We deliver! Get curated industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe to Adweek newsletters.
X’s global head of marketing Angela Zepeda, who joined the platform in September, told ADWEEK editor in chief Ryan Joe at Social Media Week that X will air a brand campaign later this year.
The message of the campaign, which Zepeda said is likely to debut sometime “after Cannes,” positions X as the go-to place for people to stay on the pulse of culture and news.
“The brief that we gave to our agency to think about was [that we] wanted X to be in the center of a tagline that would give a call-to-action, and that people would understand why you would go to this platform,” Zepeda said.
The campaign also aims to send the message that “if it breaks in culture, you will come to X,” she added.
In Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform in 2022 and his subsequent decision to change its name from Twitter to X, Zepeda acknowledged that some brand equity had been lost.
“As a brand marketer,” she said, “I had a lot of respect for Twitter—the name of it. It’s a really great case study. It was about the chirping, telling people where you were in real time. The ‘tweeting’—that was perfect. That was great.”
X’s opportunity to redefine itself will come with its forthcoming brand campaign, she suggested.
In the push, X isn’t just attempting to win over users but also advertisers. Many of the platform’s biggest spenders, including Disney, Unilever, Apple, and Mars, dialed back ad spend or abandoned the platform altogether in the wake of Musk’s drastic platform changes and loosened content moderation policies.
And while many advertisers have since returned—with the total number of companies advertising on the app up 15% in 2024, according to MediaRadar data—the company’s total U.S. ad revenue is still expected to see a 28% dip from 2023 to 2024, down to $1.4 billion from $2 billion.
Innovations in brand safety on the platform, Zepeda said, are helping to assuage advertisers’ concerns and regain their favor. These include the crowdsourced fact-checking Community Notes framework and a brand safety portal with adjacency tools that enable brands to set parameters for the kind of content they’d like their messages to appear next to.
Outside of its core advertising business, X is diversifying its revenue streams across subscription products as well as new offerings like X Money, a payment platform expected to launch this year in partnership with Visa, as well as developments in video content and original programming. The merger of X with Musk’s AI company xAI, announced in March, is also expected to usher in a slew of changes.
Asked whether Musk—whom Zepeda said she hasn’t yet met directly—still intends to transform X into a so-called “everything app” ala China’s WeChat, she suggested it’s still a path X is considering.
“So far, we’ve seen great success with the launches of the services we’ve done … so we’ll continue to press,” she said. “There’s a lot of roadmapping with our engineers. The true and whole vision for the app could go in that direction, but I think we’re seeing how U.S. consumers respond to the platform with some of these new innovations. The whole goal is to try to make this the app that everybody really does want to use.”
She added: “Lots of things are on the table for consideration, and that’s what makes our company very exciting.”
