The Advertising Research group that worked with client teams for big advertisers such as Samsung, Verizon, AT&T and Google, doing custom studies and handling third-party measurement, also lost more than 70% of its people, this person said, leaving only two to handle prioritized work for a host of tech and telecom advertisers.
A third team that handled consumer and customer research studies globally was eliminated except for one employee, the person said. Employees across all three groups worked on brand safety issues at times.
Advertisers that have paused spending on Twitter have tended to be brand advertisers who are more focused on audience measurement and brand lift studies that the insights and analytics group would handle. Many of the remaining direct-response advertisers focus only on clicks and conversions they can attribute to their ads.
"So far we haven’t had any issues on the analytics side,” said one agency executive, adding the agency has no brand lift studies for clients in market right now. “For the one remaining client we have on the platform, they haven’t experienced issues yet,” the agency executive said.
However, staff cuts could make it hard for brand advertisers that have paused spending to return to Twitter. And they also raise a question of whether Twitter can continue to provide brand safety controls for advertisers or get MRC accreditation for its processes, since almost every person on the team working on the audit is now gone, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Of course, the brand safety team at Twitter has one less thing to monitor these days. Sky News reports that Twitter has quietly dropped its policy against sharing Covid-19 misinformation. And the same advertisers that want brand lift studies and third-party audience measurement also tend to be the ones most concerned about brand safety.
Still, Musk has touted audience numbers and brand safety as selling points as recently as Nov. 26. He tweeted a presentation deck showing average daily users at all-time highs but hate speech incidence declining to levels similar to before he took over— after an initial spike in late October and early November.