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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon vs Twitter Continues, Baby Boomers Still Hold the Cash, AM/FM Radio Still a Thing?

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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!

 

About Mack Collier

My name is Mack Collier and I am a digital marketing and content strategist located in Alabama. Since 2006 I've helped companies of all sizes from startups to global brands such as Adobe, Dell and Ingersoll-Rand, create customer-centric programs, content and experiences. A long-time internet geek, I've been online since 1988 and began using social networking sites in 1991 when I joined Prodigy. Today, I help companies understand how new technologies like web3, crypto and artificial intelligence can integrate with existing marketing strategies to lead to exceptional customer experiences.