Twitter's New CEO Was Hired to Quintuple Advertising Revenue

Twitter lost over 50% of its advertising revenue (and possibly as much as 89%) in the 6 months after Elon Musk took control of the company. Companies like Mondelez International, Coca-Cola, Merck, Hilton, and AT&T halted all advertising on Twitter, and other companies like HBO, Amazon, and IBM pulled back close to 90% of their ad spending on the platform.

Musk needed someone with deep relationships to the chief marketing officers and advertising agencies that serve the biggest companies in America. That’s why he hired Linda Yaccarino to be Twitter’s new CEO.

Linda served as NBCUniversal’s chief of advertising sales from 2011 to 2023 and was responsible for transforming the company’s advertising model.

In 2011, NBCUniversal had 15 different sales teams that each went after the same clients, and clients had to deal with multiple sales teams to buy the ad inventory they wanted to. Linda consolidated those 15 teams into a single sales team and gave ad buyers a single point of contact for their purchases.

In 2015, Linda stopped providing Nielsen TV ratings for CNBC, claiming that those ratings were missing up to 30% of the channel’s audience across new digital channels. Instead, CNBC would sell ads based on new metrics provided by marketing and research firm Cogent Reports.

In 2019, Linda helped design a deal that gave NBCUniversal exclusive rights to all media and sponsorship opportunities for the 2028 LA-based Olympic games so that marketers could come to NBC as a one-stop-shop for all media and sponsorship opportunities related to the Olympics.

Her playbook has been to consolidate media properties and client experiences, and to sell ads based on metrics that measure the full value of those consolidated properties. That is an attractive playbook for Elon who has grand ambitions of turning Twitter into an “everything app” (like WeChat) that combines messaging, social media, and payments.

But more importantly for the short term survival of Twitter, Linda has deep professional and personal connections in the advertising world. A month before her new Twitter role was announced, Linda interviewed Elon at a the POSSIBLE marketing conference. During the interview, Linda played diplomat (and did so quite well) between Elon and the advertising community. That’s exactly what Twitter needs right now in order to rebuild its advertising revenue.

Linda seems to have built her career through diplomacy. She was a member of President Trump’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, and she worked with the Biden administration on a Covid vaccine campaign. She is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Media, Entertainment, and Culture committee which is viewed by some people on the right as an unelected group of elites trying to push a “woke” agenda. Yet she is also working with Elon Musk who has himself criticized the WEF and who is disliked for many reasons by some people on the left.

Linda seems to have thread the diplomatic needle relatively well in her career so far. She brings a notably different view to the table than Elon Musk, and in my opinion, the two of them (Musk working on product and Linda working on advertising operations) will be an effective team.

Nevertheless, some of Elon Musk’s own fans aren’t happy with his decision to hire her.

Billboard Chris either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that Twitter is not a charity — Twitter needs advertising revenue to survive. And every major advertising pocket is deeply concerned with brand safety (i.e. not having their brands become associated with hateful opinions that make people feel sad).

In general, critics have three main worries about Linda (all political rather than business):

She is a member of the WEF and therefore is infected with the “woke mind virus”. Yet they same critics are silent on the fact that Trump also appointed her to one of his committee’s while he was President.
She advocated for wearing masks during the Covid pandemic.
She helped Biden run a Covid vaccine campaign. Yet the same critics support Trump and are silent on the fact that the vaccine was Trump’s idea to begin with.

None of these criticisms are likely to result in a Twitter boycott or brand damage though since Musk fans still trust him.

Quotes by Linda Yaccarino

“There are several news organizations who don’t like your push for democratization and what they believe is the devaluing of the badges, because they were differentiated.”
Linda Yaccarino (Speaking to Elon Musk at a marketing conference)

“Most news organizations have a codependent relationship with Twitter, and I can speak on behalf of the industry, but I’ll speak on behalf of my own company [NBCUniversal], we have a big distribution partnership with [Twitter]. There are days where I see some of your tweets and I say, I wish I could say, stop helping the situation…”
Linda Yaccarino (Speaking to Elon Musk)

“When you’re in the media business, or even in the marketing business, you have to know who your consumer is, and you actually have to be focused on where they’re going next.”
Linda Yaccarino (Media Interview)