3 items in Jonathan Lewis’ in-tray at X
Analysis
X has announced that Channel 4 head of commercial innovation and partners Jonathan Lewis has joined as UK managing director.
This means X has filled the UK MD role for the first time since it rebranded from Twitter. Previous Twitter UK MD Dara Nasr left the company in November 2022, later joining WeTransfer.
Lewis has been at Channel 4 for 12 years and a board member of the European Broadcaster Exchange since 2018. Earlier in his career, Lewis was managing director at Vevo and held various commercial roles at Channel 5.
In a post on X, Gregory Owens, X’s vice-president, ad sales and partnerships, and managing director, Europe and Africa, global sales partners, said he was “thrilled” to announce Lewis as UK MD.
He commented: “Jon brings an exceptional background in leadership and innovation, as well as a wealth of industry experience. A fantastic addition to our leadership team in Europe. […] Jon is ideally suited to guide our amazing UK team into an exciting future, where we’re committed to enhancing content quality, user experiences and service excellence for our advertisers and agency partners.”
What might be his early priorities as MD in the UK?
X’s value on the media plan
Talk to any agency strategist about social media and they will privately (and sometimes publicly) admit that X, and Twitter before it, was never a significant part of their media plans.
After Elon Musk intervened to reduce content moderation efforts, and thus create greater brand-safety concerns, advertisers reduced their spend with the platform or left it altogether, in part because it was easy to turn off spend when it played a minor role.
According to Kantar, a net 26% of marketing professionals plan to reduce adspend on X in 2025 — the largest recorded pullback in expected spend for any media owner since Kantar began measuring marketer sentiment in its annual Media Reactions report in 2020.
For X to retake share of the social media ad market, it will need to prove itself indispensable to brands’ media strategies in ways it never did in the past.
Brand-safety woes
X will also need to do so while convincing advertisers that it can provide a brand-safe environment within which to advertise, even as Musk continues to make inflammatory posts about the UK government.
Musk has in recent weeks called for prime minister Sir Keir Starmer to be imprisoned and extended an endorsement to far-right anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, whom he called to replace Nigel Farage as leader of the Reform party.
He also publicly backed Alternative for Germany, a far-right populist party that a German court has ruled may threaten democracy in the nation.
While X’s purportedly laissez-faire approach to content moderation has led to advertisers shying away from the platform for fear of showing up next to hateful content, it’s possible that Meta’s own recent changes to content moderation, which have been explicitly designed to emulate that of X, could help normalise advertising on the latter. This is especially true as advertisers have not signalled interest in decreasing adspend on Meta platforms.
As media analyst Brian Wieser, writing in his Madison and Wall newsletter, argued: “By conveying how Meta will take the same approach that X has around brand safety, this action will probably have (whether intended or not) the effect of helping X in its efforts to capture share of marketer budgets.”
‘Too big to fail’? Industry reacts to Meta content moderation changes
Staving off competition
Since Musk rebranded Twitter to X, the company has lost an estimated $5bn in brand value as of September 2024. Meanwhile, in the same month an analysis of Similarweb data by the Financial Times suggested that users had declined by more than a third in the UK over the course of a year.
With X losing goodwill among advertisers and users, upstarts — namely Meta’s Threads and Bluesky — have grown at pace in what has become a competitive microblogging market.
Threads has over 275m users as of the company’s latest quarterly earnings. Bluesky, meanwhile, boasts a smaller but growing pool of over 26m users.
In the UK, Bluesky in particular has become increasingly popular among journalists and other media personalities seeking refuge from the uptick in hateful speech and misinformation on X. This growth could accelerate if Threads sees a similar shift in content following Meta’s changes to moderation.
While neither Threads nor Bluesky yet accept advertising, assuming they do at some point in the future, Lewis will be charged with protecting X’s commercial territory — a potentially difficult task given advertisers tend to follow audiences wherever they can be found.
X has been reached for comment.
