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Glory days, well, they’ll pass you by.
Springsteen might have been singing about a bygone suburban dream, but hey, the lyrics still apply to what’s happening over at X, formerly known as Twitter and also formerly known as a social media platform that advertisers were interested in.
Those glory days have passed: More than a quarter of advertisers are planning a cutback on spending on X, “driven by brand safety concerns and poor perceptions around innovation and trust,” according to new research from marketing insights and analytics company Kantar.
The report, which polled 18,000 consumers and 1,000 senior marketers globally, found that a net 26% of marketers planned to cut back spending on X in 2025, marking the “biggest recorded pullback from any major global ad platform,” per Kantar’s data.
“Advertisers have been moving their marketing spend away from X for several years,” Gonca Bubani, a director at Kantar, said in a statement. “The stark acceleration of this trend in the past 12 months means a turnaround currently seems unlikely.”
With Elon Musk at the helm, marketers’ trust in advertising on X dipped further than it already had, from 22% in 2022 to 12% this year. Now, only 4% of marketers think advertisements on X provide brand safety. By way of contrast, Kantar notes that 39% of marketers have confidence in Google’s brand safety.
“Marketers are brand custodians and need to trust the platforms they use,” Bubani continued. “X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next—it’s difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment.”
And that’s the thing about glory days: They really can pass you by.