Ubisoft said it has paused a Twitter ad campaign for Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, making it the latest company to either alter or pull out of advertising on the social media site since Elon Musk’s takeover.
A VR spin-off available for Meta Quest 2 and 3, Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR launched less than a week ago, so naturally, Ubisoft wanted to promote it via Twitter with a new trailer.
The trailer accrued at least 10 million views after it went up on Monday, Nov. 20, until Ubisoft took it down, with a spokesperson telling Axios it had paused the advertising campaign on Twitter. While Ubisoft has not provided an exact reason for this, its decision came shortly after Twitter owner Elon Musk described an antisemitic conspiracy theory as “the actual truth.”
Although Musk has since denied being antisemitic, several other companies have pulled advertisements from Twitter. The full list, according to Axios, includes Apple, Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, IBM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Comcast.
A report by Media Matters shows that ads for these companies were spotted adjacent to similar toxic posts, including ones that promote Nazi ideology. It would appear Ubisoft and its fellow companies do not want to risk their brands becoming associated with such views and have figured it’s not worth advertising their products on Twitter, at least for the time being.
Considering one of Twitter’s main sources of revenue is advertising, driving away these companies is not good for business and only risks encouraging more companies to follow suit.
In a statement on Nov. 17, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said, “There’s absolutely no place for [antisemitism] anywhere in the world,” though the offending post to which Musk replied has yet to be taken down.
On Nov. 19, Axios also reported multiple marketing leaders are calling for Yaccarino to resign “before her reputation is damaged,” citing Musk as “not someone marketers can do business with.”
