After
leaving Hyundai this past month, Angela Zepeda has joined X as the social media company’s first global head of marketing since Elon Musk took over the platform in late 2022.
On Monday, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that Zepeda will not only be leading the platform’s marketing
efforts, but will also shape the company’s “transformation” moving forward.
As
Hyundai’s head of marketing, Zepeda oversaw social media, creative work and experiential and multicultural marketing, leading the automotive company’s recent investment in Reddit and
more.
But Zepeda’s CMO title — which she had held since 2019 — changed when the automaker split its marketing department into creative and performance divisions this past
July.
About two weeks ago, Zepeda left the company, writing on LinkedIn that after five years at Hyundai, she was
“thrilled to shift gears” and begin a new adventure at X.
The global head of marketing role at X
has remained vacant since Leslie Berland left the position, shortly after Musk bought the company two years ago.
Zepeda is stepping into the role at a challenging time, as the platform struggles to boost ad revenue after two years of significant job cuts and an ongoing advertiser exodus in response to
widespread concern over ad safety among a proliferation of harmful and offensive content.
Research and
consulting firm Kantar recently found that 26% of marketers globally are planning to decrease their spend on the platform in 2025, while only 4% of marketers think X ads provide brand safety.
X’s ad revenue is reportedly down around 83% compared to what it had been before Musk took over the app.
In addition, last week, X was banned in Brazil, its
largest user base in Latin America, resulting in the loss of about 20 million users and immediately reducing the platform’s monetizable daily active user count from 250 million to 230
million.
Paired with the loss of 5 million users in Europe that the company reported this year, X’s total user base is down at least 10% in 2024.
