Back on November 21, Elon Musk gathered what remained of Twitter’s employees at its San Francisco headquarters to tell them that the dreaded layoffs were finally over, after roughly gutting around two-thirds of the company’s total workforce over the first few weeks as Twitter’s new Chief. Despite such an announcement, he keeps firing people. Like, what the heck dude? Who continues doing what they said they would stop doing? We call those kinds of people madmen. They used to burn people at the stake for shenanigans like this back in the colonial era.

Musk The Sunderer

Just last week, dozens of Twitter employees across its sales and engineering departments were laid off, including one of Musk’s direct reports who was managing engineering for Twitter’s ads business. This is based on company sources and Social Media posts from affected employees seen by The Verge. What this means is that Musk has done three more rounds of layoffs after ‘promising’ to stop.

Meanwhile, he has given a directive internally to revamp how ads are targeted in Twitter’s main Feed within a week. This is supposedly part of his plan to fix what he has publicly called “the worst ad relevance on Earth.” Musk’s plan is to change Twitter’s ad targeting to work like Google’s search ads, which target primarily by searched keywords, as opposed to user activity and profile data. It’s an approach that’s optimized for use with search engines. Why? Because people use search engines with intent, whether that be to find answers or look up products. This is the same concept that has helped Google build one of the most profitable businesses of all time. For Social Media though, it hasn’t worked nearly as well.

Tweeting last Sunday, laid off Engineering Manager for Monetization Marcin Kadluckza, who reported directly to Musk, hinted at the feasibility of the one-week deadline. As per Kadluckza:

“I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though).” 

It has been confirmed that Musk did give an aggressive one-week deadline just before Kadluckza and others in the ads, consumer, and sales orgs were given the boot last Friday. Here’s something to think about – Musk gave a similar deadline to revamp Twitter Blue when he first bought the company.

The Wrap

Improving Twitter’s ads has been a key focus of Musk since he bought the company. He has correctly pointed out that Twitter’s ads are less personalized and effective than its competitors. What’s really uncertain is if changing targeting to be more keyword-driven like Google ads will actually improve the quality of Twitter’s advertising, as others with a better understanding of the trade-offs have pointed out.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3ExEE7a