Linda Yaccarino Bails NBCU For Twitter CEO Position : May Jumpstart Ad Sales

At long last, Elon Musk is heading over the day-to-day operations of Twitter, something that investors have been pressing him to do for months. Linda Yaccarino, Chairman of Global Advertising and Client Partnerships at NBCUniversal will become CEO in about six weeks.

Musk announced that he will transition to being executive chairman and Chief Techology Officer, overseeing product, software and sysops.

One surprising thing about the announcement was that Ms. Yaccarino gave absolutely no notice. She was spotted on Thursday doing back-to-back rehearsals for the advertisers up-front presentations which begin next week, and resigned this morning just prior to Elon Musk’s announcement that she had been hired as CEO of Twitter.

It was announced that Ms. Yaccarino will be succeeded by Mark Marshall, President of Advertising Sales and Client Partnerships. He has been promoted to Interim Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships.

Yaccarino oversaw a wide swath of ad sales at NBCU, from linear to digital—she was instrumental in getting Peacock up and running. She has also been an outspoken critic of Nielsen’s data accuracy.

Although Nielsen has blamed much of its TV and streaming measurement accuracy on COVID-19, which made it impossible to go out and talk to TV viewers in person, Ms. Yaccarino’s criticism started well before the pandemic.

Speaking on a Variety Entertainment Summit panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2016, she said, “Imagine you’re a quarterback, and every time you threw a touchdown, it was only four points instead of six. That’s basically what I’m dealing with every friggin’ day.” And that was just the beginning. She openly criticized Nielsen for years, convincing some of her colleagues to get on board with calling Nielsen data out as lacking in TV ratings accuracy.

At NBC Universal, she was instrumental in developing a unified tech-enabled trading system called One Platform. She also developed the combined ad and sponsorship program for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, which had never been done before.

Discussions about the job likely began after Ms. Yaccarino interviewed Elon Musk at the MMA Global POSSIBLE Conference held in Miami April 15-17. Musk made a pitch for advertisers to come back to Twitter, but also reiterated he is going to do things his way.

“It’s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places of Twitter and not in other places,” he said at the MMA POSSIBLE marketing conference. “But it is not cool to say what Twitter will do. And if that means losing advertising dollars, we’ll lose them. But freedom of speech is paramount,” said Musk.

Although Musk made clear what his current position would be transitioning to, surprisingly, Musk said Ms. Yaccarino would focus on business operations, whereas it would seem as if her first priority should be to try and quickly jump-start ad sales. She has deep ties in the advertising industry and may be able to woo back some of the many advertisers who have bailed.

However, it’s possible that she may have arranged to have some of the key people on her ad sales team at NBCU follow her to Twitter, and that’s just not yet been announced yet. The timing is odd that she doesn’t start for six weeks given that the upfronts start on Monday (Netflix
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had planned to appear this year, but canceled amidst announced protests from the writers strikers).

There is no question that she is highly respected in the media world. “Linda’s a force,” Joe Marchese, former head of ad sales at Fox Network Group, told The New York Times
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. “She has one of the biggest jobs in advertising and the ad market is as hard as it’s ever been.”

However, with two very strong personalities, it will be interesting to see how Musk and Yaccarino interact with each other. Lou Paskalis, a veteran advertising executive and a friend of Yaccarino’s told The Times, “With her stature in the industry as probably one of the most beloved and trusted people on the revenue side, I question why she would subject herself to that kind of potential reputational risk,” he said. “If she fails in the role, then there’s probably no way that Twitter will survive as an ad-supported platform.”

He noted that moving into the CEO role at Twitter was like taking a “step into the lion’s mouth.” Given all of the recent layoffs at Twitter, even of long-time veterans at the Social Media company, his skepticism is warranted.

The staff at Twitter now is virtually a skeleton crew and it is unclear what decisions have been made before Ms. Yaccarino’s hiring as far as how much say she will have over adding staff—particularly in the ad sales department where it is direly needed. Elon Musk is a well-known micromanager.

Ms. Yaccarino definitely has her work cut out for her. Despite claims by Musk that many advertisers have been returning, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower, of the Top 100 advertisers prior to Musk buying the company, 37 appeared to spend zero during the first quarter of this year, and 24 others reduced their ad spending by 80% or more.

It’s also been reported that Twitter’s revenue and adjusted earnings dropped by approximately 40% year over year in December.

Therefore, it seems likely that Musk may reverse course on his skeleton crew strategy and let Ms. Yaccarino beef up the ad sales force significantly. Let’s hope this is the next, and positive chapter, for Twitter.