At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Snap’s global vp of of smb and mid-market, Sidharth Malhotra, revealed three things he’s noticed to help sellers overcome the totally fragmented path consumers take—at least on Snap.

“We’ve all been taught the marketing funnel. But it’s a problem,” he said, adding: “The journey is no longer linear.”

The value of the traditional funnel has long been up for debate, with both detractors and fervent supporters.

Snap claims you don’t get new consumers from oversaturated channels

Malhotra argued that ad buyers are wasting money on oversaturated channels, where diminished returns are hidden by dashboards that blend many metrics together. And metrics like return on ad spend or cost of return don’t show whether advertisers are actually getting a return on the dollars they spend.

Of course, Snap doesn’t have the overwhelming popularity it used to, especially with TikTok’s surge in recent years. But he indicated that a lot of the ad buyers who are dumping spend into the ultra-hot social media platforms are putting their ads in front of repeat buyers—the age-old problem of marketing to people already in line to buy.

Malhotra pointed out that “40% of U.S. users on Snapchat aren’t showing up on TikTok and 80% aren’t showing up on Pinterest.”

His argument was that Snap is a good place to get first-time customers. 

Don’t hard sell when people are chatting with each other

For Malhotra, Snap is a chill place. “We lean into comfort,” he said. With that in mind, he advised that ads on Snap shouldn’t “interrupt the conversation” by showing a high-quality 30 second video ad.

“Switch gears by going low-fi,” he said. “It looks like an attentive conversation that drives clicks immediately.”

Snap is trying to pitch itself as a place for so-called “conversational commerce” to happen, where smart brands can show up, integrate themselves in the discourse with a subtle video, and grab a new sale. His strategy was to align Snap with AI answer engines, where consumers are gravitating but where the ad landscape is still being worked out.

“Chat and AI is where conversational commerce is going next,” said Malhotra. 

His goal is for Snap to be a major part of that.

ADWEEK’s Social Media Week kicked off with a bang as creator Dhar Mann gave away a $1,000 Old Navy gift certificate to a lucky participant. 

He was reviving a hit collaboration he’d worked on with Old Navy parent company Gap, where people had to guess whether a person’s outfit is Old Navy or designer. Guess right, and you get a grand to spend at Old Navy stores.

The tricky part of the brief was that Old Navy had a message it wanted to send—that its clothing was fashionable but accessible—but Mann wanted to deliver without actually saying those words.

He worked with Damon Berger, Gap’s svp of marketing shared services, whom he met at a YouTube party at Cannes. They first activated the collaboration live onstage at the Advertising Week industry conference last October. Berger was slightly concerned because of how little control he’d have.

“I thought I’d get fired,” he joked onstage at Social Media Week. 

The partnership has since deepened, and Mann said that they’re now doing short-form activations and exploring deeper brand involvement, including a YouTube video released two months ago.

Mann did not have any brand partners for the first five years of his social media career, he told the Social Media Week audience—something he had some anxiety about, as he saw other creators spin up partnerships. But he told the crowd to be patient. Today, Dhar Mann Studios can afford to be selective about which brands it partners with. 

The company has 125,000 square foot studio facility containing 85 different sets and locations, and its content gets one billion views per month, according to its CEO, former MTV president Sean Atkins. Atkins said that brands that want Mann to stand on stage to hawk a product aren’t the sort of partners the studio looks for.

For creators like Mann, who also partners closely with the NFL and Adobe, brand partnerships have become about finding collaborators who respect the creative vision.

Over the last few week, X eliminated over 20 nontechnical roles, and has laid off Angela Zepeda, the ad industry veteran who joined the social platform in 2024 as its head of global marketing, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Zepeda’s LinkedIn profile indicates she lost her job last month.

The company is trimming talent as its billionaire owner Elon Musk prepares to take his rocket company SpaceX public in an IPO targeting a valuation of around $1 trillion. SpaceX could reportedly file as soon as this week. X was folded into Musk’s AI company xAI in a $45 billion merger last year; then, early this year, SpaceX also joined xAI.

Zepeda was the first true marketing leader appointed at X in the Musk era, filling a role that had been vacant since 2022. 

Her priority at the platform was to distill X’s image and ethos to users and to advertisers, the latter who have historically generated more than 90% of the platform’s revenue. X has lost reams of advertisers, and, as a result, about half of its ad revenue since Musk’s takeover in 2022 (tallying $1.25 billion in 2025 compared to $2.43 billion in 2021)—largely over brand safety concerns sparked by Musk’s lax approach to content moderation.

Last spring, Zepeda told ADWEEK’s editor-in-chief Ryan Joe that X planned to roll out a major brand campaign later that year that would position X as the enduring digital town square. That brand campaign never materialized.

Now, X is hyper-focused on ramping up revenue, offering fresh financial incentives to lapsed advertisers, and bringing on a new chief revenue officer, longtime private-equity executive Jon Shulkin.

Neither X nor Zepeda could be reached by press time. 

X is imploring advertisers who’ve abandoned the platform to return, promising some a sweetheart deal of up to $200,000 in extra value, according to a leaked pitch deck viewed by ADWEEK. 

On one slide, presented to an ad agency with many clients that have not invested in the platform for a number of months, X suggested it would toss in 50% of added value for every dollar spent, up to $200,000 per advertiser. 

Details of what constitutes “added value”—whether discounts, free ad credits, rebates, or something else entirely—were unspecified.

The incentive was framed as a “return-to-platform incentive” in the slide.

The incentive structure is the same as a promotion X ran last year for Omnicom specifically, though the company’s pitch to the holding company also included additional financial incentives like 15% in media credits for spending on X’s inventory via auction, excluding revenue-sharing products.

The platform ad revenues were roughly halved after Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover in 2022. Last year, it brought in about $1.25 billion compared to 2021’s $2.43 billion from ads, per Emarketer estimates. Many advertisers dialed back their investments or exited the platform altogether over brand safety concerns posed by X’s lax approach to content moderation and misinformation under Musk’s leadership. 

More than 20 slides of the leaked deck were dedicated to promoting X’s brand safety credentials, transparency practices, and built-in controls for advertisers that help them avoid “sensitive content.” 

In one slide, X explained how Grok—the AI chatbot operated by X’s parent company xAI and integrated natively into X—is being deployed to aid brand safety. “ALL (sic) posts on X are reviewed by xAI’s Frontier model Grok for Brand Suitability,” it read. It also claimed that profile ads will only show up on X profiles that have been “fully vetted by Grok, which evaluates all compliance with X’s Rules and policies and Brand Suitability.” 

The push aligns with a broader pattern for X, which is increasingly positioning Grok as a cornerstone of its brand safety practice, as reported by ADWEEK earlier this month. The push arrives just weeks after Grok users filled X with a deluge of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real users—a scandal that has prompted a handful of regulatory investigations and lawsuits.

In the slides, X also pitched the platform as an ideal advertising environment for high engagement and high performance. It purported to be “#1 for ad attentiveness,” and said X users are 45% more likely to buy products they’ve seen advertised on X compared to non-X users, according to GWI figures from Q2 of 2024 through Q1 of 2025. 

The company also claimed that, per X internal data from August 2 to Dec 7, 2025, the platform observed a 140% lift in click-through rates, a 43% increase in conversion rates, and a 37% increase in sales. 

Ad performance—and ad-linked sales in particular—has been a fixation of Musk’s as the company looks to recover ad revenues. In February of 2023, Musk wrote in a post: “Almost nobody buys anything on Twitter, but almost everyone on Instagram does.”

As recently as this month, Musk posted an interactive survey on X asking users if they’d ever made a purchase based on an ad they’d seen on the platform. Of some 1.6 million responses, 88% they had not.

Have you ever bought anything based on an ad on this platform?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2026

X did not provide an on-the-record comment by press time. 

X will temporarily bar creators from monetizing their content through its Creator Revenue Sharing program if they share AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without clearly disclosing that it was made with AI. The move comes three days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran, sparking a chain of violent reactions.

X’s head of product Nikita Bier made the announcement in a post on X Tuesday morning, writing: “During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground.” He added that AI platforms have lowered the bar to making “content that can mislead people.” 

Today we are revising our Creator Revenue Sharing policies to maintain authenticity of content on Timeline and prevent manipulation of the program.

During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies,…

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) March 3, 2026

Creators who post AI-made videos of armed conflict without adequate disclosure, Bier said, will be suspended from Creator Revenue Sharing for 90 days. Additional violations will lead to permanent suspension from the program.

Replying to one user, Bier explained that creators would need to click on the menu and select ‘Add Content Disclosures’ where they will find a ‘Made with AI’ label option.

X will be able to check whether videos are AI-generated using available metadata imbued by AI systems in combination with Community Notes, X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking tool, Bier added. 

X debuted its revenue-sharing initiative in mid-2023. Through the program, X Premium-subscribed creators or verified organizations with at least 5 million organic impressions in the past three months who have at least 500 verified followers are eligible to cash out on their content. These users to earn based on engagement—a 2024 departure from previous rules that determined payouts based on ad impressions. 

The policy update comes two days after a Wired investigation found X drowning in misinformation about the conflict in Iran. Various months- or years-old videos were presented as new, some posts included outright disinformation about specific attacks, and  AI-generated imagery and videos spread like wildfire, shared even by the Iranian newspaper Tehran Times.

X has been recently plagued with its own endemic issues related to AI-generated content, too. In late December and early January, the site was overwhelmed with nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real users after users prompted Grok AI, embedded within X, to produce the images. Though the platform eventually tweaked its rules, the changes were far from comprehensive, as users can still use various Grok interfaces to produce such content. 

Meanwhile, the company has also been signaling its willingness to crack down on content that might deter advertisers from spending on X. Last week, X held a webinar for advertisers—the presentation for which was obtained by ADWEEK—promoting its brand safety capabilities. X’s ad revenues are about half of what they were before billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk acquired the platform for $44 billion in late 2022, according to data from Emarketer.

X did not comment by press time. 

In a new 44-slide pitch deck, obtained exclusively by ADWEEK, X is once again pitching itself as a highly safe environment for advertisers. The slides promote various tools for transparency, campaign measurement, and brand safety that debuted between 2022 and 2025. X presented the deck to brand- and agency-side advertisers last week, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

These include keyword controls, blocklists, as well as partnerships with leading media quality firms DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science (IAS), and Trustworthy Accountability Group. 

Notably, the deck positions Grok—the AI chatbot operated by X’s parent company xAI and integrated natively into X—as a cornerstone of the app’s brand safety and suitability mission. One slide claims Grok provides “enhanced contextual understanding of posts”; the ability to “identify sensitive topics based off of cultural trends on X”; and “superior text recognition across content formats including images with oddly-sized or distorted text.” 

But throughout the past year, Grok has not only failed to ensure brand safety but in some instances disseminated the very content that brands deem most unsafe. In January, users prompted Grok en masse to flood X with sexually explicit nonconsensual deepfake images of real users. Around 6,700 such images appeared hourly during one 24-hour observational period, tallied by deepfake researcher Genevieve Oh. Now, that incident is the subject of various regulatory investigations across the globe. Six months earlier, Grok had spewed violent and antisemitic content on the social platform, producing rape fantasies and calling itself ‘MechaHitler.’ 

The company says in the document that it is “deeply committed to safety for all.” 

In the new pitch deck, X claims Grok “exceeds industry benchmarks” for brand safety, with an “average brand safety score” above 99.99% according to IAS and DoubleVerify, though details about these methodologies were not shared. In 2024, DoubleVerify publicly said that X’s brand safety rate is 99.99%—a figure that referred not to the share of content that is brand-safe on X, but to the rate of effectiveness of X’s proprietary brand safety systems at the time. However, the rate was never presented as a representation of Grok’s capabilities.

“This webinar session and deck were part of our ongoing proactive communication with clients. Transparency and control are the core tenants,” said a spokesperson for X.

DoubleVerify declined to comment. IAS declined to share specifics about its methodology but directed readers to learn more about its work with X in a blog post on its website. That post includes no mention of Grok.

The deck spotlights various other products and tools designed to give advertisers greater control over their placements and to assure them that content on X is being effectively moderated.

A significant portion is dedicated to highlighting Community Notes, X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking feature, which allows users to add relevant context to posts that may include misinformation. Users are 80% more likely to delete a post if it receives a Community Note, according to research from Sorbonne Université Paris, Cornell University, and University of Washington. Now, X says it is piloting a new program that allows AI tools to propose Community Notes called the AI Note Writers API.

An appendix to the document also makes specific recommendations for the controls that advertisers should consider applying to different kinds of ad buys on X. For example, the company suggests applying pre-bid adjacency controls and “limited” sensitivity settings for timeline, profile, reply, search, and vertical video ads.

X’s advertising business has suffered substantive losses since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the platform in late 2022, in large part due to brand safety concerns. Upon his takeover, Musk aggressively cut headcount, flipped the blue check-based identity verification system on its head, and loosened the app’s content moderation policies. The upheaval spurred a mass exodus of advertisers, many of whom did not want to risk their messages appearing next to controversial content. 

Though many major advertisers, including IBM, Disney, and Apple, have since returned to the platform, X’s total 2025 ad revenues, according to estimates from Emarketer, reached just $1.25 billion—roughly half the $2.43 billion it tallied in 2021 before Musk’s takeover.

In January, X elevated Monique Pintarelli to global head of advertising at xAI, part of its push to recover these lost revenues. In conversation with ADWEEK earlier this year, Pintarelli said X is focused on “how we can create user experiences on the platform that can also be beneficial for the advertising community.”

See the full pitch deck below. 

Maybelline New York and Essie, both owned by L’Oréal, are bringing in one agency to run social for the first time.

VML has been named lead U.S. social agency for the brands following a competitive review, the agency told ADWEEK, with a remit spanning social strategy, content production, and community management. The scope does not include influencer marketing.

The pitch began in November 2025, consolidating what had been a patchwork of internal teams, according to VML.

The move reflects a broader reckoning in beauty, where discovery and purchase are increasingly happening on TikTok and Instagram, making social a key commerce channel. For brands like Maybelline and Essie, in the makeup and nail polish sectors, respectively, that shift demands a more integrated approach to content.

“It wasn’t just content creation,” Leo Madden, global client partner at VML, told ADWEEK. “It was strategy, production, real-time community management, listening, performance measurement—all working together as an engine.”

The review, which ran through early 2026, was managed internally by the brand rather than through a search consultancy. Madden said he didn’t have visibility into how many agencies competed.

Maybelline spent approximately $60 million on media in 2025 and Essie spent around $10 million, according to COMvergence estimates.

While the two brands will share a social team, their voices will stay distinct, Madden said. Work is already underway, with content live since January and VML teams actively providing community management, though the agency declined to share specific examples.

The win comes as VML is pulled into a new group called WPP Creative as part of CEO Cindy Rose’s $676 million cost cutting plan. Longtime VML global CEO Jon Cook was promoted to lead the division as CEO.