The chief executive of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has moved to repair the company’s relationship with advertisers by reinstating a “client council” for marketing and ad agency executives.
Linda Yaccarino wrote on the platform on Thursday that it was “officially bringing back the client council in the fall”, as the business seeks to reverse an advertiser boycott that has hit revenues since it was bought by Elon Musk for $44bn last year. Musk admitted last month that cashflow was still negative amid a 50% slump in advertising revenues.
Yaccarino, who was a highly rated TV advertising executive before joining Twitter this year, told the news channel CNBC she had been focused on talking to brands such as Coca-Cola and Visa.
“I’ve lived on a lot of planes lately, direct conversations with CMOs and CEOs [chief marketing officers and chief executive officers], 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.
Yaccarino said X had become a safer platform since the takeover. “By all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago,” she said. However, multiple reports have flagged the platform’s struggle to eliminate child sexual abuse material after the takeover, while Musk has been criticised for reinstating previously banned users such as the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.
Yaccarino suggested part of the difficulty was that some big advertisers might not have known who to talk to because the company had reduced its staff total from about 8,000 workers to 1,500 since Musk’s takeover.
She added that her role as chief executive was clearly defined and the differentiation with Musk, who still has a hands-on presence at the business, was “very clear”. Musk has said he wants X to become an “everything app”, like China’s WeChat, including the ability to send payments.
“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.”
Yaccarino described the rebranding of Twitter as a “liberation that allowed us to evolve past a legacy mindset”. Musk announced in a tweet on 23 July that Twitter would become X.
Asked about the proposed cage fight between Musk and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Yaccarino said she was focused on the “seriousness of the potential of X” and added that the bout talk “may be a humorous back and forth between Zuck and Musk”.
She also jokingly described the fight as a “great brand sponsorship opportunity”.
