Over a year ago, Apple removed its ads from X after Elon Musk backed a series of antisemitic posts from far-right users on the social media platform. Around the same time, a new report found that ads from companies such as Apple were being served on pro-Nazi content on X.
However, since November 2023, when Apple stopped advertising on Musk’s X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, a lot has happened. Namely, Donald Trump was elected president once again, and this time, Musk is essentially operating as his right-hand man.
Now, roughly 15 months after Apple halted its ad spend on X, Apple has returned to advertising on the platform.
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MacRumors first noticed that Apple is currently running at least two different ad campaigns on X. One ad, from the official @Apple X account, promotes the company’s Safari web browser. The other ad is being run on Apple’s @AppleTV account for the Apple TV series Severance.
The ads currently do not appear on either of the accounts’ X profiles. But that’s not unusual for Apple. X allows advertisers to promote regular posts as ads, which would show up on their profile page, or run a post specifically as an advertisement, which does not appear on the advertiser’s profile page. When running ads on X, Apple has always utilized the latter mechanism. However, for a user to observe these posts, X must serve the ads to them.
As MacRumors points out, although Apple paused its ads campaigns, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives continued to maintain a presence on Musk’s platform.
While Apple has resumed ads on X, it’s unclear how big their current ad campaigns are. The Safari ad, for example, has just over 600,000 impressions as of publishing on Feb. 13. It was originally posted on Feb. 10. Other advertisers who previously left have returned at various points but with a significantly reduced marketing budget for ad spend on X.
