On Friday, retail giant Walmart announced that it would be scaling back its advertising on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, noting in its statement, “we’ve found some other platforms better for reaching our customers.”
According to a source familiar with the company’s decision-making, the company has been preparing to make the move for a while. However the announcement comes as the social media platform is enduring an exodus of advertisers following a series of controversial posts by the CEO, Elon Musk on the platform.
According to data from MarketingDive, Walmart spends roughly $2.7 billion on advertising per year. Joe Benarroch, X’s head of operations, in an email to CBS MoneyWatch said that although the retailer has announced it would scale back, it is still maintaining a large presence on X.
Benarroch said, “Walmart has a wonderful community of more than a million people on X, and with a half a billion people on X, every year the platform experiences 15 billion impressions about the holidays alone with more than 50% of X users doing most or all of their shopping online.”
Earlier this week, during the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit, Musk defiantly cursed advertisers which sought to distance themselves from X over Musk’s personal statements, telling them if they want to “blackmail me with advertising” into not saying what he believed, they could, “go fuck yourself.” He went on to warn that by cutting off their ad spending on the platform, they could “kill” X.
He added the warning, “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”
The brouhaha began when a poster on X claimed that Jews are fomenting hatred for white people, to which Musk replied, “You have posted the actual truth.” Dozens of advertisers, including major players such as Apple, Coca Cola and Disney have abandoned advertising on the platform since then.
Advertisers have long sought to not let their advertising be placed near controversial material, for fear their brands will get caught up in the fights over it, alienating segments of their customer base over issues in which they themselves have no position.
A recent New York Times report fond that if major advertisers pull their ads from X it could cost the social media company as much as $75 million in revenue.
On Wednesday, Musk called his support of the post claiming Jews fomented hatred of white people “one of the most foolish” posts he’d ever posted on X.
He added, “I am quite sorry. I should in retrospect not have replied to that particular post.”
