Musk’s X or Zuckerberg’s Meta: who’s winning advertising dollars?

In July, Musk admitted that Twitter revenue was down 50 percent. (AFP)
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Updated 15 September 2023
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Musk’s X or Zuckerberg’s Meta: who’s winning advertising dollars?

  • Agency experts weigh in on the battle between the various social media platforms

DUBAI: There has recently been a flurry of activity in the social media industry with acquisitions, rebrands and new launches — with much debate on who will eventually emerge the victor or at least the dominant force in the market.

Most notable among this activity was Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter in October 2022, followed by the platform’s rebrand to X this year.

Meta dropped its brand-new social platform, Threads, built by the Instagram team, bearing a marked resemblance to X in the same month as the rebrand.

It is not just the platforms that are battling it out; the tech titans are too with Musk inviting Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a mixed-martial arts bout, which now seems unlikely to take place.

Meanwhile, other platforms including Snapchat and Instagram are maintaining their edge with new offerings — such as integrating social commerce — to win advertisers, while TikTok, the youngest kid on the block, continues to surge in popularity and revenue.  

“Brands are constantly adapting to the evolving nature of customer behavior, and the recent movements by X and Meta are examples of how the platforms are constantly looking to create new ways to capture and retain a higher share of people’s time, attention, and demand,” Pedro Goncalves, head of digital media at PHD, told Arab News.

The constant changes in the social media space come as advertising budgets recover from pandemic levels, making it ever more important for companies to invest their ad dollars wisely.

Many advertisers left the platform soon after Musk’s takeover with 50 of the top 100 advertisers announcing they would stop advertising on X, according to a report by media watchdog Media Matters.

These advertisers accounted for nearly $2 billion in spending on the platform since 2020, and over $750 million in advertising in 2022 alone.

In July, Musk admitted that Twitter revenue was down 50 percent.

It seems clear that Meta’s family of apps is leading the way when it comes to advertising revenue, while TikTok is also a popular choice.

“TikTok and Meta are certainly getting the lion’s share of the spend as platforms,” said Mazher Abidi, head of strategy and insights at advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi.

The others are not too far behind with Snapchat, for example, being an outlier in Saudi Arabia.

It is important to note that its proposition differs from other social media platforms making it a bit niche, and although Snapchat does not boast the same scale as the TikTok and Meta apps, it “does still have a place in the heart of audiences in our region, certainly in Saudi Arabia,” Abidi told Arab News.

PHD’s Goncalves said: “We observe a natural tendency and well-established role for each one, with Meta currently ahead in direct response KPIs (key performance indicators); X and Snapchat quite balanced in terms of engagement and traffic, and TikTok increasingly delivering more in terms of ad recall and attention.”

Meta remains one of the largest platforms for advertisers, according to Aneesa Rashid, social and influencer lead at media agency UM MENAT, because its apps Facebook and Instagram “combined provide cost efficiencies, mass reach and strong lower funnel capabilities.”

TikTok and Snapchat, on the other hand, “play a bigger part in producing authentic and unique content experiences, fueled by creators, whilst also diving in further to the social commerce space,” she said.

The former “has emerged as a major player in the social media landscape, surprisingly not just with younger audiences, (but) as momentum grows amongst older demographics,” and the latter has been a “key pioneer platform in the region, especially in markets such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt,” Rashid added.

While X seems to be trailing behind in terms of advertising revenue, Abidi said: “If you take a step back and look at the direction of travel of advertising on X, it has been going down for a while.”

The reasons range from geopolitical concerns to polarizing content on the platform, but “brands have been finding alternatives for a while, shifting spends to other established competitors, such as the Meta platforms, and even TikTok,” he added.

X did not rank in consumers’ or advertisers’ top five platforms for ads, according to the latest Media Reactions report by analytics firm Kantar.

Moreover, among marketers, its receptivity was in the negative with more marketers claiming they will decrease spend on X in 2024 than increase it, the study found.

Despite headlines about X’s declining revenues, the Middle East is seeing a different story playing out.

“In the Middle East, we did initially witness a reduction of ad spends on the platform as a precautionary measure,” said Rashid.

However, “X’s recent launch of performance driven products including mobile and website conversions ads, has helped optimize campaign performance, and since we’ve seen brand interest shift back,” she added.

She also predicts that the company’s developments “will see advertisers coming back to the platform in anticipation as they plan for 2024 social strategies.”

Abidi echoed the sentiment, saying: “I think X has quite a unique position in our part of the world particularly in Saudi Arabia, where it has been an outlier in terms of popularity; Saudis use and love Twitter with more passion and use it more actively than most other markets around the world.”

Musk’s rebrand of Twitter seemed sudden as many users woke up to see the iconic Twitter bird being lifted with a crane and gradually being replaced by X.

However, contrary to public perception, the rebrand could well be a calculated move, part of Musk’s ambition to turn X into an “everything app,” points out Abidi.

“It’s surprising to most, but I think the real interesting story starts now,” he said.

Rashid and Abidi remain optimistic about Musk’s long-term goals as more ‘super apps’ or ‘everything apps’ crop up.

X plans to “expand beyond just social media networking to include banking, shopping and most recently a feature for video and audio calls without the need for a phone number, effectively building a global address book, so this may just be the beginning of an impressive comeback,” said Rashid.

WeChat in China or Careem in the Middle East are good examples of apps that integrate various services into one app. The “user behavior and audience receptiveness” already exist in the region, and “if some of those X features do come our way, I believe we’ll find quite a receptive audience,” said Abidi.

“The idea of a global super app is certainly ambitious, but if anybody has got the ambition and ability to pull that off, Elon Musk is one of the few,” he added.


McCann Content Studios expands footprint to Saudi Arabia

Updated 20 May 2025
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McCann Content Studios expands footprint to Saudi Arabia

  • Studio is part of FP7 McCann Riyadh

DUBAI: Middle East Communications Network’s social media and creator-focused practice McCann Content Studios is expanding to Saudi Arabia.

Operating as part of creative network FP7 McCann in Riyadh, the studio aims to meet clients’ requirement for social media-led campaigns and influencer partnerships.

“Our expansion into Saudi Arabia is a strategic step forward — not just in footprint, but in how we partner with brands in a market that continues to lead regional transformation,” Tarek Miknas, CEO of FP7 McCann Middle East, North Africa and Turkiye, told Arab News.

He added: “For us, this is about more than scaling services; it’s about building enduring partnerships rooted in trust, performance and relevance — and ensuring we’re structurally set up to support the ambitions of the Kingdom’s most dynamic brands.”

The studio first launched just over a year ago and has since doubled in size, with operations across Dubai, Cairo and Beirut.

It employs more than 100 people, and its services include strategy, creative, social, influencer marketing, production, community management and performance tracking.

Fahad Mugharbel, social media director of FP7 McCann, will lead the practice from Riyadh. Before joining FP7 McCann in April, he worked at Saudi-based entertainment firm UTURN for more than four years.

The Kingdom is defined by “pace, ambition and evolving expectations,” and clients believe “content must do more,” said Amr El-Kalaawy, regional managing director of FP7 McCann Saudi Arabia.

The move is therefore a “natural next step in our growth — one that reflects both the scale of opportunity and the level of partnership our clients expect,” he added.

Going forward, McCann Content Studios plans to expand its “capabilities in data-led content performance and deepen our creator ecosystem,” El-Kalaawy said.


Fortune reveals 100 Most Powerful Women in Business list for 2025

Updated 20 May 2025
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Fortune reveals 100 Most Powerful Women in Business list for 2025

  • First Abu Dhabi Bank Group CEO Hana Al-Rostamani, National Bank of Kuwait’s Deputy Group CEO Shaikha Al-Bahar both feature

DUBAI: Fortune has announced the 2025 Most Powerful Women in Business list, featuring 100 leading businesswomen from sectors including finance, tech, healthcare, telecom, retail and energy.

Its publication coincides with Fortune’s inaugural Most Powerful Women International conference which is taking place in Riyadh on May 20-21.

This year’s edition of the list features 52 women from the US and 48 from other countries, including one each from the UAE and Kuwait.

Hana Al-Rostamani, group CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank, comes in at No. 76. She is currently the only female chief executive of a publicly listed corporation in the UAE, and serves on several boards, including the Institute of International Finance, the US-UAE Business Council, and the Arab Monetary Fund’s cross-border payment system Buna. 

Shaikha Al-Bahar, deputy group CEO at the National Bank of Kuwait, features at No. 92. She has risen through the ranks since joining the bank in 1977 and was appointed to her current role in 2014.

Al-Bahar is the only woman on NBK’s executive management team. She is also chair of the National Bank of Kuwait France, and the National Bank of Kuwait Egypt, as well as a board member of the bank’s UK subsidiary.

“The rise of women as CEOs is continuing, which is great,” said Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer of Fortune. 

She told Arab News: “There have been some years we’ve been doing the list where it has taken a step back. (But) this year, 11 percent of Fortune 500 (companies are) run by women, and that’s the highest it has ever been.”

There are several studies showing the correlation between “diversity of thought and background” in leadership ranks and the financial outcome of a company, and so, “we track it, and we track the progress (in) the hopes of making business better,” Shontell added.

The top 10 Most Powerful Women in Business 2025 are: 

1. Mary Barra, chair and CEO, General Motors.

2. Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture.

3. Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup.

4. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD.

5. Ana Botin, executive chairman, Banco Santander.

6. Tan Su Shan, director and CEO, DBS Group.

7. Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO, TIAA.

8. Marta Ortega, chairperson, Inditex.

9. Abigail Johnson, chairman and CEO, Fidelity Investments.

10. Meng Wanzhou, deputy chairwoman, rotating chairwoman, and chief financial officer, Huawei.

Compiled by Fortune editors, the list is based on several factors such as company size and health, as well as an executive’s career trajectory, influence, innovation, and efforts to make business better.

The full list can be found here.


Gary Lineker to leave BBC amid antisemitism row

Updated 20 May 2025
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Gary Lineker to leave BBC amid antisemitism row

  • Lineker had earlier shared a post criticizing Zionism, accompanied by a rat emoji
  • He will not be part of the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup or next season’s FA Cup coverage

DUBAI: BBC sports presenter Gary Lineker will leave the corporation following a controversial social media post that drew accusations of antisemitism, according to a statement.

Lineker had earlier shared a post criticizing Zionism, accompanied by a rat emoji, an image historically associated with antisemitic tropes, before deleting it following backlash.

In an Instagram post on Monday, Lineker apologized for the post and announced he would step down early, with the final episode of his show “Match of the Day” airing as the Premier League concludes on Sunday.

He will not be part of the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup or next season’s FA Cup coverage as previously agreed with the broadcaster.

Lineker acknowledged that the post “contained an emoji that has awful connotations.”

He added: “Unfortunately, I did not see the emoji. If I had, I would never, ever have shared it.

“I have stood up for minorities and humanitarian issues, and against all forms of racism all of my life, including, of course, antisemitism, which I absolutely abhor. There’s no place for it and never should be.”

The BBC confirmed Lineker’s departure in its statement on Monday. BBC Director-General Tim Davie said: “Gary has acknowledged the mistake he made. Accordingly, we have agreed he will step back from further presenting after this season.

“Gary has been a defining voice in football coverage for the BBC for over two decades. His passion and knowledge have shaped our sports journalism, and earned him the respect of sports fans across the UK and beyond.”

The incident was the latest controversial post by the 64-year-old, who has found himself at the center of several rows over his social media usage, most of which involve him sharing his political views, which goes against the BBC’s rules on impartiality.

In March 2023, he was temporarily suspended over comments he made criticizing the Conservative government’s asylum policy.

Earlier in February, he was among 500 high-profile celebrities who signed an open letter urging the BBC to reinstate a documentary on Gaza that had been removed from iPlayer after it emerged its narrator was the son of a Hamas official.

In his written statement, Lineker said: “Football has been at the heart of my life for as long as I can remember — both on the pitch and in the studio.

“However, I recognize the error and upset that I caused, and reiterate how sorry I am. Stepping back now feels like the responsible course of action.”


Microsoft wants AI ‘agents’ to work together and remember things

Updated 19 May 2025
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Microsoft wants AI ‘agents’ to work together and remember things

  • Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own
  • Microsoft is trying to help AI agents have better memories of things that users have asked them to do: Exec

REDMOND, Washington: Microsoft envisions a future where any company’s artificial intelligence agents can work together with agents from other firms and have better memories of their interactions, its chief technologist said on Sunday ahead of the company’s annual software developer conference.
Microsoft is holding its Build conference in Seattle on May 19, where analysts expect the company to unveil its latest tools for developers building AI systems.
Speaking at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, ahead of the conference, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts the company is focused on helping spur the adoption of standards across the technology industry that will let agents from different makers collaborate. Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own.
Scott said that Microsoft is backing a technology called Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source protocol introduced by Google-backed Anthropic. Scott said MCP has the potential to create an “agentic web” similar to the way hypertext protocols that helped spread the Internet in the 1990s.
“It means that your imagination gets to drive what the agentic web becomes, not just a handful of companies that happen to see some of these problems first,” Scott said.
Scott also said that Microsoft is trying to help AI agents have better memories of things that users have asked them to do, noting that, so far, “most of what we’re building feels very transactional.”
But making an AI agent’s memory better costs a lot of money because it requires more computing power. Microsoft is focusing on a new approach called structured retrieval augmentation, where an agent extracts short bits of each turn in a conversation with a user, creating a roadmap to what was discussed.
“This is a core part of how you train a biological brain — you don’t brute force everything in your head every time you need to solve a particular problem,” Scott said.


‘It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is,’ Fortune editor-in-chief tells Arab News ahead of Riyadh summit on women in business

Updated 19 May 2025
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‘It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is,’ Fortune editor-in-chief tells Arab News ahead of Riyadh summit on women in business

  • Alyson Shontell finds Kingdom’ Vision 2030 transformation “remarkable,” so the magazine wants to see it for itself and show it to the world
  • The CCO says aim is to build a global network through which women in the Middle East feel connected to women in other parts of the world

RIYADH: The Fortune Most Powerful Women franchise, which includes an annual list of the 100 Most Powerful Women, began in 1998. Now, nearly three decades on, the publication is entering the Middle East region with the Fortune Most Powerful Women International conference in Riyadh on May 20 and 21.

“More and more women were getting into the upper ranks of business,” and “we wanted to be on the ground covering it,” said Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer of Fortune.

“There’s no more exciting place for us to be right now (than Saudi Arabia) covering the world of business and women’s progress,” she added.

Despite reforms and transformation in the region, some still view it as a place with restricted freedom for women and media. However, Shontell is “excited to go in judgment-free,” and connect with women in the region and “show what they’re doing to the world,” she said.

The transformation in the Kingdom since Vision 2030 has been “remarkable” and, she added, “we want to see it for ourselves and show it to the world.

“It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is: the Middle East.”


EXPLORE: A New Era for Business: Partnering for Global Prosperity


Fortune’s ambition is “to connect global power and the biggest businesses in the world,” and so “we would love to build the most powerful women’s network into a global network,” through which women in the Middle East feel connected to women in other parts of the world, she explained.

This year, 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies are run by women, which is the highest number it has ever been, Shontell said.

There is still a long way ahead before gender equality is reached in businesses, but “that’s a big reason why we think it’s still important to show the changing evolution of power,” she said.

Last year, Fortune also published a Most Powerful People list — “to recognize powerful people as powerful people” — and that list was dominated by men.

“That’s how the world is, and we’re not going to pretend that it’s otherwise,” Shontell said, adding that it is part of Fortune’s mission to track progress, present the world as it is, and when there are changes, to showcase them as well.

For Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer of Fortune, there’s no more exciting place for her team to be right now to covering the world of business and women’s progress than Saudi Arabia. (AFP/File)

At the beginning of this year, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his second day in office calling titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”

He has issued multiple orders since then aimed at rolling back the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) policies of major corporations, foundations, non-profits, educational institutions and even the government.

One order, which deems DEI policies “illegal,” suggests that these policies are a “guise” for “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”

The directives have raised several concerns, some around women’s participation in the workforce.

Shontell, however, remains optimistic. “There’s a pretty strong commitment from women in the United States,” she said.

“We have made a lot of progress over the last 50 years here, and I don’t think many people would like to see that backslide.”

Alyson Shontell says that despite US President Donald Trump's policies aimed at rolling back the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) policies of major corporations, foundations, non-profits, educational institutions and even the government, women have made a lot of progress in the United States and there is no sign of sliding back. (AFP/File photo)

Shontell herself has been part of that commitment. She joined Business Insider in 2008, as the company’s sixth employee going on to become editor-in-chief in 2016.

When she was appointed as editor-in-chief at Fortune in 2021, she became the youngest and only woman to serve in that role in the company’s 95 years.

“When you think of who the editor-in-chief of Fortune, or even Business Insider, is, you don’t think of a young woman,” Shontell said.

To illustrate her point, she said that even if one asked AI what it thought the editor of a business magazine looks like, it would draw up someone like JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon.

And she was right. We asked Meta AI and ChatGPT: “Can you generate an image of the editor-in-chief of a major global business publication?” The former gave us four images: one of a woman and three of men, while the latter gave a single image featuring a man

There is still a long way ahead before gender equality is reached in businesses, but “that’s a big reason why we think it’s still important to show the changing evolution of power,” says Alyson Shontell. (AFP/File)

The most common reaction Shontell receives is surprise. But she doesn’t mind. Rather, she likes surprising people and the feeling that “no one sees you coming.”

It “kind of gives you something to work toward something to be extra proud of when you achieve it,” she said.

For Shontell, the industry has been nothing but change since she stepped into it, which was well after the days of leisurely business lunches and thick magazines, she says.

“A lot of the trends that we’re seeing now are just completely different than they were before,” and much of the conversation in the newsroom is around future-proofing the company, she said.

 

 

The key, according to her, is a flexible team and the knack to recognize trends and understand which ones are here to stay.

When she was at Business Insider, her goal was to get everyone to read it. Fortune, on the other hand, is not about scale.

“My goal is to continue to up our relevance and to broaden the audience just a little bit, but to keep it very much thought leadership,” she said.

Shontell explained that it is hard to run a company in a fast-changing and unpredictable world, and so, the question is: “How can we be the best asset for this global leadership reader?”

The aim is to “give them the information they need to do their jobs through the best of their abilities, so that the rest of us can all benefit from them making better decisions.”

Alyson Shontell says she doesn’t mind the still prevailing common perception about gender in the business world. She likes surprising people and the feeling that “no one sees you coming.” (Instagram: fortunempw)

Fortune was relatively slow to embrace digital media with its website only launching in 2014.

By the end of 2024, it had 24 million global users, and its social channels have a total of 7 million followers.

Still, not many younger audiences are aware of the brand or consume its content. Shontell admits that while Fortune has been very good at reaching C-suite audiences, “we have increasingly been bad at reaching the next generation and pulling them up through their career path.”

But now, with social media, she says “we have permission to show up differently on different platforms” to reach a potential reader.

That means speaking in a different tone of voice perhaps to reach GenZs and millennials on platforms like TikTok, which would be “their first experience with us,” she said.

It is a “delicate balance” of “how do you get that next gen reader so that Fortune will continue to exist and be read and widely known in 20 years, and how do you maintain that thought leadership at the same time?”

As part of this effort, Fortune is reinventing its video offering this year and launching podcasts.

Artificial intelligence is at the core of technology and any conversation about it, and undoubtedly is an “incredibly powerful tool,” said Shontell.

Despite the dangers of AI — fake news, misinformation, deepfakes — and concerns about potential job losses, Shontell believes AI will bring journalism back to its roots.

Any news or information that can be rounded up and aggregated does not need humans and will be done by AI, but that is an “exciting opportunity, because it will bring journalism back to its core roots of seeking original information and facts and bringing it to readers first with the best analysis (and) the best new information that you can get,” she said.

Shontell says that in the last decade or so, the news media industry has almost lost its way, partly because the business model is predicated on cutting through noise and grabbing attention, instead of delivering news in a way that is aligned with the news company’s specific approach.

There will be “hard change,” and news firms can either be a big publication with scale and a “solid” business model like The New York Times or Bloomberg, or a smaller, niche publication; anything in the “messy middle” will have a difficult time, she said.