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An employee retrieves a shopping cart from the parking lot of a Walmart store on May 18, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.
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CNN
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Walmart acknowledged Friday that’s not the case. Advertisement on social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter.
“We are not actively advertising on X. This is not about a specific change in advertising policy,” a Walmart spokesperson told CNN in an updated statement late Friday.
“We are constantly optimizing our marketing efforts. These decisions are made in a dynamic market and may change in the future.”
Last month, many big-name brands suspended advertising on X after Musk publicly endorsed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories supported by white supremacists.
Following the news, Joe Benarroch, head of operations at X, told CNN in a statement that brands that advertise on the platform can get in front of a huge number of users. .
“Walmart has a great community on X, with 500 million users on or doing everything online,” Benarroch said. He said.
Benaroch argued that Walmart’s decision to pull advertising from X was not a direct result of Musk’s actions, and said Walmart continues to be active on the platform in other ways.
“Walmart hasn’t advertised on X since October.”[ober] So this is not a recent hiatus, and the company is just organically connecting with a community of over 1 million people on X,” Walmart said in a statement, including a post the company made on Friday after announcing the news. Regarding the ad freeze, which was pointed out for continuing to post on the platform.
Musk apologized Wednesday for his “stupidest” social media post ever. But he slammed advertisers who are leaving his platform.
“I don’t want them to advertise,” Musk said at the New York Times Dealbook Summit in New York. “If anyone’s going to blackmail me with advertising or money, fuck you. Go. Damn it yourself,” he said.
The ad leaks included media companies such as Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate, and Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.
Walmart’s decision wasn’t made overnight, people said. The move is part of an escalating series of actions from the retailer, which added that it will continue to advertise on other social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
Craig Atkinson, CEO of digital marketing agency Code 3, told CNN that it’s not surprising that companies are removing ads and believes there is “no way to ring this bell.” Told.
“Big brands will say they don’t need X, they’ll find their audience elsewhere, and they’re probably right,” he says. “As long as Company X has a loyal user base, opportunistic new brands will continue to buy advertising, but I don’t think big brands will come back.”
Meanwhile, Jasmine Engberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said it’s another example of how Musk’s erratic leadership has affected the company.
“If anyone is killing X, it’s Elon Musk, not advertisers,” she said. “If X were to go bankrupt, an autopsy would reveal a series of platform policy decisions, layoffs, tweets, and hostile comments from Mr. Musk that deprived X of its primary source of income.”
Enberg noted that before the incident, Insider Intelligence predicted in October that Company X’s global advertising revenue would plummet by 54.4% this year.
“For the company to personally and publicly attack the advertisers who have kept X alive during an advertising boycott could be fatal to X’s advertising business,” Enberg added.
“It’s easier to pull ads out than to bring them back. What’s unique about the X ad boycott is that it’s not primarily about content adjacency or moderation,” she said. “Advertisers are concerned about reputational damage and uncertainty in their dealings with Mr. Musk. [his] The comments will only deepen the rift between them. ”
Musk visited Israel this week, visiting a kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7, meeting with families of Israeli hostages, and meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog.
But Musk said Wednesday that his trip to Israel was “not an apology trip” and “didn’t answer all of that.” Musk said he’s a good person, but he’s not going to “tap dance” to show people that.
– CNN’s Jennifer Cohn contributed to this report