Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s advertising chief, was preparing to interview Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, on stage at a conference last month when she received an email from a colleague in the advertising industry.
Rob Norman, a former executive of advertising giant WPP, wanted to know if Ms. Yaccarino had seen the op-ed he wrote after Musk bought Twitter last year. Mr Norman’s column discussed the tech billionaire’s amplification of misinformation on Twitter and its chilling effect on advertisers.
Ms. Yaccarino said she had such concerns and intended to raise such concerns, Mr. Norman said. But the main focus of her conversation with Mr. Musk would be on something else: his efforts to transform the social network into “Twitter 2.0”.
Now Ms. Yaccarino will be the face of Twitter 2.0. Mr Musk said on Friday that he had selected Ms Yaccarino, 60, to become the company’s CEO. Hours earlier, NBCUniversal announced that Ms. Yaccarino would be leaving effective immediately.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO,” said Mr. Musk tweeted. He said she would focus primarily on business operations, while he would continue to work on product design and technology.
By choosing Ms. Yaccarino, Mr. Musk is signaling his priority at Twitter: his advertising business, rather than his social media knowledge. Ms. Yaccarino has been one of Madison Avenue’s power brokers for decades. And Twitter, which derives most of its revenue from advertising, has struggled to expand that business, especially after Musk terrified advertisers last year.
“Linda is a force,” said Joe Marchese, former head of ad sales at the Fox Networks Group, who has known Ms. Yaccarino for at least a decade. “She has one of the biggest jobs in advertising, and the advertising market is tougher than ever.”
Still, Ms. Yaccarino will have to do more than fight Twitter’s ad problems. The San Francisco-based company has been seriously downsized since Mr Musk cut back 75 percent of its workforce and struggled with expertise gaps and technical glitches. Twitter is also weighed down by a $13 billion debt it took on to enable Mr. Musk to buy the company.
Most importantly, Ms. Yaccarino would face an erratic and unpredictable boss in Mr. Musk. The 51-year-old billionaire has a track record of firing executives who fail to achieve his goals. He sometimes tweets news about his various companies without warning, including electric car maker Tesla. And as owner of Twitter, Mr. Musk retains absolute power in the company.
Mr. Musk already flipped Ms. Yaccarino’s carefully laid plans when he tweeted on Thursday that he had selected a new Twitter chief, although he did not identify her. Ms. Yaccarino, who was back-to-back rehearsing for NBC’s annual pitch to major advertisers when the tweet came out, hadn’t informed many of her fellow executives that she intended to leave, four people with knowledge of the matter said. .
Lou Paskalis, a longtime advertising executive and friend of Ms. Yaccarino, likened her move to Twitter to a “step in the lion’s mouth”.
“With her status in the industry as probably one of the most loved and trusted people on the revenue side, I wonder why she would expose herself to that kind of potential reputational risk,” he said.
Mr. Musk and Ms. Yaccarino might bet there’s a lot of upside with Twitter 2.0. Mr. Musk has laid out ambitious plans for the company, telling employees that it could one day be worth $250 billion and that the platform could become an “everything app,” with features such as payments. (He recently said Twitter is worth $20 billion, less than the $44 billion he paid for it.)
Ms. Yaccarino has already worked on her priorities on Twitter. A person who spoke to her in recent days said she is focused on repairing the company’s relationship with Madison Avenue and bringing media companies back to the platform, possibly with partnership deals.
And she and Mr. Musk seem aligned on political issues — such as a more permissive approach to speech on Twitter — that are central to his vision for the platform, two people familiar with her views said. She is a conservative and a critic of so-called awake discourse, a term used by conservatives to describe elements of left-wing social progressivism that they view as censorship, they said.
Former President Donald J. Trump twice appointed Ms. Yaccarino to two-year terms on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, where she joined so-called Republican politicians such as Mehmet Oz, the famous physician.
Ms. Yaccarino, who did not respond to requests for comment, grew up with working-class Italian parents in Long Island, New York, including a father who was a police officer. She went to Catholic school. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University in 1985 with a degree in telecommunications, she spent nearly 20 years at Turner Entertainment, becoming chief operating officer of advertising sales, marketing and acquisitions before leaving for NBCUniversal in 2011.
At Turner and NBCUniversal, Ms. Yaccarino — who is said to negotiate like a “velvet hammer” — has made a name for herself helping traditional television hold up in advertising in the age of Facebook and Google. Every year she took the stage at Radio City Music Hall for the pre-presentations, the glitzy showcases used by television networks to court Madison Avenue, to persuade marketers to pay a hefty premium over social media’s rates to advertising on shows like “This Is Us” and “Saturday Night Live.”
But while Ms. Yaccarino has spent years defending TV ad money against tech companies and has been a fierce critic of Facebook and YouTube, she’s also forged partnerships with apps like Snapchat and TikTok and digital outlets like BuzzFeed.
Outside of work, Ms. Yaccarino became heavily involved in initiatives including the World Economic Forum’s Task Force on Future of Work, which she leads. She also chaired the board of directors of the Ad Council, a non-profit organization, and helped the group raise $60 million in three months at the start of the pandemic to combat vaccine hesitancy, through private conversations , sending notes and “using every lever she had,” says Lisa Sherman, the council’s chief executive.
It’s unclear when Ms. Yaccarino met Mr. Musk, but they were publicly on stage at the media conference last month at the swanky Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in Florida. Ms. Yaccarino had previously expressed her admiration for Twitter, calling the platform “the single, No. 1 largest” content distribution partner for NBCUniversal at an advertising industry event shortly after Musk acquired the company. At the time, she added that she had no intention of “betting against him” and that she believed he could “learn advertising.”
“I think we can teach him,” she said.
This week, Ms. Yaccarino was present when Mr. Musk spoke at an advertising conference in California’s Napa Valley hosted by WPP, three people familiar with the event said.
Ms. Yaccarino would be a rare female chief executive in tech, as top executives such as Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki recently resigned. Throughout her career, Ms. Yaccarino has often said she was the only woman at the table and has described instances of bias, such as the time a male supervisor complained in an otherwise flattering performance review about her aggressiveness: her high heels would no longer be a weapon. to use.”
While Ms. Yaccarino is active on Twitter, her habits are sedate compared to Mr. Musk’s, though she’s liked dozens of posts by and about him in recent weeks.
Still, the differences between Mr. Musk and Ms. Yaccarino became apparent last month at the media conference in Miami. A polished Ms. Yaccarino came with prepared remarks. An unshaven Mr. Musk spent a few moments with his toddler son, X Æ A-12, before joining her and offering sometimes hesitant answers to her questions.
Ms. Yaccarino repeatedly echoed the concerns expressed by her industry colleagues since Mr. Musk took control of Twitter, stressing several times that advertising executives’ audiences were critical to the company’s financial success.
Mr Musk said “there are legitimate concerns from advertisers that I want to hear.” He told of a complaint he heard from David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, who was frustrated that he couldn’t place ads for “White Lotus,” the popular HBO show, alongside Twitter discussions about “White Lotus.”
The issue has since been resolved, Mr Musk said.
Mrs. Yaccarino replied, “So it’s a new beginning.”
John Koblin contributed reporting from New York.
