Linda Yaccarino is leaving her job as head of global advertising at NBC Universal to take the chief executive officer role at Twitter. She will work closely with owner Elon Musk, who will be both chief technology officer and executive chairman. Twitter’s next leader is a well-connected media executive whose deep ties to Madison Avenue could help lure advertisers back to the platform at a critical time.
She will helm a company mired in multiple crises – many of them spurred by Musk himself. Musk fired or lost about 75% of Twitter employees since his October takeover, including most of those who had deep relationships in sales and partnerships, which Yaccarino will now need to repair. The company has also faced an advertiser exodus, triggered in part by Musk’s erratic content moderation decisions and his own tweets.
Yaccarino joined Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal in 2011 after nearly two decades at Turner, home of cable channels like TNT and TBS. At NBC, she helped launch the ad-supported streaming service Peacock, oversaw live events like the Super Bowl and Olympic Games, and forged partnerships with tech companies including Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitter.
She’s perhaps best known for leading the TV industry’s push for new ways to measure viewers. Yaccarino was highly critical of Nielsen, whose ratings have long formed the basis for TV ad deals, for not counting all the people who watched NBC’s shows online. In recent years, Yaccarino took the unusual step of bringing together competitors in the media industry to discuss alternatives.
During his tenure, Musk slashed thousands of jobs, scaled back the company’s content moderation, and allowed accounts previously banned for breaking rules to return. A controversial subscription service plan, Twitter Blue, has been flailing, drawing less than 1% of the user base. Twitter needs to boost sales in order to repay $12.5 billion in debt the company took on when Musk bought it. Annual interest is expected to exceed $1.2 billion.
Despite a slight uptick in daily users since early 2022, Twitter’s revenue has fallen by 50% since October as a result of a “massive decline” in advertising, Musk said in March.
Twitter users are already dissecting Yaccarino’s politics and behavior on the platform to try to understand what kind of content moderation decisions she might stand behind – and whether she will align with Musk in his embrace of right-wing provocateurs that were suspended under Twitter’s previous leadership for breaking rules or spreading misinformation.
While at NBC, Yaccarino oversaw the integration of sales teams for Telemundo and became a big advocate for multicultural programming. While Musk has publicly mocked diversity efforts at Twitter, Yaccarino has been a “champion” of such measures and doesn’t back down during business negotiations. She’s tough, but she’s fair.
One of Yaccarino’s first challenges will be a new show on Twitter from fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose incendiary remarks led advertisers to steer clear of him on cable. Another will be handling her mercurial, unpredictable new boss.
(With inputs from agencies)
