Love it or hate it, X is on a roll.
With a strong start to the year—marked by Donald Trump’s election win, big advertisers returning, and renewed interest from Wall Street—Elon Musk’s social platform has momentum on its side. To keep it going, now, X is doubling down on AI.
On Friday, X introduced two new AI-powered tools for advertisers—Prefill with Grok and Analyze Campaign with Grok—designed to streamline ad creation and performance analysis. Prefill with Grok generates ad copy, images, and CTAs based on a website URL, while Analyze Campaign with Grok offers AI-driven insights to optimize campaign performance. The tools, rolling out to SMB advertisers, are part of X’s broader push to enhance ad efficiency and targeting through AI.
AI has been a pretty dominant theme for Elon lately, with the company’s newest model, Grok-3, earning rave reviews with its release last week. Just as Grok is making waves, X is launching these new Grok-powered ad features. Hey, is that actual coordination between marketing, PR, and product? We’ve come a long way from the poop emoji PR days!
Why This Matters:
This move isn’t really about winning over big brands or holding companies, which already have plenty of resources to create and measure campaigns. Instead, X is doubling down on SMBs, seeing an opportunity as larger advertisers remain cautious due to brand safety concerns. By investing in AI tools that simplify ad creation and analysis, X is positioning itself as a go-to platform for this segment.
This focus on SMBs also reflects their lower sensitivity to media quality and brand safety compared to Fortune 500 advertisers, making them a potentially more dependable target for X’s ad business. That said, some larger advertisers—including Apple and Amazon—have started returning to the platform. X’s political influence is helping to draw more big brands back, even as brand safety concerns persist.
Experts React:
Siddharth Rao, Head of Ads & Trust and Safety Engineering at X, tweeted about the launch:
Here’s the full thread from the X Business account about the Grok ad tool rollout. Also, just for fun, we asked Grok why X is going after SMB advertisers. Here’s what it had to say:
Our Take:
X keeps chugging along. The company seems to have found its rhythm, and its strategy right now is pretty clear (hat tip to CEO Linda Yaccarino). It will be interesting to see what John Nitti does as he settles in as the new Global Head of Ad Innovation. It feels like he’ll focus more on Fortune 500 initiatives—more programmatic access, more data partnerships, more TV—but TBD.
