SAN FRANCISCO: Former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino will become Twitter’s new CEO, current chief executive Elon Musk says in a tweet, as the social media platform seeks to reverse a plunge in advertisement revenues.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk said on Friday. “@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business op-erations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
Yaccarino, who modernised the advertising business at the Comcast Corp entertainment and media division, will have her hands full as she takes on a firm loaded with debt, among other challenges. Since Musk acquired Twitter in October, advertisers have fled the platform, worried that their ads could appear next to inappropriate content after the company lost nearly 80 percent of its staff. Musk this year acknowledged that Twitter suffered a massive decline in advertisement revenue.
Musk has axed thousands of employees, rushed the launch of a subscription product that allowed scammers to impersonate major brands and sus-pended users with whom he disagreed.
Twitter’s “trajectory will immediately take a 180-degree turn” under Yaccarino’s leadership, said Lou Paskalis, a longtime advertisement industry executive and CEO of AJL Advisory, a marketing consultancy.
“I think [Yaccarino] has climbed every mountain she could at NBCU and did it impeccably well, and there’s no greater challenge than restoring or-der at Twitter,” he said.
Yaccarino could not be reached for comment.
While Musk said Yaccarino would help build an “everything app”, which he has previously said could offer a variety of services such as peer-to-peer payments, his selection of an advertising veteran signalled that digital ads would continue to be a core focus of the business.
In order to diversify revenue sources, Musk has focused on Twitter Blue, a subscription feature that costs users $8 per month to verify their ac-counts, but the product has had limited success. –Agencies
