X is imploring advertisers who’ve abandoned the platform to return, promising some a sweetheart deal of up to $200,000 in extra value, according to a leaked pitch deck viewed by ADWEEK.
On one slide, presented to an ad agency with many clients that have not invested in the platform for a number of months, X suggested it would toss in 50% of added value for every dollar spent, up to $200,000 per advertiser.
Details of what constitutes “added value”—whether discounts, free ad credits, rebates, or something else entirely—were unspecified.
The incentive was framed as a “return-to-platform incentive” in the slide.
The incentive structure is the same as a promotion X ran last year for Omnicom specifically, though the company’s pitch to the holding company also included additional financial incentives like 15% in media credits for spending on X’s inventory via auction, excluding revenue-sharing products.
The platform ad revenues were roughly halved after Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover in 2022. Last year, it brought in about $1.25 billion compared to 2021’s $2.43 billion from ads, per Emarketer estimates. Many advertisers dialed back their investments or exited the platform altogether over brand safety concerns posed by X’s lax approach to content moderation and misinformation under Musk’s leadership.
More than 20 slides of the leaked deck were dedicated to promoting X’s brand safety credentials, transparency practices, and built-in controls for advertisers that help them avoid “sensitive content.”
In one slide, X explained how Grok—the AI chatbot operated by X’s parent company xAI and integrated natively into X—is being deployed to aid brand safety. “ALL (sic) posts on X are reviewed by xAI’s Frontier model Grok for Brand Suitability,” it read. It also claimed that profile ads will only show up on X profiles that have been “fully vetted by Grok, which evaluates all compliance with X’s Rules and policies and Brand Suitability.”
