The highlight of today’s 2023 Possible Event in Miami Beach – the Mobile Marketing Associations inaugural annual conference- was Elon Musk being interviewed by NBCU’s Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships, Linda Yaccarino. Here’s a summary of that interview, to the best of my recollection.
Musk, who briefly brought his son onto the stage to peek from behind the giant POSSIBLE letters at the audience, seemed relaxed and happy, if tired. The crowd, which must have counted two or three thousand strong, was cautiously welcoming, with applause on several occasions during the interview.
Yaccarino on her part was tough but respectful, not shying away from the difficult questions. None of the mutual shoulder-slapping usual at industry conferences.
As far as advertising on Twitter was concerned, it centered mostly around brand safety. When asked what he had to say to advertisers who did not want to run campaigns against hateful content, Musk replied that Twitter had introduced measures that had already greatly reduced hate speech, and that he was committed continuing to do so. As an example, he pointed to a recent interview with the BBC, in which the interviewing journalist had claimed there was a lot of hate speech on Twitter, but when prompted by Musk, could not name “a single example”.
One factor why advertising was placed in ill-fitting positions in the past, Musk explained, was because “Twitter 1.0”, i.e. pre-Musk Twitter, did not allow running ads against keywords.
Musk said that ads could run the gamut from spam on the one hand to relevant, entertaining, funny, and informative ads on the other. He wanted marketers to contribute to giving users a great experience by serving them the latter, calling such ads “actual content”.
Yaccarino asked whether Musk was willing to reintroduce for Twitter 2.0 an advertiser council that had had direct influence on the platform during the Twitter 1.0 era. Musk replied he felt direct influence was not appropriate, but acknowledged that advertisers had “legitimate concerns” that he wanted to hear about in an open forum.
While the interview had been widely anticipated to be mostly about advertising on Twitter, a make or break attempt at getting brand advertisers back on to Twitter, it actually spent most of the time covering a wide range of other subjects.
Musk emphasized the importance of free speech, transparency, and trust in creating open and transparent platforms, and pointed out that Twitter had open-sourced the algorithm by which the platform decided which tweets to recommend to users.
He also spoke to the importance of open platforms enabling citizen journalism and providing a forum for everyone’s voice to be heard, as opposed to “five publishers” or editors-in-chief deciding what people got to see.
Musk addressed concerns about AI and safety, emphasizing simplicity and transparency.
Finally, he spoke to the issue of Twitter’s new blue verification checkmark scheme, the target of a lot of criticism. He emphasized the need for a level playing field, where citizens had just as much of a voice as do journalists, and that introducing a $7 subscription fee had been an unavoidable step for fighting bots. “You can literally run hundreds of thousands of bots on just one machine, AI allowing them to act exactly like humans would do.” But if bot-runners had to pay $7 for every bot…
The interview closed with a Q&A. By and large, Musk did a decent job in an interview that was skillfully conducted by Yaccarino, both addressing advertisers’ main concerns, as well as the main criticisms leveled at Twitter. Strong, but not endless applause by the crowd at the end.
W Media Research 