X has rebuilt its Ads Manager, and on Thursday 1st October, the company previously known as Twitter invited agencies to London to see the result. We joined local and visiting digital marketing teams at X’s office just off Piccadilly Circus for a breakfast briefing with three X specialists. Many marketers file X under news and politics rather than treating it as a channel to plan around, but X wants to be seen as a place where performance and premium advertising sit side by side.
The briefing opened with the numbers. X says it’s the number one news app in more than 160 countries, with active user minutes up 14% year on year, and that UK users are 51% more likely than average to follow influencers or experts. Citing research from Adelaide and Emarketer, it also ranks itself second for social media attention. Those figures come from X, but they show who the new tools are built to reach: people paying attention to what’s happening now.
The next question is how easily the platform lets you reach them, and that’s where the Ads Manager overhaul comes in.
A Simpler Ads Manager, With More Control Over Creative
Shayn O’Donoghue, X’s Client Account Manager for Media and Entertainment, covered the redesigned interface, targeting, and reporting. X built the overhaul around three ideas:
- Simplicity: artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including Optimised Targeting, cut the number of steps needed to launch a sales or conversion campaign.
- Control: advertisers can reuse top-performing assets from other platforms, crop directly in the post composer, and use 9:16, 4:5, and 2:3 aspect ratios.
- Performance: X says it rebuilt the ad stack from the ground up to deliver faster optimisation and trackable return on investment (ROI).
Creative rules X says drive results
X also set out the creative principles it recommends, citing Karen Nelson-Field’s research on attention:
Video:
Cap it at 15 seconds and show your branding within the first 3 seconds. X calls video one of its strongest and fastest-growing formats, says short clips earn higher completion rates, and says early branding delivers 30% higher unaided brand recall.
Copy:
Keep it to 50-100 characters and one clear message. People read on X, with 70% viewing the copy (versus 21% on Instagram), so a short, focused line gets seen, and the best-performing ads are the concise ones.
Variety:
Use three to five ad formats and test different tones of voice across them. X says this drives brand lift, campaign awareness and purchase intent, and it shows you which approach your audience responds to.
Sound:
Most X ads play with the sound off on mobile, so adding captions is essential.
Takeovers and Campaign Planning
For its biggest moments, X sells takeovers – premium placements that run for a day and that it limits to one slot per country per day. There are four formats:
| Format | What you get |
|---|---|
| Timeline Takeover | The first ad users see when they open X that day |
| Spotlight Takeover | The top of the Explore tab for 24 hours, with video creative that can carry sound and link out to a website, X profile, companion post or event page |
| Immersive Takeover | The first slot in the vertical video feed for a full day |
| Reach Blocks | Targetable, scaled reach with age and gender controls for a day of amplified visibility |
X recommends planning in three phases over three to ten weeks of activity, with always-on support for performance goals:
- Ignite (the tease) collects insights and starts building awareness
- Takeoff (the launch) maximises awareness and delivers the message
- Fly sustains relevance and converts audiences.
The calendar gives that structure plenty to work with. X’s planner for August to December lists Black Friday, Diwali, Halloween, Champions League nights, Formula One races, Christmas and Boxing Day, among others. For any brand with a Q4 plan, it’s a useful map of when attention peaks.
Creative Strategy and Custom Formats
Keara Norman, X’s Creative Strategist, introduced the Creative Strategy pack. X’s team builds formats beyond the standard ad units, but only for brands that pass a minimum spend threshold. Two examples stood out…
Like-to-Remind lets users like a post to opt into updates from a brand, which suits launches, events, and episodic content. eToro used it so fans who opted in received every moment of its app launch, before, during, and after the reveal.
Trend Genius monitors conversations around a brand’s ambassadors and serves a matched ad at the peak of a trend. When Bradley Cooper trended after dancing at a Taylor Swift concert, a Louis Vuitton ad featuring him deployed automatically. Brands set safety filters in advance, with an optional manual approval step. Trend Genius works in three steps: it detects the trend and its origin, matches a creative asset, then targets the media. The same system served Louis Vuitton creative featuring Ana de Armas after a CinemaCon trailer drop, and Tyler the Creator after his Coachella announcement. X also points to the scale of the conversation, counting 1.8M posts across the three ambassadors’ conversations, which explains why speed matters.
The spend gate puts these formats out of reach for smaller advertisers. That principle isn’t out of reach, though. Real-time relevance beats scheduled messaging, and any brand can plan around the moments its audience already cares about.
Premium Content Partnerships
Jordan Bedford, who works in Content Partnerships, covered the third pillar. Brands can run pre-roll video ads ahead of premium publisher content, then layer X’s audience targeting on top. Sport, entertainment, gaming and news make up the main verticals. X also stressed control and transparency, including a brand safety review of where ads run.
The strongest proof point came from Wimbledon. Barclays paired pre-roll before the tournament highlights with a Timeline Takeover and a live fan destination page. X reports 143M global video views across the tournament, enough, it says, to fill Centre Court 9,500 times.
The New X Ads Manager
We first covered this in May, when X announced a rebuilt Ads Manager, its first significant overhaul in around 20 years, with a phased rollout that began in April. Our view then was that simplicity, control and performance were familiar promises, because most major ad platforms are heading in the same direction: automation, real-time data, and ease of use. Since then, the promises have turned into specifics: fewer steps to launch a conversion campaign, reusable assets, and a rebuilt ad stack.
X has also wrapped a commercial offer around the tool, with takeovers, creative strategy, and premium pre-roll. The audience data X shared explains why the investment matters. Citing audience research from GWI, X reports the following about its UK users:
- 14% buy new technology on launch day, which gives launches a ready audience.
- 46.7% sit in high income brackets, which means spending power for premium and high-ticket offers.
- One in five working users holds a management position, so business-to-business campaigns reach decision-makers.
The Last Word
Our takeaway: the barrier to testing X has dropped, and it’s earned a place in the planning conversation. Review whether it deserves a line in your Q4 plan, start with video capped at 15 seconds, and design for sound off with captions, since most X ads play silently. We’d run three to five variants, and judge the results against the same goals as your other paid social channels. If you’d like to talk through where X fits in your paid media strategy, get in touch.