advertising and profits his strategy to save the «little bird»- Corriere.it

advertising and profits his strategy to save the «little bird»- Corriere.it


The mission

However, if there is anyone who can manage to put the reins on Musk, it is the new CEO, a sixty-year-old Italian-American manager nicknamed the velvet hammer for her very tough negotiation tactics wrapped up in a friendly garment. Or, as media-tech consultant Terence Kawaja puts it more trivially, one who has the masculine attributes, just what she needs to revive Twitter. I look forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the app for everything, Musk said in announcing the appointment. What it will actually be X remains to be discovered. The entrepreneur has said in the past that he wants to expand Twitter's functions to include payments, encrypted messages and phone calls. All possible additional sources of advertising revenue, which have collapsed since Musk became the master of the social network and started talking about changes also in the way of moderating content, to guarantee users' freedom of expression. Yaccarino's first task is therefore to regain the trust and money of advertising investors, who fled Twitter for fear of seeing their brand ads next to inconvenient or too controversial invectives and rantings. And the top manager really seems to have the character and the experience to do it.

The roots

Her roots are Italian and she is proud of it. she was born and raised on Long Island, near New York, in a very traditional Italian and Catholic family, she said in an interview with Ad Age. Her father Bob Yaccarino and her mother Isabella Bartolone are of Sicilian origin, as is her husband Claude Peter Madrazo, whom she met while working together in the Turner television group and with whom her manager had been married for over twenty years and had two children. Italian culture is focused on family, community and relationships, and these values ​​have always been important to me in my work, explained Yaccarino. And she stressed how her mother was an incredible inspiration to her. She wasn't lucky enough to go to university. She raised three daughters and made sure that each of them focused on studying in order to become financially independent. I keep thinking that I owe her a debt and that she helps and pushes and guides me. A 1985 Telecommunications graduate from Pennsylvania State University, Yaccarino worked at the Turner Group until 2011, becoming the operational manager of advertising sales. She then moved on to NBCUniversal, a television and film giant headquartered at 30 Rockefeller plaza in Manhattan. There she earned a reputation as a tough, combative, profit-crunching manager: with an advertising sales team of over two thousand people, she has generated over $100 billion in advertising revenue in twelve years. She is tough and ambitious: she had been biting the brakes for some time and aimed to become CEO. Having failed to break the glass ceiling at NBCUniversal, she jumped at the offer of Musk, with whom she also appears politically sympathetic. Like him, he thinks that freedom of speech is a fundamental value and should be protected more widely than the champions of political correctness do.

Relations with investors

At the same time, however, Yaccarino is well aware that to win back advertising investors Twitter must listen to their concerns and clarify how it intends to moderate content, particularly in view of the 2024 presidential election. their ad campaigns, as Yaccarino explained to Musk on stage at the convention in Miami a month ago. To which Musk retorted that it's perfectly fine if a brand wants its ad to appear in certain places on Twitter and not others, but it shouldn't try to force Twitter to do so. And if that means losing ad dollars, we lose them. But freedom of speech is fundamental, he reiterated. In short, it will not be easy for the new CEO to find the right balance between the need to increase advertising revenue and respect Musk's philosophy, which maintains control of product design and new technologies. Yaccarino isn't starting from scratch: Apple and Disney have remained big investors on Twitter, even with Musk. And she can leverage, with her excellent relationships, with the Madison Avenue industry. impossible for now to ask her for an interview to better understand her strategy. An example of Musk's antics that disturb advertisers is how Twitter's press office answers any question, probably decimated by the barrage of layoffs decided by the new owner. We verified it ourselves: my request for an interview with Yaccarino received an automatic response whose only content was the poop emoticon. Perhaps witty, but vulgar and hardly reassuring.



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