Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a fantabulous day and ready for an even bigger week! Here’s some business and marketing stories I’ve been watching over the last week:
The Elon vs Twitter saga just keeps getting weirder and wilder. Since we talked last week, Elon made a very generous offer to buy Twitter outright, offering $54.20 a share. The move was blocked by existing shareholders. Elon is now rumored to be building a consortium of investors to make an even bigger offer.
What I find revealing about Elon’s overtures to buy Twitter, is how users and personalities on Twitter are reacting. Elon has long been critical of how Twitter moderates content, and many feel if he owned Twitter he would bring sweeping changes to how content is moderated on the site. This has sparked outrage among many Twitter users and personalities, and suddenly Elon and his company Tesla are under a microscope.
I think what this story proves, more than anything, is that both Elon and the outraged users understand that Twitter is not a free speech platform, it is a platform for shaping speech. Via moderation, any message that the owners of the platform want to see highlighted, can be highlighted. Any message that the owners of the platform want to see suppressed, can be suppressed. This makes Twitter’s value far greater than anything you will see on a balance sheet.
Elon understands that. So do the ‘outraged’ users and personalities. This isn’t about protecting free speech, this is about some people wanting to ensure that their speech continues to be protected.
And I suspect this story ends either with Elon owning Twitter, or being suspended by Twitter. We’ll likely find out sooner rather than later.
Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares, rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company…https://t.co/D41t4b04fb
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 16, 2022
Half of US wealth is in the hands of Baby Boomers, while their Gen X children now control 30% of the wealth. Millennials control 6.4% of the wealth, but it should be noted that for this survey, millennials are everyone born after 1981. So everyone in the US 41 and younger. That’s a pretty big group, you would think their share of US wealth would be at least 15% or so.
US Household Wealth Update: Baby Boomers Still Control Half; Gen X Share Rising https://t.co/rSIVazuIZN @marketingcharts @federalreserve @AARPresearch
— marketingcharts (@marketingcharts) April 13, 2022
I found these results on ad-supported audio interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I was honestly surprised that AM/FM radio had such a large share, but when you consider that the figures include listening to audio while driving, it makes sense. AM/FM radio accounted for 88% of the ad-supported audio that we listened to while driving in 2021. Podcasts at 11% actually seems like a fairly strong number to me. Podcasts lag behind traditional radio in terms of monetization options, unless the podcasts are run through a larger platform like Spotify that has ad network capability integrated into the offerings.
Still, the takeaway from these numbers has to be that modern marketers shouldn’t overlook that traditional AM/FM radio in car still has a lot of potential for generating sales.
In 2021, more than three-quarters of the time that US adults spent listening to ad-supported audio went to AM/FM radio. https://t.co/idtR6SOs7K#advertising #radio pic.twitter.com/7W1NJra4dC
— Chart of the Day (@ChartoftheDay_) April 12, 2022
So that’s all for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! I hope everyone has a wonderful week and we will see what craziness awaits us in the coming days!
