk will modify how advertising works on twitter.
Lastly, Musk then tweeted “free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences”. Musk doesn’t want any content to be restricted. Thus, he wants to reverse the permanent bans of controversial accounts such as former president Donald Trump. This could prevent brands from marketing on the platform, as they may not want their products on the same page as controversy. On the flip side, controversy tends to spark debates and buzz which could allow brands to reach more potential customers, or better known as shock advertising.
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