Sarah Personette Resigns As Twitter's Top Ad Exec
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, November 1, 2022
Sarah Personette has resigned as Twitter's top ad exec, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
Personette, a long-time Madison Avenue media executive before joining Twitter two years ago, most recently served as chief customer officer.
In a series of tweets this morning, Personette said she resigned Friday and her "work access was officially cut off" Monday night.
"Business is the most personal thing and you all made that feel true," Personette added.
While the news is not shocking given Musk's rapid shakeup of Twitter's management team, it comes as many in the ad industry already are taking a pessimistic view of his move to take Twitter private, remove the team responsible for the platform's brand-safety controls, making questionable tweets and re-tweets on the platform, and generally sending mixed signals about its future safety as a digital media platform.
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As recently as last Thursday, the day before her resignation, Personette had tweeted that she "had a great discussion with @elonmusk" -- adding: "Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remains unchanged. Looking forward to the future!"
Personette joined Twitter in 2018 after a brief stint as COO of Refinery29, and three years before that as vice president of global business marketing at Facebook.
Prior to that, she served as president of the IPG Mediabrands UM unit, and has held senior positions at Spark Foundry, MEC and Starcom.
How many articles is this on Twitter now? If I had a dollar for every article and op-ed piece MP has had in the past 3 days I could buy a blue checkmark on Twitter.
Musk has owned Twitter for a whopping 4 days and the speculation that he's going to somehow ruin Twitter and turn it into a cesspool of hate speech is ridiculous. Turning the convenient blind eye to Twitter's complete failures and subversion of truths is head scratching from an outlet that is supposed to objectively cover the industry.
Musk figured out how to land rockets backwards after trips to space with pinpoint precision, he has the most succesful EV brand in the world, he figured out how to create a low-cost satellite system to provide internet access to the most remote areas of the world (which the U.S. government publicly admits is helping with the war in Ukraine), he co-founded PayPal, BUT somehow, we should all freak out anticipating that he is going to inhibit free speach and advertisers should run away.
His track record is better than anyone. Nobody should be nervous that Musk is removing a team that has failed miserably at monitoring content and subverting the truth.
As with all social platforms, the users will decide if Twitter is a success or not. Not advertisers.