Linda Yaccarino took an impossible job. And she failed at it.
That’s my tweet-length summary of Yaccarino’s two-year run at Twitter/X, which she announced via her own Twitter post Wednesday.
The longer version of my analysis isn’t much longer.
In 2023, Elon Musk brought on Linda Yaccarino to fix his ad business, which he himself had broken after buying Twitter in 2022. And as long as Elon Musk owns Twitter, no one can fix his ad business: It’s not big enough to be a must-buy for most advertisers, and his ownership generates potential headaches for any advertiser who thinks about investing money there. It’s easier to ignore it, which is what most advertisers do.
Rather than enumerate all of Musk’s erratic approaches to advertising sales — No. 1 on the list, of course, remains his famous “go f**K yourself” pitch back in 2023 — let me sum it up this way: For years, Elon Musk was told that if he just toned down his behavior on his platform, he might have an easier time getting reputation-conscious brands to spend money with him. Instead, he sued them.
But earlier this year, faced with the prospect that his behavior was tanking sales at Tesla — the company that’s made him the richest man in the world — he at least made gestures to respond, telling anyone who would listen that he was going to spend less time on politics and more time running the automaker. (Whether he’ll follow through is another matter.)
That is: If Musk really wanted to make Twitter an ad business, he could have tried. Instead, he kept on doing what he was doing and hoped Yaccarino could clean up his mess.
“Elon found the requests and requirements to get advertisers back to be tedious,” says Lou Paskalis, an ad industry veteran who now works as a consultant via his AJL Advisory business. “But if he wants to understand why advertisers haven’t returned, he should look in the mirror.”
