It should be no surprise that Elon Musk’s RSVP to attend Possible, the ad industry confab set for next week, caused a rift among the most powerful marketers. After all, Musk is a professional rift stirrer. So, when word got out that Musk would appear on stage, a few chief marketing officers on the guest list expressed concerns. On the one hand, they recognized he is a billionaire who controls one of the most powerful social media companies in the world; on the other, Musk is a vector of chaos whose every tweet is a possible liability for brands on Twitter.

One of the attendees, Diana Haussling, Colgate-Palmolive’s chief marketing officer, summed it up in an email after Possible organizers announced Musk’s participation: “I am both excited for the [success] of the conference while also mindful of the harmful and often racist rhetoric of Elon Musk.”

Tariq Hassan, McDonald’s chief marketing and experience officer, and Kristi Argyilan, senior VP of Albertsons Media Collective, also noted concern that marketers might make it too easy for Musk to restore his brand without appropriate pushback. 

Read more: Musk to speak at marketing trade conference

Possible is backed by MMA Global, the mobile marketing association, of which McDonald’s, Colgate-Palmolive and Albertsons are members.

Semafor first reported on emails of dissent regarding Musk attending Possible. Twitter declined to comment.

Musk has been the center of a storm of his own making since buying Twitter in October. Brands fled the platform, pulling advertising dollars, but they are slowly returning. Since the Super Bowl, some of Twitter’s biggest spenders have resumed ad campaigns. Ad Age has found Nike and McDonald’s running ads there, after being among the most visible marketers to retrench when Musk first took over. Mondelēz also is planning to return to Twitter, a person familiar with the brand’s strategy told Ad Age. Mondelēz, Nike, and McDonald’s did not return requests for comment.

There have been other high-profile brands, which had a lighter footprint on the platform in the months after Musk took over, that have recently been more visible on Twitter. 

To advertise or not on Twitter is a sensitive subject, and it's one that brands are not eager to announce publicly. Musk has shown a penchant for putting brands on blast to his 134.3 million followers if he senses dissent from marketers. In November, he threatened to “name and shame” brands that defied him.

Possible trouble

Some MMA members were uneasy after MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart announced Musk’s appearance at the Miami event in an email in March. In the email, Stuart said “no one represents making the impossible possible as Elon does.”

“His willingness to leverage success and personal financial resources to further an agenda under the guise of freedom of speech is perpetuating racism resulting in direct threats to their communities and a potential for brand safety compromise we should all be concerned about,” McDonald’s USA CMO Hassan wrote. “Further, all of us who lead our brand's investments across platforms were required to navigate a situation post-acquisition that objectively can only be characterized as ranging from chaos to moments of irresponsibility.”

Ad Age spoke to multiple people affiliated with MMA Global, and these people said that most marketers were ready to talk with Musk, even if they disagreed with him. Marketers were confident that Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal's chairman of global advertising and partnerships, would handle the Musk interview appropriately, these people said.

“Not one person on that email thread is going to drop off,” one of the marketing leaders said.

“As a professional organization of marketers our responsibility is to support the industry in engaging in constructive dialogue about pressing issues we face,” Stuart said in a statement to Ad Age. “Elon was invited as the owner of Twitter to hear his plans for managing the next generation of the Twitter platform and, ultimately, so the attendees gain the perspective they need to make the right decisions for their brands and businesses.”

Ad Age has learned that some of the marketers who presented resistance in the email chain plan to meet one-on-one with Musk in Miami, including Hassan. 

As a marketing leader at a major brand, you will face questions from your CEO, said another person close to MMA. “They will ask, did you meet with Elon and perform a threat assessment as to whether or not you can do business with him,” this person said. “As the media buyer, you’ve got to make the effort. When the threat is the CEO, you must meet with the CEO.”

Read more: WPP's Twitter support and what it means for advertisers

The person or the platform

Brands are being asked to support the platform without dwelling on Musk’s personal crusades in his Twitter feed. “The risk has moved from the platform to the person,” said Lou Paskalis, newly appointed chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media, a media watchdog group. “And, so, it’s a different risk threat assessment [for marketers]. I now have to investigate this dude, not this platform, to make it safe for my brand.”

Possible's organizers hope the event is the opportunity for that scrutiny. It will be Musk’s first official appearance in front of a purely advertising crowd since he claimed Twitter’s ownership. Musk is set to speak with NBCU's Yaccarino, who has been on record calling for advertisers to hear Musk out for months. NBCU is a top media partner with Twitter.

Brands are looking at Twitter again because they sense the worst could be over, and advertisers are trying to diversify where they spend money, according to an ad exec at a major brand, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Leadership changes at Twitter have stabilized,” this person said. “There are new contextual ad targeting tools, and ultimately people are saying there have been no major blowups lately.”

At the same time, this person said that Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been more aggressive with advertisers, pushing up pricing to expand its margins. This person also said brands are watching Chinese-owned TikTok and its potential ban in the U.S.

With all these variables brands have budgets to spend, and could spread some of that money to Twitter. "It will be significantly less" than it was before, though, advertising leaders said.

“The budgets that used to be allocated to Twitter are gone,” said a top executive from an advertising industry trade group, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They’ve been reallocated elsewhere and all the agencies and marketers that I’ve spoken with, they don’t really envision the money returning to Twitter any time soon.”

More news: Twitter's tools to measure offensive content around ads

Just for titters

Ad agencies and top brands have opposed Musk’s changes. Activist groups, including NAACP and Anti-Defamation League, have said Musk emboldened hateful actors with his looser moderation policies. Meanwhile, Musk framed his stances as support for “free speech,” giving accounts wide latitude to spout off on Twitter.

Musk clearly feels hemmed in by activist groups, and he tweeted in November that they “hate free speech” and blamed them for pressuring advertisers to revolt. Musk has also made less serious, if not equally puzzling, changes to Twitter, such as last week, when he removed the “w” from the Twitter sign at the San Francisco headquarters. It now reads “Titter.” Earlier this month, Musk also changed the Twitter bird logo on the website to the Doge dog, a meme reference to Dogecoin. Musk recently changed the profile name on his Twitter account to read: Harry Bōlz.

Twitter has proved to be a risky place for brands. Just last week, Nike and Bud Light were at the center of conservative outrage, after the brands appeared in social media posts by Dylan Mulvaney, a trans creator. A contingent of conservative Twitter users called for boycotts of Nike and Bud Light because of their public embrace of the trans woman. The culture clash played out on other social platforms, including TikTok and Instagram. 

Nike posted to Instagram: “Be kind … encourage each other.”

Nike did not return a request for comment, but a review of its Twitter account showed the brand was less active on Twitter in the months after Musk took over. In recent months, particularly around the Super Bowl in February, the brand started to tweet more. Then this month, Nike launched a new Twitter account for its .Swoosh community, a Web3-based loyalty program. Nike has also been seen running more ads on Twitter.

In November, major ad agencies and brands backed away. In December, Twitter’s ad revenue fell 73% year over year, as measured by Standard Media Index, which tracks receipts from the largest ad agencies in the U.S.

Twitter’s business is plummeting, according to Insider Intelligence’s latest analysis. “Twitter needs to unravel Musk’s personal brand from the company’s corporate image to regain advertiser trust and bring back ad dollars,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in a research report this week. Twitter ad revenue is expected to drop 30% in 2023 compared to 2022, the report said, adding that Twitter activity would also decline among users. Twitter’s user base could drop 5% by 2024, Insider Intelligence said. Twitter still ranks third, however, in terms of minutes spent on the service, among those users, trailing TikTok and YouTube, Insider Intelligence said.

Sheryl Daija, founder and CEO of Bridge, an independent DE&I-focused trade group for the global marketing industry, said that members of her group were highly critical of how Musk was being presented at Possible. The tone was off from the start, Daija said, feting Musk, instead of vetting Musk.

“His involvement has been celebrity-like versus taking the perspective of being a little more humble,” Daija said, “and understanding the pain that he causes a lot of people just by virtue of his presence. There must be a stronger acknowledgment of that.”

Bridge would invite Musk and similar figures to events, Daija said, “but it’s the way you show up, it’s the way that you position it” that matters.