Twitter’s new CEO is an advertising executive who secured $100 billion in deals during more than a decade at NBCUniversal – and Elon musk will hope she can repair his platform’s strained relationship with brands.
Linda Yaccarino was confirmed as Twitter’s new head on Friday, hours after she quit the NBC job.
She also holds influential positions at the World Economic Forum, where she is chair of the Taskforce on Future of Work and also sits on its Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee.
Twitter suffered a sharp decline in advertising after Musk’s $44 billion takeover in October 2022, when some brands paused spending with the platform. Her appointment is seen as an attempt to reverse the damage.
Musk said Yaccarino will help ‘transform this platform into X, the everything app.’
Who is the new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino?
Yaccarino joined NBCUniversal in November 2011 as president of cable entertainment and digital advertising sales, according to her LinkedIn page.
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She then rose through the ranks and was appointed to chairman of global advertising and partnerships in October 2020.
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Her now-deleted profile on the NBCUniversal website said she led a 2,000-member global team to ‘help connect emerging and established brands to hundreds of millions of viewers’.
Yaccarino’s team has ‘generated more than $100 billion in ad sales’ since she joined in 2011, it said.
She also transformed NBCUniversal’s advertising sale strategy and ‘reengineered the advertising business for the 21st century’.
Before that, she spent 19 years at Turner, a major media firm which is now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
She studied liberal arts and telecommunications at Penn State University.
Yaccarino has also held prominent positions at the Ad Council.
In December 2020, Donald Trump appointed Yaccarino as a member of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.
How will Linda Yaccarino help Twitter?
She has been described as an ‘assertive’ operator who can be pugnacious ‘when the situation warrants’.
Twitter has had a tricky relationship with some advertisers since Musk’s takeover – and he will hope Yaccarino’s experience can help reverse that.
Reports in January said Twitter had suffered a 40 percent drop in revenue since last year, as more than 500 advertisers pause spending on the site.
In November, Musk admitted there had been issues with advertising revenue, telling his followers: ‘Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation, and we did everything we could to appease the activists.’
Some Twitter users have threatened to end their Twitter Blue subscriptions because of Yaccarino’s links to the World Economic Forum, her support for vaccines and masks during the pandemic, and her support for diversity initiatives.
But Musk said: ‘I think people from both sides of the political spectrum will find Linda to be smart, fair and reasonable.’
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