Future of Marketing Briefing: X claims an ad comeback, reality proves out a different thesis
Written by admin on January 16, 2026
This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
A claim from X has has taken on a life of its own after I featured it in a story I wrote earlier this month.
X’s ads boss said that nearly all of the platform’s top 100 advertisers were “back” without a breakout of who those advertisers were, no context around what “back” meant and no disclosure of how much money they were actually spending. I asked. There were no numbers forthcoming.
“We are more focused on advertising than ever before,” said X’s global head of advertising Monique Pintarelli. “We have a number of brands that are not just back, they’re spending at or higher than pre-acquisition levels,” she added, without specific figures.
Skepticism was warranted.
On its own, the comments were thin. But in the churn of hot takes and screenshots, the remark quickly became shorthand for something much bigger — the idea that X’s advertising business was effectively healed. The article itself did not make that leap. It went out of its way not to.
So consider this week’s briefing a reset. Not a redemption arc. Just a closer look at where X’s ad business actually sits right now.
Short version: the comeback narrative has gotten ahead of the reality.
The numbers — what little of them there are — support that. The original piece cited Sensor Tower data showing that while more than six in 10 of the biggest advertisers on X in 2022 are still spending on the platform, they are doing so at a fraction of their prior levels.
Additional data only reinforces that.
Digiday requested data from Ebiquity, which shared insights from clients, primarily of large multinational brand advertisers, that it provides digital governance and auditing services to. Clients work for over 75 of the top 100 global advertisers based on their advertising spend worldwide.
Ad spend on X hasn’t recovered from its 2023 spend level based on Ebiquity’s data, staying roughly flat. The number of clients in Ebiquity’s database spending on X has gone down year-on-year: 40 in 2022, 25 in 2023, 11 in 2024 and seven in 2025, with the latest figure still subject to change as filings are finalized.
Taken together, the data adds context to Pintarell’s comments. It is likely true that most of the platform’s top 100 advertisers have resumed some level of spending after pulling back in 2022 amid concerns over Elon Musk’s ownership.
In some respects, it would be more surprising if they had not.
What has followed since Musk’s takeover has hardly been a courtship. He has publicly ridiculed the advertising, undermined some parts of it and threatened legal action against others. In response, it would appear many advertisers returned to X with the bare minimum — enough to ease those tensions, not enough to signal confidence. Yes, there are outliers. But the idea that ad dollars have meaningfully returned — or that X’s ad business is anything close to “back” — is tenuous at best.
Take GYK Antler, for example. The agency’s head of media Adam Telian said that none of the brands he works with have resumed spending on X, and the platform hasn’t been a part of the conversation for several years. Similarly, Brave Bison’s director of paid media Mark Byrne said that X has fallen down client wishlists and is rarely pushed proactively in media plans.
An ensuing scandal will have only sharpened those concerns. In recent weeks, X’s AI tool Grok has been used to generate manipulated images of real people, including women and minors, in sexually explicit ways, often by removing their clothes. Users began documenting and reporting these examples in late December and into the new year. Though on Wednesday, X announced that the team has “implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis. This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers.” And while it’s a step in the right direction, it isn’t a total U-turn that prevents users from using Grok to create any other type of inappropriate content.
For brand advertisers, this is not a footnote. It is the environment, one far removed from anything that resembles a stable or normalized marketplace.
“There doesn’t seem to be a good handle on content safety such as what other platforms like Meta and TikTok have, which further leads me to believe that X isn’t the best option for many advertisers,” said paid social media expert Shamsul Chowdhury.
It’s a perspective shared by Byrne, who noted that this recent issue has heightened sensitivity around where budgets end up.
“For some advertisers, it extends beyond brand safety in the traditional sense into whether they want to be seen supporting certain environments at all,” he said. “That makes controls, exclusions and transparency more important than ever.”
Which calls into question why any brand would ever want to fund a platform like X? Aside from the threat of being named, shamed and sued by Musk, the upside is hard to see.
What remains may be less a vote of confidence than a form of inadvertent participation.
Turns out, marketers could be buying ads on X without realizing. The platform makes a meaningful portion of its ads available via programmatic auctions, and in doing so makes it easier for marketers to end up there without ever making an affirmative decision to do so.
Here’s how: when a marketer buys ads on Google Ads there’s a chance they will buy ads on X, which is available at cheap ad prices there following a deal struck in 2023. Moreover, because of those prices, Google’s buying algorithms may optimize spend toward those places. The only way to avoid this, is if marketers instruct those algorithms not to buy from X.
“When I have been auditing brands’ Google Ads activity over the last year or so, X makes an appearance in placement reporting for the ones that are not critically reviewing where their ads are serving, which has caught out the majority of brands as to why that is happening in the first place,” said ad tech consultant Jonathan D’Souza Rauto.
It’s a timely reminder to be more deliberate about what’s being bought. Chowdhury pointed out that advertisers, especially those who are price sensitive, likely aren’t looking under the hood to evaluate where they’re showing up. But it does still add to Pintarelli’s point that more advertisers are genuinely back on X. But as Byrne put it, there’s a difference between a genuine return to X as a planned, strategic platform and X appearing in delivery as a by-product of automation.
All told, X remains an anomaly in the media space: influential without being dependable, unavoidable without being trustworthy and still large enough to matter even as it drifts further from what most of the market would recognize as a functional advertising platform.
Numbers to know
1.6%: Forecasted percent increase for U.K. 2026 ad spend, according to IPA’s Q4 2025 Bellwether report
64%: Percentage of marketers which predict their customers will use traditional search engines less often in the coming 2-3 years
28%: Percentage of retail commerce media decision makers in North America and Europe which still review and approve creatives manually
80%: Percentage of advertisers who believe Gen Z and millennial consumers feel positively about AI-generated ads, however only 45% of these consumers actually feel that way
What we’ve covered
The story which started it all off and became the building block for this briefing. Also in this story is the fact that X has big plans for the Super Bowl next month, from its Super Bowl portal, to a new Grok-powered BrandRanx tool for advertisers and users.
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What we’re reading
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Despite the global outrage over Grok’s latest scandal, Elon Musk has still denied that Grok has created any illegal content, saying it’s users who are responsible, not the technology, according to Politico.
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