Apple has resumed advertising on X, Elon Musk's social media platform, for the first time in over a year.
Apple removed its ads from X after Musk supported the ongoing anti-Semitic posts by far-right users on the social media platform. At the same time, a new report found that ads from companies like Apple were being served on X alongside pro-Nazi content.
However, since November 2023, a lot has happened since Apple stopped advertising on Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter. Namely, Donald Trump was once again elected president, and this time, Musk is essentially acting as his right-hand man.
Now, about 15 months after Apple halted its advertising spend on X, Apple has returned to advertising on the platform. 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. Another ad is running on Apple's @AppleTV account for the Apple TV series Severance.
The ads do not currently appear anywhere in the accounts' X profiles. But that's not unusual for Apple. X allows advertisers to promote regular posts as ads, which will show up on their profile page, or to specifically run a post as an ad that does not appear on the advertiser's profile page. When running ads on X, Apple always uses the latter method. However, for a user to notice these posts, X needs to serve them the ads.
As MacRumors points out, even though Apple had paused its ad campaigns, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives continued to maintain their presence on Musk's platform.
With Apple resuming ads on X, it's unclear how large their current ad campaigns are. For example, the Safari ad has over 600,000 views since it was posted on February 13. It was originally posted on February 10. Other advertisers who previously left have returned in various places, but marketing budgets for ad spending on X have been significantly reduced.
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