Twitter Ads Reform:

Bring Management of the Platform Back to North America

This letter is intended to bring Twitter advertisers together to make the ad platform an online resource run by professionals FOR professionals.

X Corp is clearly unaware of the detrimental nature of its working relationship with the small team it has left in Mumbai.

The prime goal is to see management of the platform brought home to North America and assigned to an intrapreneurial team of dedicated account managers.

If you're an advertiser who's been negatively impacted by the Ad Team's amateur operating style and decisions, there's a contact form at the end of this page. Use this contact form to share how they mismanaged your ad account.

The Problem:

Online traffic is the most vital source of revenue for just about all online businesses.

Building a business and maintaining its ongoing growth and success has never been more challenging.

With these kinds of obstacles, every decision counts and when the future of your business hinges on the decisions of others, you need the assurance you're dealing with competent professionals who understand your mission.

There is simply too much on the line for outcomes to be decided by arbitrary decisions.

The Ad Team focuses solely on speeding through its workloads and cutting many corners along the way to meet quotas, showing total disregard for the impact these actions have on advertisers as well as X Corp itself.

Here's a summary of the low-quality standards Twitter advertisers presently contend with:

1) Agents, regardless of education level or professional background, are given the ultimate power to terminate an ad account without  notice.

2) Agents offer no clear or personalized explanations for suspensions. There is no case-by-case approach - they merely communicate with pre-written templates that are copied and pasted into emails.

3) No matter how pressing or dire the situation, agents are a distant time zone away and advertisers in the west are left with excessively long wait times.

4) The "escalation" of cases is little more than lip service - wait times are equally as long as the standard queue and no specialists are assigned.

5) Any reviews of a case are merely illusory - all decisions will remain final. This is proven by the copy-and-paste email that is systematically issued to all advertisers.

6) There is no due process. In the event that an ad has been cited as "misleading or deceptive" one would figure that an advertiser could be asked to submit their source material to prove that all claims, fact and figures in their ads are accurate, true and fully substantiated.

7) NO exception for agency owners - the same rigid, small-minded approach will be applied to your agency. No regard is given for the potential termination of valuable client relationships or harm your reputation.

8) Larger advertisers with budgets exceeding $5000+ /month are not given any priority. No urgency is placed on follow-ups (that would include the follow up to the initial onboarding application). In other words, larger advertisers are also taken for granted.

The shortcomings of the Ad Team's work goes beyond the arbitrary, cookie-cutter approach it takes to all advertisers - it also extends to the overall operational health of the system, which is highly detrimental to X Corp's finances.

Non-Streamlined Billing Limitations:

Smaller and mid-sized advertisers are saddled with small credit limits. Once those credit limits are reached, their accounts are frozen by as much as 5 days until payments are cleared. That is 5 days that X Corp is cut off from cashflow.

A solution to this problem has been developed, however it is only being applied on a case-by-case basis.

With X Corp's finances being so dire, why isn't this solution being applied on a wide scale?

Additional Shortfalls:

The folks behind the Ad Team also appears to be managing the Monetization of Twitter Blue accounts.

At this present time, it's taking upwards of 3 months and longer to get approved for monetization.

Now that Meta's Threads is fully operational, this mundane wait time could drive frustrated creators away from the platform.

Long Term Impact if Problems Persist:

At the time this document is being written, Twitter is faced with two very grave issues.

The first of which is that ad revenue has dropped by 50% over the last few months, leaving the company barely solvent.

The second threat comes from Meta, which has launched Threads and will be concentrating its efforts to monetize this Twitter knock off very shortly.

Advertisers who've been stung by the Ads Team's mismanagement of their accounts will not be able to resist the opportunity to shift their ad dollars to Meta.

Twitter will not only suffer the loss of additional ad revenue, but see its chief rival fatten its war chest and put it in a better position to claim more market share.

The Solution:

The Ads Team's conduct clearly demonstrates a complete disregard for its employer's financial well-being. 

In true short-sighted nature, the employee's prime concern is with cashing in their pay checks, with no regard with where the funds for those payments come from.

Two solutions are being proposed. Whichever one X Corp. deems fittest, however, there should be an underlying set of standards that should be established and followed:

The most vital standard: When an ad is submitted for review, there are to be NO SUSPENSIONS whatsoever for non-compliant ads. 

The very spirit of a review process dictates that submitted creatives are assumed to be potential non-compliant with both parties working together to publish ads that are suitable, safe and useful to Twitter's users.

The review process should  be used to identify ads that violate policy and instruct the advertiser to revise the ad accordingly to meet compliance.

In addition to the fundamental rule, the following points should also be applied:

• Establish a base-level standard for quality of service - failure to meet that marker results in termination.
• Standard Operating Procedures are to be written and all employees are expected to follow through on their guidelines.
  
• No retroactive punishment - if a creative has been approved and is later deemed a violation, that ad can be halted, but the ad account in question will not be held responsible for what is a mistake on the part of the review team.
  
• No decisions are final - there is to be an appeal process - no one person can be trusted to make a proper first-and-final decision.

All queries must be addressed within a reasonable amount time - exceeding those times will result in a penalty.

Solution #1 -  Have X Corp. integrate Twitter Ads into the San Francisco or Toronto offices or a combination of the two.

Solution #2 -  Help an existing domestic customer service provider with the onboarding of Twitter's ad platform.

Get In Touch:

The reason for this initiative is simple - Twitter will go on to become far larger than what it presently is and with that, it's reach will become broader and more potent. There is a lot for advertisers to gain from this growth.

Feel free to also use this form to share your own experiences with the dismal way the Twitter Ads platform is managed.