Linda Yaccarino, CEO, X Corp. (formerly Twitter), on Thursday said she has autonomy under the platform’s owner Elon Musk, dismissing apprehensions that arose when she was hired, on her ability to operate under Musk, who has an extensive control over the organisation.
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In an interview with CNBC, Yacaarino said her and Musk's roles were "clear". Besides product and development, “Elon is working on accelerating the rebrand and working on the future,” she said. “And I’m responsible for the rest. Running the company, from partnerships to legal to sales to finance.”
Under her leadership, advertisers should be comfortable in returning to the micro-blogging platform, she said.
She stressed on the platform’s effort to make improvement in the advertiser experience, many of whom have left the platform after Musk acquired Twitter.
Brands advertising on the platform backed out as hate speech and illegal content continued to spread on the platform even weeks after Musk took over. These brands did not wish to risk their advertising money on the platform, by putting advertisements beside that type of content.
As a result of Yaccarino’s direct engagement with marketing and communications executives, some brands including Coca-Cola and Visa had returned to Twitter advertising under her leadership, the former global advertising chief at CNBC parent company NBC Universal said.
However, she still faces a difficult task in regaining advertiser trust. Musk has said that user engagement continually reaches fresh heights on the platform but no concrete data on engagement has been provided by the company.
The company’s new content controls would reduce the risk experienced by advertisers to be able to remove the content that is “lawful but awful” from X. Yaccarino added that brands are now “protected from the risk of being next to” potentially toxic content.
Yaccarino emphasized that layoffs done prior to her tenure at the company were a very necessary cost discipline exercise. The number of employees was brought down to 1,500 by Musk from 8,000 employees before the platform was acquired.
Yaccarino was relatively dismissive of the threat posed by Meta’s Threads, which has seen engagement fall off since after a thrilling launch. But, she added, “you can never ever take your eye off any competition,” as reported by CNBC.
Yaccarino emphasised that an imminent cage match between Musk and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg would be a “great brand sponsorship opportunity.”