Ad Industry Shocker: Twitter Hires The 'Velvet Hammer' As CEO

Muck, Yaccarino last month (AP Photo)

Elon Musk has named former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino as Twitter's new CEO, as the company tries to reverse a plunge in ad revenue.

Yaccarino will take over a social media platform beset with challenges and a heavy debt load, after she spent several years modernizing the advertising business at NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast Corp.

In a tweet Friday announcing the news, Mr. Musk said Ms. Yaccarino will focus “primarily on business operations,” while he handles product design and technology. “Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app,” he said.

I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.

Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app. https://t.co/TiSJtTWuky

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2023

One of Ms. Yaccarino’s prime tasks will be to lure back marketers who suspended spending out of concerns Mr. Musk would weaken content moderation or that there was too much uncertainty surrounding the company, reports The Wall Street Journal. 

She has a head start advising Musk: After advertisers bolted last year, Yaccarino reached out to help him navigate Madison Avenue and understand advertisers’ concerns better, people familiar with the situation said.

Inside NBCUniversal, the 60-year-old is regarded as an advertising sales machine. She is nicknamed the “Velvet Hammer,” because her hard-nosed negotiation tactics come wrapped in a friendly package.

During her 12-year tenure at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino and her 2,000-plus-person advertising sales team have generated more than $100 billion in ad sales, according to the company.

Yaccarino, described by colleagues as a hard-charging executive and artful self-promoter, joined NBCUniversal in 2011 after almost two decades at Turner, whose networks are now part of Warner Bros. Discovery. She has steered the company through a structural decline in television that has affected all major media companies as consumers cut the cable cord. That change has put downward pressure on ratings—the metric used to generate ad dollars. 

Yaccarino has pushed NBCUniversal to look beyond the 30-second TV ads that still make up the core of the business, embracing interactive shopping and forming partnerships with digital companies like BuzzFeed and Apple. She has streamlined ad sales across networks like Bravo, E! and the NBC broadcast channel, and played a role in the launch of the ad-supported Peacock streaming service.