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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 1/28/23: He should have called it 'Trash Social' [1]
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Date: 2023-01-28
Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads on Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by The New York Times.
Ashley Banger, writing for ArsTechnica, summarizes the Times’ analysis of the platform’s character and prospects. In short, it’s not attracting the kind of people advertisers want.
Ad experts told the Times that Truth Social major brands are put off because of users posting conspiracy theories and hyperpartisan statements. But the brands could also be avoiding Truth Social simply because there aren’t as many users there to reach compared to Facebook’s billions of users or Twitter’s hundreds of millions. Perhaps most significantly, Truth Social wasn’t attracting enough young audiences for brands to funnel ad spends that way. Among the samples the Times collected were ads for “vaccination exemption” cards, kids' guides to "resisting socialism," and plenty of gold-plated and “diamond-dusted” Trump trinkets. While there was nothing misleading about some of these ads, like those pushing Trump hats or bobbleheads, other ads sold fake merchandise. Some clearly fabricated information to make sales, like creating a fake tweet from Joe Biden to push a $2 bill with Trump’s face on it. Others relied on disturbing imagery to sell “miracle cures” like “nature’s oxycontin” or alternative medicines for common ailments like toe fungus, vision impairment, and wrinkles.
While I can say with some confidence that I have never purchased any product as a result of an internet ad, the prospect of a “kid’s guide to resisting socialism” intrigues me, as does the ad which asks me if I’m “tired of overpaying ‘woke’ insurance companies.”
As the Times analysis points out, these ads are hardly what you would call “classy:”
Most of the ads from Truth Social reviewed by The Times used images designed to catch a user’s attention, like grotesque eyeballs and skin abnormalities, typically selling alternative medicines and miracle cures.
One major problem (aside from attracting fundamentally bad people) cited by marketers is that they can’t track the effectiveness of their own ads, so they have no idea whether their investment is even worth it.
“[Truth Social’s] ad-serving technology, run by Rumble, a right-wing video streaming website, offers limited tools for tracking an ad’s performance or for showing ads to users based on their demographic profiles. Those tools, now standard among larger ad networks operated by Google and Meta, are vital for determining an ad’s success.”
And Donald Trump’s name alone is a deterrent “red flag” for advertisers, who have created a “blacklist” of words they do not want their ads to be associated with:
In a reflection of the wariness that brands have over Mr. Trump and his politics, the word “Trump” ranked as the 11th most common blacklisted term provided by advertisers in 2019, according to data from Integral Ad Science, a company focusing on brand safety. “It’s really dangerous for major advertisers to be closely associated with a political figure and also a political movement,” said Bob Hoffman, an advertising industry veteran and the author of The Ad Contrarian, a newsletter critical of the industry. “It’s not in their best interest to get involved in that quagmire.”
Trump’s name finds itself in good company. According to the Wall Street Journal, some other words advertisers shun the most in placing their web ads are “shooting” and “bomb.”
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