The new CEO of the company formerly known as Twitter says she's spent much of the past eight weeks trying to get big brands back and advertising on the social media platform that's been in upheaval since it was bought last year by Elon Musk.
X Corp. CEO Linda Yaccarino said Thursday on CNBC that she has been focused on talking with brands like Coca Cola, Visa and State Farm, along with their chief marketing officers and chief executives.
A number of companies had pulled back on ad spending — the platform's chief source of revenue — over concerns that Musk's thinning of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to flourish.
“I’ve lived on a lot of planes lately, direct conversations with CMOs and CEOs, and we cover a lot of ground and I focus on those that have either maybe paused or reduced spending to remind them about the power of the platform and the power of the user base and the economic potential of them partnering with us again,” she said in her first media interview since Musk appointed her as CEO.
Yaccarino suggested that part of the difficulty is that some big advertisers might not have known who to talk to because the company has slashed its staff from about 8,000 workers to 1,500 since Musk's takeover. She also said she's been working to assure advertisers that brand safety initiatives tailored to them will make sure that their ads will “only air next to” content that's appropriate to them.
She said the platform is balancing Musk's free-speech vision with techniques that, while not removing many toxic posts, are supposed to make it hard for them to surface to most users.
“If it is lawful, but it’s awful, it’s extraordinarily difficult to see it,” Yaccarino said.
The former NBCUniversal executive said her role under Musk — who's also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — is clearly defined.
“Elon focuses on product design. He leads a team of extraordinary engineers and focuses on new technology,” she said. "So think about it as Elon is working on accelerating the rebrand and working on the future. And I’m responsible for the rest. Running the company from partnerships to legal to sales to finance, all the things.”
She said she has autonomy in doing that and described it as like a relay race.
"Elon works on the technology, dreams up what’s next, passes the baton to me. I bring it to market for economic prosperity, not only for our company, but for all of our customers, like our advertising partners,” she said.
Yaccarino said she's paying close attention to Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads.
After the initial hype that brought a surge of users to Threads, "it’s dropped off dramatically but you can never, ever take your eye off any competition because they’ll continue iterating," she said.
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16 Comments
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Nibek32
If they want more ad money, they should listen to what advertisers want, which is a less toxic platform full of hate groups.
Twitter is on the decline and not coming back. It’s the next MySpace, a graveyard for bots and misinformation.
Wandora
'Woke left scolds' upset they can no longer 'censor Twitter'
https://youtu.be/0N6VYiFH7Bk
Jimizo
A wonderful intro to an objective view.
The last time I was this impressed was a link to ‘Louder with Crowder’.
Desert Tortoise
Wandora, in business there is an old but very true saying; the customer is always right. As a business owner you defy that at great risk. Elon Musk is finding this out the hard way. The users of Twitter, the likely customers for Twitter's former advertisers, do not want to have share a site with far right haters, white power advocates or the anti LGBTQ+ crowd. The want no part of that bunch. When Elon Musk changed the moderation rules and allowed Twitter / X to be overwhelmed with haters the likely customers of those advertisers fled. They knew they would lose customers if they did not, and they didn't see the haters becoming a viable customer base to replace the one they had.
The funny thing about hate and discrimination is that the human mind seems hard wired and pre-disposed to these faults. I grew up in a highly racist environment taught things like "if God intended the races to mix he would not have put them on separate continents", etc. We were literally taught that in Church btw. But I have learned that sort of thinking is wrong and do not want that kind of bigotry in my life so I exclude the haters from my circle of friends and acquaintances. It is just not healthy to be around. And it is a constant struggle every day against the ingrained tendency to discriminate. So I don't have a lot of patience for the haters any more. I understand them too well but learned that it poisons your soul and makes you a very bad person.
That is not meant to be scolding, but the lessons learned from a long and productive life.
lostrune2
Twitter fired a lot of its workers
Ad companies need Twitter support staff. They don't want to put their money in, then find out they can't get help from a non-existent support staff
Would ya buy a product where if ya need support ya may not get it?
That's why a lot of ad companies are hesitant to put their money into Twitter now
TaiwanIsNotChina
Yeah, you can do that by firing Musk, undoing all of his asinine decisions, including the name change, and rehiring the moderation teams. Simple plan, no?
GBR48
An ad is an ad. It is there to sell stuff. It doesn't matter what content it appears near. If you get a better deal per view, you may as well advertise on an adult site. Customers are customers, whatever their interests. And the targeting of ads, as promised by certain tech entities, is rarely worth the extra.
Some of these companies may be using this as a cover to reduce ad spending as the economy is tanking. The Musk soap opera really doesn't matter. As long as the platform is getting clicks, its an advertising medium. And one still used by most governments.
Desert Tortoise
No. X can't be changed back to the Twitter that existed before Mr. Musk bought it. That bridge is burned and gone forever.
opheliajadefeldt
Desert TortoiseToday 12:19 am JST
Great comment, thank you!!
opheliajadefeldt
lostrune2Today 04:22 am JST...........It would be like going into a shop to buy something only to find no staff in there.
opheliajadefeldt
Thankfully, having never been on twitter, I have never read any of the racist, hateful comments, but I have seen what normal intelligent people have said about them. No company or platform can exist like this forever and hope to grow, but there are a few in the USA which do the same, but they have a tiny viewer/listener market and for the most have remained like that for many years.
konjo4u
It is no secret that Musk was born in South Africa.
Wandora
@ Desert Tortoise
Thanks for your long, thought-out reply. I know what you are saying and I agree, as long as you are not promoting censorship. What you call 'haters' is directed at right-wing thought, and that is not by definition 'hate'. That a social media site allows all viewpoints is how it should be. If advertisers see that as a bad thing, then their motives need to be addressed.
Desert Tortoise
What I mean by "haters" are the religious, racial, ethnic and sexual bigots of the world. The people who say Africans or Arabs or whomever are somehow inferior people to "us" the righteous whomever us happens to be. Or those that hate the people of a particular country or ethnic group like the Turks who hate Kurds for example, or Sunnis who call Shiite's "apostates" and "infidels". Or the Catholic nun who told me I was going to hell simply because I disagreed with their dogmas and from first hand personal experience as an altar boy knew their priests to be drunken do-nothings with no moral authority but who command absolute obedience to an endless list of Canon Law. I have no patience for that in my life. All it does is bring you down and fills your own heart with bigotry. The lowest common denominator has its attractions but it is not for me. It is like hands reaching up from below trying to always drag you down. We have to do better. Leadership matters and leaders need to appeal to people's better angels than to their darkest fears.
virusrex
Seeing how she has a boss that routinely dismiss outside input as not important and that do things that alienate sponsors without any consideration her job is not going to be easy at all.
Russell Leisenheimer
As long as the public face of the company tweets like a partisan troll, advertisers aren't going to be racing back to the platform