From Cindy Gallop to R/GA: where will adland’s top Twitter users head if it collapses?

Every day creative directors battle over the merits of new campaigns, veterans bicker over the state of creativity and copywriters trade bon mots. But, should the app change significantly in form (or disappear entirely), is there anywhere else for the industry’s wittiest to go?

Chapin Clark, the executive creative director behind R/GA’s laconic Twitter account, estimates that he spends “easily three or four hours a day” on the service. It’s been the focal point of industry debates for years, in part due to the platform’s text-first format. “I’m a copywriter and Twitter has always felt like home to me,” says Clark.

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“I do it because I get something out of it. I always find things that amuse me or open my eyes to something or I find things that are pleasingly weird. I would have to be a pretty big masochist to be doing it all that time if I didn’t really enjoy it.”

Some of the pillars of advertising Twitter, though, are looking toward the exit door. Robyn Frost, a prominent art director at TBWA\Chiat Day New York, tweeted a 50-word elegy for the app this morning, closing on the invitation: “Let’s stay in touch on ig.”

welp. if this is the end of twitter, it’s been real. met loads of brilliant, really lovely people here. been hired into almost all of my agency jobs by wonderful people i’ve met on here. career and life truly changed because of it. let’s stay in touch on ig: robynhfrost ✌

— Robyn Frost (@robynhfrost) November 18, 2022

The nascent Creative Communications Union, a nascent trade union for British agency workers, initially relied on Twitter to build awareness and organizing networks – but earlier today, it began directing followers towards more discrete homes on Discord and Mastodon.

Well, it looks like it might really be happening. The workers who’ve made Twitter happen for all these years have asserted their power ✊. We, of course, are going nowhere as there’s still so much to do See below for how to keep in touch pic.twitter.com/9BIosnGsGN — Creative Communications Workers (@CreativeCommsW) November 18, 2022

For his part, Clark is skeptical that users will relocate en masse. “I don’t think there really is a comparable alternative right now,” he tells The Drum. “For all the people posting about going to Mastodon, there doesn’t seem to be much heat around it. It tends toward the polite and boring ... it lacks the edge of Twitter.”

The account has provided a unique outlet for R/GA and Clark, who’s used it both to prick at the agency business and make political statements. “It’s a place for the vital exchange of information, and connecting and organizing,” he says.

Clark argues that, despite the talk of decline and fall, ad Twitter has livened up since the Musk acquisition. “I will stay and be active on Twitter as long as it’s around and functioning, and as long as it stays interesting. The last, you know, few weeks have felt like a very vibrant place with a lot of good posting. If it’s a wake, it’s a pretty entertaining one.”

LinkedIn’s adland opportunity arises

Cindy Gallop, another stalwart of marketing Twitter, says she’s “personally committed to staying on Twitter until it absolutely disappears.”

But she suggests that the conversation will shift, bit by bit, on to LinkedIn. Though the platform is thought of as a purely professional arena, there’s more room for personal debate, Gallop says. “Professionals are human beings too. And people on LinkedIn are enormously welcoming to sharing what one is doing in one’s life as much as what one is doing in one’s business.”

Furthermore, she says the platform is a more effective networking and broadcast tool. She’s been able to parlay LinkedIn into an effective tool for pulling in investment to her business Make Love Not Porn. “I have to make synaptic connections happen that will attract investors,” she says, “and I am personally gobsmacked by the amount of incoming investor interest I get from LinkedIn. Right now, LinkedIn is my single most effective mechanism for attracting investors.”

Rather than look for like-for-like replacements, she suggests users consider alternatives built with the potential harms of social media in mind. “There is huge opportunity for the social media of the future, especially through the female lens. That opportunity is only bigger today. The time is now for anybody who is not a white man to start the social platform of the future. The young white male founders of the giant social platforms that dominate our lives today, and Elon Musk is absolute proof of this, are not the primary targets of online or offline harassment, abuse, sexual assault, violence, rape, revenge porn – and they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms.”

Clark also thinks new competitors could break through. “I’m optimistic. People are creative and new things are built all the time. People will find new ways to express themselves.“

Future models of social media – and future homes for advertising discourse – could involve the industry at a much earlier stage, Gallop notes. “I would like to exhort members of the advertising industry to think about that huge opportunity for a new kind of social platform. Within the advertising industry, you absolutely have the skills and the talents that could bring a whole different lens to building the social platform of the future. Who better than us to think about ways of building that social platform that make it enormously beneficial for advertising in a way that also integrates advertising into community receptivity within that platform? At a moment when the field is wide open for the new Twitter, I think people within our industry should be asking themselves how they might be able to do that as well.”