Linda Yaccarino, head of global advertising at NBCUniversal, has stepped down to join Twitter as the next chief executive officer.
Twitter owner Elon Musk Confirmed hiring in a tweet on Friday.
“Excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO!” Musk tweeted. “She will focus primarily on business operations, while I will focus on product design and new technology,” he said.
He added, “We look forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the app for everything.”
The announcement came a day after Musk’s remarks. Via Twitter He said he would be stepping down and a new CEO for the social media website would take over, though he did not name the new person. In a tweet, Musk said the person would be appointed in about six weeks.
Yaccarino joined NBCUniversal in 2011 and rose to the top of the company’s global advertising business. On Monday, the head of advertising was scheduled to attend NBCUniversal’s Upfront event in Radio City, New York. Upfront is a sales presentation that the company makes to the advertising industry every May together with media in the same industry.
A long-time head of advertising, he brought a wealth of relationships with chief marketing officers and other head of advertising to Twitter as advertisers fled the platform. lose Billions of dollars after Mr. Musk’s acquisition last year.
Musk completed the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last October. Shortly after, he fired the company’s top management and laid off thousands of employees.
As several advocacy groups have documented, Twitter has seen an uptick in offensive speech and rhetoric, prompting many companies to stop advertising spending on the platform. In an attempt to make up for lost advertising revenue, Musk created Twitter Blue, a new subscription service that offers features such as the ability to compose longer tweets.
Yaccarino and Mask sat together keynote speech At a marketing conference in Florida in mid-April. During the conversation, the duo discussed the role marketers will play in the future of Twitter and Twitter’s place in the cultural conversation.
During the press conference, Mr. Musk reportedly It tried to reassure advertisers that Twitter was a great place for brands.
Yaccarino’s departure from NBCUniversal comes just weeks after Jeff Shell was fired as the company’s CEO after admitting to an inappropriate relationship with an employee. NBCUniversal’s top executives will report directly to the parent company’s president, Mike Kavanagh, rather than Shell’s successors. comcast.
NBCUniversal announced Friday that Yaccarino will leave the company with immediate effect, and current president of advertising sales and client partnerships, Mark Marshall, will become interim chairman of the company’s advertising and partnerships group.
Marshall will report to Mark Lazarus, Chairman of NBC Universal Television and Streaming. Lazarus and Marshall are likely to attend Monday’s NBCUniversal upfront presentation, CNBC’s David Faber and Julia Bourstein reported Friday.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.
