When Meta announced it was terminating its use of fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram back in January, the industry speculated that the move could deter brand safety-conscious advertisers from spending on the tech giant’s social platforms. But the company’s Q1 earnings indicate that brands are not so easily spooked.
Meta’s revenues, the vast majority of which come from ad sales, were up 16 percent YoY during the first three months of 2025, suggesting advertisers didn’t blink after the fact-checking announcement. Or did they? According to MikMak, an ecommerce platform for multichannel brands, spend on Meta dipped 3 percent in Q1 compared to Q4 2024. And MikMak CEO Rachel Tipograph explains that single-figure drop represents a significant portion of ad spend.
“On any given day, Meta is our number one source of traffic,” Tipograph tells VideoWeek. “We’re talking about really large numbers. And when we look at our data and start to see when the dip occurred, it was in January, all around the time of that fact-checking announcement.”
“Nothing is permanent”
However, MikMak’s data shows that spending has since returned to Meta, even in light of its rollback on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. John Bishop, SVP, Business Intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions, says short-term pullbacks from social platforms are often more reflective of “PR moves” than any meaningful change in advertiser behaviour.
“Whenever Meta has had a misstep – and they’ve had several missteps over time – it’s benefited brands to come out and say we’re taking a pause,” he comments. “But everything really comes down to scale and reach, and at the end of the day, people pick that back up.”
“Paid media is very easy to turn on and off,” concurs Rachel Tipograph. “It’s easy to be emotional in the moment, and then it’s easy to just reenact what you were doing. Nothing is permanent in advertising, which is why ad stocks are so volatile on Wall Street – because they know how easy it is to turn media on and off.”
And brand safety is often less of a concern among Meta’s advertiser base, comprising millions of small and medium-sized businesses, many of whom never intended to turn off their spend. Then at the other end of Meta’s advertising spectrum are large agencies that often have what Bishop calls “sweetheart deals” in place with the Big Tech companies.
The X factor
But those same agencies have reportedly come under pressure from the White House – specifically Elon Musk, who has allegedly pressured Interpublic Group (IPG) to increase spending on X or risk jeopardising its upcoming merger with Omnicom – which has also given clients financial incentives for advertising on X, according to leaked documents seen by Adweek.
And although X’s ad revenues are forecast to return to growth this year for the first time since Musk’s takeover, they are still a fraction of Twitter’s pre-Musk ad dollars. And Tipograph notes that only two of MikMak’s 2,300 brand customers are currently live on X. This suggests advertisers are much more capable of staying away from X than Meta, either because they rely on it less, or fear its brand risk more.
While both are contributing factors, Bishop says the former is a stronger driver of brands’ decisions, given X’s position on the “secondary tier” of platforms for advertisers. Tipograph agrees that X is seen as a lower priority for ad investment. “I would put Meta, Alphabet and TikTok all in this echelon of platforms that truly drive business results for advertisers, which makes them more forgiving,” she comments.
Meta’s walled garden approach also insulates it on media plans, according to Vanessa Otero, CEO of Ad Fontes Media, despite the risks its recent policy decisions pose to brands.
“Advertising budgets to Meta for years have dwarfed what’s on X,” says Otero. “And on social media, there’s a lot of direct-to-consumer, very performance-based advertising, focused on the conversions. And because it’s a walled garden, and they have all this data on the customers, it tends to work very well as a channel. But say you have your several hundred thousand, few million dollars going towards Meta, and now they’ve publicly done this rollback on DEI, rollback on fact-checking, it’s worse for your perception as a company, worse for your brand.”
The siloed majority
But for brands seeking protection in an increasingly risky social landscape, many have found safe harbour on “the positive corner of the internet”. Pinterest, the social sharing site used for product discovery, saw a 70 percent rise in spend in January, according to MikMak. And while uncertainty around the future of TikTok had an impact on the redirection of social spend at the time, Tipograph says Pinterest’s reputation for brand safety played an important role.
“There are a lot of brands that moved spend into environments like Pinterest because of brand safety and the fact that it can also drive conversion,” notes Tipograph.
John Bishop adds that where TikTok spending is often adjusted based on political circumstances, “Pinterest is kind of an evergreen” when it comes to brand and consumer safety. “You know they’re not going to misstep. They have very good reputation for protecting data, consumer privacy, as well as being a positive place.”
That said, the flow of ad spend to brand-safe environments is still stymied by what Vanessa Otero calls “antiquated, wrong-headed” approaches to brand safety. Earlier this month, independent agency Bountiful Cow published research that showed advertising on premium news inventory that had been deemed unsafe by brand safety tools actually improved campaign performance. Despite this, WARC data reveals that global ad spend on news content has fallen by 33 percent in the last six years.
“News has a totally separate set of considerations to social media,” comments Otero. “Folks are worried about running next to negative news content, because there’s this wrong perception that it damages their brand, even though they’re investing on X and Meta, which is negativity, negativity, negativity, bias, misinformation, all that stuff, all day long. But there’s a totally different conversation when advertisers think about news publishers. And often it’s different investment teams, so the decisions they’re making are often siloed, and they often don’t make sense.”
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