Mondelez International Makes a Comeback on X (Twitter) Amid Brand Safety Announcement

Oreo maker Mondelez International was among the first global brands to pull ads off X (formerly known as Twitter) last year after Elon Musk acquired the social media site. The company cited hate speech concerns, according to reports by Reuters. However, X’s brand safety tools have brought the company back on the platform since May, Adweek has learned. Amid declining ad revenue, X announced new brand safety tools today. The social media platform is offering U.S. advertisers “premium-vetted inventory” via its existing partnership with ad-verification company Integral Ad Science. The platform plans to expand these solutions internationally. Zoom’s Updated AI Policy Draws Concern From Privacy Experts This inventory will give brands the confidence that their ads appear adjacent to content that meets the GARM Framework as verified by IAS, according to the company. “X has made tremendous progress in building brand safety tools that empower advertisers to leverage the power of their platform while curating the context in which the ads appear,” Jon Halvorson, svp of consumer experiences at Mondelez International, said in a statement. “Adding pre-bid meets a critical commitment made by their leadership and we are eager to implement this new feature going forward.” To that, X is also introducing Sensitivity Settings, an automated tool that will “help brands establish the right balance between reach and suitability when it comes to ad placement on the platform,” the company told Adweek in a statement. Made available in two weeks, this tool will give advertisers levers under the Standard Sensitivity and Conservative Sensitivity bucket. While the former bucket is for brands with a moderate sensitivity threshold, the latter is suitable for brands with a strict sensitive threshold, the company said. Marketers have cited content moderation and brand safety concerns on X for some time now. To suppress concerns, X introduced pre-bid adjacency control for advertisers in December last year. Since then, more than 1,900 global advertisers have tested the tool to avoid harmful content adjacency with an efficacy rate of more than 99%, per the statement. These include Coca-Cola, Visa, Taco Bell, Amazon, Marriott, Mondelez, Expedia and Applebee’s, as per X. The platform also initiated a request for proposal process to evaluate brand safety solutions from its tech vendors Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify in June. Still, X appears to be overlooked in brand conversation among marketers, ad buyers told Adweek. Under the Standard Sensitivity, brands will be able to avoid hate speech, explicitly sexual content and excessive profanity. These categories carry forward to Conservative Sensitivity with additional categories such as obscenity, spam and drugs. X also plans to introduce a third sensitive preference, called Relaxed Sensitivity, which will show ads alongside a broader range of content to maximize reach. “Unlike Mondelez, a lot of brands are going to sit on the sidelines and wait and see how this goes,” said Matt Voda, CEO of Optimine Software. X lost in brand conversations Although these brand safety efforts make sense, X seems to be lost in conversations among brands and marketers who don't find a compelling reason to invest ad dollars on the platform. This is partly because of the lack of performance metrics available on X—something the platform has struggled with prior to Musk's ownership. “Despite Meta's privacy headwinds, X was still waning behind in conversations back then,” said Avi Ben Zvi, general manager of North America at Winclap. X's new premium inventory has left marketers skeptical about whether this would inflate the current CPM, Zvi pointed out. X found this concern to be a fair assessment since "it's premium inventory," the company told Adweek. Elsewhere, ad buyers continue to point out that X still lacks new and innovative ad products to bait advertisers. "X needs to solve for product innovation, algorithm, bid levers and more traditional attribution models that advertisers are used to," said Zvi. According to Jon Molina, vp of paid social at Brainlabs, transparency about the unique nuances of IAS’ solution, understanding what parameters have been put in place for the tool to function, and to what degree the machine learning is influenced by the content on the platform, will be critical to regain brand trust.