Brands taking ‘wait and see’ approach to Elon Musk’s Twitter, says Wunderkind’s Jamie Hoey

A third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks, highlighting the nervousness about Elon Musk’s planned changes.

Brands are closely eyeing Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership to decide whether to keep their advertising spend on the platform, according to the newly appointed country manager of US marketing tech giant Wunderkind.

Speaking in an interview with The Australian, Wunderkind’s Australian country manager Jamie Hoey said that the brands he’s working with are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach for now about deploying marketing spend on Twitter.

Recent data from Pathmatics shows more than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks, highlighting the nervousness among advertisers about Elon Musk’s planned changes.

“I think brands are cautious about appearing alongside certain types of content,” Mr Hoey said.

“Brand safety is going to be something that gets raised an awful lot, especially if there’s going to be more ‘freedom of speech’ under Elon Musk, and brands will want to ensure that they’re appearing alongside something that correlates with them and not potentially alongside something that could be seen as controversial.”

Pathmatics data shows more than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks, highlighting the nervousness about Elon Musk’s planned changes. Picture: Samuel Corum/AFP

Wunderkind, which was recently valued at more than $US1bn ($1.51bn), has targeted Australia as a growth market for its software-based marketing platform, and is opening a Sydney office this month. Local customers include Glue Store, HelloFresh and Uniqlo.

The company has around 800 employees globally across offices in New York, London, Indianapolis, Montreal, Amsterdam and now Sydney, where the company says it plans to grow headcount exponentially across sales, customer success and client partnerships in the coming 12 months.

According to Mr Hoey, previously managing director of digital agency Croud, marketers are facing a perfect storm of challenges, with consumer spending predicted to decline amid rising advertising costs, and Google’s planned removal of third-party cookies on the horizon in 2024.

He said that by not fully maximising first-party data and owned channels, retailers are leaving up to 10 per cent on the table in missed revenue due to wasted marketing spend and an over reliance on paid channels. Online businesses use Wunderkind to remember who their users are, allowing them to deliver one-to-one messages on websites, through emails and texts.

“Local e-commerce and retail players need a proven revenue channel to drive sustained growth,” he said.

“When Google does depreciate third party cookies, brands will need to use and rely on their first-party data a lot more. Ultimately it will be the most valuable data they have, because it’s customers telling them what they like and what they don’t, and I look at Google’s move as an opportunity rather than a problem, and it’s where solutions like Wunderkind can come in to play to help negate it.

“We’re going to be going out and hiring, in comparison to some of the other MarTech companies that are maybe pausing hiring. We have a strong belief we can be really successful here.”