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.