She will be in charge of day-to-day business at Twitter.
(Photo: imago/Future Image)
Linda Yaccarino? Google searches for the name plummeted on Friday after it was revealed the 60-year-old would succeed Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter. “I’m excited to partner with Linda to transform the platform into X, the everything app,” Musk wrote. Yaccarino is to manage day-to-day business, Musk himself wants to remain executive chairman and chief technologist.
But those who have been paying attention in the past few weeks should not have been really surprised by Musk’s decision. The duo had recently presented themselves to the world and obviously harmonized: Yaccarino had interviewed the Twitter CEO at a top-class marketing conference of her previous employer in Miami – or rather, had a charming barbecue.
She commended Musk for his workaholic work ethic — “not dissimilar to my own,” as she cleverly put it — while subtly criticizing him for his past dealings with Twitter’s advertisers. Also, would the new guidelines for tweet truthfulness actually apply to Musk? And how does his work at Twitter fit in with his self-declared goal of advancing the good of mankind?
Anyone who has seen the interview should have hope that Yaccarino could actually achieve the almost impossible – to keep an erratic, choleric genius like the owner Musk happy and in check and also to revive Twitter’s advertising business.
Decades of experience in the advertising market
Yaccarino has long been a household name within the American advertising industry. The 60-year-old has had a steep career: After studying telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University, she did an internship at the entertainment company NBC Universal (NBCU) and discovered her “love for the media” there, as she once said in an interview.
She then left NBCU and worked for the media company Turner in marketing and acquisitions for twenty years before returning to NBCU in 2011.
There she was responsible for a team with more than 2000 employees and managed the global advertising market and corporate partnerships. As the Wall Street Journal reports, her nickname at the company was velvet hammer because she wrapped hard-hitting sales tactics in pleasantries. At NBCU, she advocated moving beyond traditional 30-second TV ads to partnering with digital platforms like Apple and Buzzfeed.
She also built the Peacock streaming platform, which was launched in 2020 and recycles content from the entertainment giant. However, the platform’s market share in the fiercely competitive streaming market is low, with 22 million people subscribed to it. In addition, she created an advertising offer for Peacock especially for small and medium-sized companies.
Yaccarino interviewed Musk a few weeks ago in Miami.
(Photo: dpa)
Overall, the manager at NBCU generated advertising sales of $ 100 billion, as the group announced. In 2019, the business magazine “Business Insider” named the New Yorker one of the “top 10 who are transforming the advertising market” – partly because she was able to bring together teams that previously worked in silos.
Apparently, Yaccarino had been looking for a position as CEO for some time. According to the Wall Street Journal, she was frustrated at not being given more responsibilities within the entertainment company and had threatened to quit.
Commitment to the World Economic Forum
Yaccarino is married and has two children. In addition to her work at NBCU, she has been involved with the World Economic Forum for four years: there she chairs the working group on the “future of work” and a committee on media, entertainment and culture, as she writes on her Linkedin profile.
The manager has also demonstrated in recent years that she understands how to cooperate with both political parties in the country: under President Donald Trump, she was involved in an advisory board for fitness and nutrition from 2018 to 2020. She helped Joe Biden’s government create snazzy ad campaigns with Pope Francis for the coronavirus vaccine.
This ability should also be of use to her in her new role as Twitter CEO – as is well known, social networks in the USA regularly stumble into trench warfare between the two parties. Especially with a view to the 2024 presidential campaign, this quality should be helpful to her – and to Twitter.
This article first appeared in the NZZ.
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