Linda Yaccarino born in New York
Yaccarino grows up in Deer Park, a town on Long Island, New York. Her parents are Bob Yaccarino and Isabella Bartolone Yaccarino, who is a first-generation Italian imigrant. She has two sisters, Lori Yaccarino Armstrong and Kate Yaccarino.
Attends Penn State
0 0 Mark Devlin Mark Devlin2023-05-13 20:13:442023-05-13 20:29:06Attends Penn StateHired by Turner Broadcasting
Yaccarino is hired by Turner (formerly Turner Broadcasting System). She will stay at the company for 19 years and 11 months.
Yaccarino hired by NBCUniversal
A week after leving Turner, Yaccarino is hired as President, Cable Entertainment & Digital Advertising Sales at NBCUniversal. Yaccarino takes responsibility for all cable entertainment and digital advertising sales for the company including USA, Syfy, Bravo Media, E! Entertainment, Oxygen Media, Style, G4, Sprout, Chiller, Cloo and their respective digital platforms. Additionally, Yaccarino will oversee the sales efforts for NBC.com, AccessHollywood.com, NBCSports.com, NBCOlympics.com and GolfChannel.com and the stand alone digital businesses DailyCandy, Swirl, Fandango, iVillage and Television Without Pity. Company:
Linda has a proven track record in driving commercial success through industry-leading innovations and creative strategic marketing solutions for her clients.
in 2016, Yaccarino described her first year at NBCU:
The first year at NBCUniversal was the hardest year I have ever had in my entire career. I was hired to come and head up an entire sales and marketing department. But I was also hired to transform the company. [There were 15 different sales teams]and they were rigidly siloed and they were almost allergic to collaboration. I believe [the ad sales system] was invented by Scooby-Doo. It was held together with duct tape and paper clips…The compensation plan, I quickly dubbed the sales prevention plan. Incentives were all out of whack. Compared to our competitors, we were about a decade behind…Anyone ever watch that show Naked and Afraid? I felt like that every day. I didn’t know where to start. I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready…I was hired to transform the company and it didn’t matter if I was ready or not. I learned really quickly that if I was going to be successful transforming this company, I was going to have to get used to being lonely. Because I was never more lonely than when I managed over 1,000 people.
Promoted to President, Advertising Sales
Yaccarino is promoted to NBCUniversal’s President of Advertising Sales:
I joined NBCUniversal because of my belief in the incredible power of this portfolio and to work with the strongest sales team in the business and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. As a unified sales team, our goal is to collaboratively develop the most creative solutions to move our clients’ businesses forward.I look forward to continuing to partner with Bonnie Hammer, Ted Harbert and Lauren Zalaznick and all of the business leaders at NBCU helping to bring our outstanding content to the market.
CEO Burke:
Linda is an outstanding executive with the proven ability to maximize the value of a portfolio of assets in a complex marketplace. I am pleased to have her leading the sales strategy for our company, offering advertisers innovative opportunities to partner with the best brands in the business.
Hollywood Reporter ‘Measurement Crisis’ Q&A
In an interview with The Holywood Reporter, Yaccarino addresses the ‘Today; show slump, NBC’s programming challenges and the impact of the platform agnostic consumer.
There really is no media company like ours. I suspect that if you were able to design a media company of the future it would look a lot like this company.
On measuring consumer behavious:
We have a measurement crisis on our hands. Measurement is lagging considerably behind consumer behavior and we have got to get to a point where all viewing or interaction with content is measured on any screen. And we need to accelerate the evolution to that. It’s not just a digital issue. Obviously there’s vulnerabilities in that space as well. It’s very, very frustrating.
Stages Summit speech
As Stages Summit in Chicago, an event produced by Advertising Women of New York to educate and inspire women about the skills they’ll need to move their career to the next stage in a rapidly changing industry, Yacarrino talks about her first year at NBCUniversal, and about transformation in general.
If you’re in a position to make transformational leadership decision, you’ve got to learn how to trust yourself. You’ve got to learn to trust your gut. And trust your experience. You’re not always going to have the data, the tools, the opportunity to make the decision in the amount of time you need to make those decisions. You’ve got to be brave…You’ve got to be comfortable with making decisions that fast. After a while you come to learn that’s OK because transformation is a really, really tough thing. [If] anyone says there’s no need to transform their company, they’re not paying attention to what’s going on,
DMS 17 fireside chat
Yaccarino particpates in a fireside chat at Digital Media Summit 17, about innovation:
Any mature or traditional company does get caught in that, ‘Hey, we’re the big players so we don’t have to pay attention or to take notice of the smaller guys coming up’. But 100% of our bets are on premium content. We focus on how, or who. is consuming that content. It’s the consumer behaviour that’s fueling all those deals and investments that you read about….We need to be where they are.
Ad Week Cover
0 0 Mark Devlin Mark Devlin2023-05-13 21:11:132023-05-13 21:17:09Ad Week Cover
WEF Global Business Context panel
Yaccarino takes part in a panel discussion on ‘The Global Business Context’ at The World Economic Forum.
How do you educate a younger generation about news literacy ? I do a lot of talks about this with younger folks. Where do you share? Where are you getting it from?…The younger generation does not differentiate. They’re used to seeing someone’s phone cam onsite somewhere telling them what’s going on and they take that as real news.
Trump names Yaccarino to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition
Yaccarino is named by President Trump to serve a two-year term to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition
IAB talk: Importance of brand safety
At IAB Video Symposium, Yaccarino discusses brand safety for consumers and society as a whole – taking personal data seriously, and where the responsibility lies.
Conversations about brand saftery have exploded.
Future of TV Advertising Conference fireside chat
Yaccarino particpates in a fireside chat at The Future of TV Advertising Global conference in London. where she discusses key NBCU innovations, including the impact of C-Flight, a ‘ground-breaking’ metric that acknowledges live, time-shifted and on-demand impressions on any screen; how OpenAP, cross-broadcaster, standardised data-set for audience buying, is going to change the lives of marketers; and the mini-revolution in ad-formats and creative opportunities that is currently underway at NBCU, including the use of AI to align advertiser messages with emotions and scenes inside shows.
Adexchangers Industry Preview
Yaccarino discusses NBCU’s plans for the year ahead, including how the company is measuring viewers across media.
If we measured viewers on televsion in terms of Super Bowls, Jimmy Fallon has about 34 Super Bowls every single night. So we have to stop and come together as an industry and stop talking about digital vs. TV, or us vs. them, so we can transact on something that delivers your business solution that makes sense.
SBJ Power Player
Yaccarino is named a Sports Business Journal Power Player:
Yaccarino makes the entire Olympic broadcast machine run. Behind Mike Tirico, the thousands of NBC Olympics producers and thousands of hours of sports action, sits the advertising revenue and Yaccarino’s team. For eight years, she’s led the sales effort, keeping the Olympics profitable for NBC despite the rapidly changing nature of consumption. Before the postponement, her team had booked a record $1.25 billion for the Tokyo Games.
The Information interview
Yaccarino is interviewd for The Information’s 2020 WTF Summit:
Every business has gone though such an incredible structural change that it’s very clear we need to change the way we do business. All of us. To transform our industries, as marketers, will help jump-start the economy. Marketing creates demand. Demand creates sales. Sales develops jobs. Therefore, it is almost a higher calling that marketers in every business come together to jump-start the economy.
Signal 2020 interview
Yaccarino is interviewed by Battelle about her role at NBCUniversal, the launch of Peacocks.
We have a huge diversity of brands, therefore a huge diversity of knowledge and access. In two really specific areas: We have an incredible purview of how consumers want to interact with us, and therefore we’re able to talk with marketers [like Proctor] about how they want to, or should be, maximising doing business with us.
#ShesMy campaign launch
On International Day of the Girl, Yaccarino launches the #ShesMy campaign,
honoring the women of all ages who have supported, inspired, and championed us over the years. Because the amazing women in our lives are not one-dimensional, and deserve recognition for the many roles they play.
The campaign asks participants to share a picture of an ‘impactful woman in your life’ on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or LinkedIn, using the hashtag #ShesMy, with a description of their meaning to the sharer, and to nominate others to recognize special women in their lives.
Promoted to Chair Of Global Advertising & Partnerships
NBCUniversal promotes Yaccarino to chair, Global Advertising and Partnerships, adding data strategy, local and regional sports network sales and cross-company strategic initiatives to her portfolio, along with global and national sales. In a divisional memo, Shell says:
While there is no doubt we are a content and technology company at our core, we need to keep accelerating our business plans to define entertainment and build the future of advertising. With the addition of these strong teams and new initiatives, we’re expanding our offerings for clients while diversifying our business and creating new company-wide opportunities. We’re making the right investments to bring that future into focus.
She will continue to report directly to Jeff Shell, CEO, NBCUniversal, who says:
Linda has done a fantastic job moving the advertising business forward, not just for NBCUniversal, but the industry at large.I’m excited for her to continue architecting the future of the ad-supported ecosystem and uniting all assets of this company to make us the best possible partner for our customers around the world.
Matrix Award winners’s advice
Yaccarino is interviewed for a profile on NYWICI Matrix Award winners. She empahsises the importance of diversifying skills.
Creative, technical, and interpersonal skills are important in our industry. But too often, people—and especially women—are reduced to one thing. So my advice is to build a skillset as multifaceted as you are. You must constantly broaden your mind, and refuse to stay in your lane. Stay curious and remain a lifetime student. Because I cannot stress this enough—turn to others around you for help and inspiration. We should rely on a lot of people: the trailblazers, mentors, peers who can we can listen to, learn from and form our own opinions.