Follow the Leader: Meg Whitman and Marissa Mayer
Femme-O-Nomics follows the ups — and downs — of today’s female captains of industry. Here is the latest on Meg Whitman and Marissa Mayer.
Business Journal Readers Say Whitman was Hardest Hit in 2012 – Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal
Jon Xavier of the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal reported the views of their readers based on their “unscientific online poll” which asked the question: “Which CEO had the worst year?” According to 56 percent of their respondents, Whitman tops the list. She was followed by Mark Pincus of Zynga who got 27 percent of the vote while Reed Hastings of Netflix placed third with 9 percent. The results were based on the choices of 124 respondents. Readers had every reason to choose Whitman—especially when she announced HP’s write down of $8 billion from its $11 billion acquisition of Autonomy Corp. due to fraud allegations. Xavier concludes that 2013 might not be a very good year for Whitman either as it faces messy civil trials against Autonomy and its own shareholders while figuring out what to do with its own stagnant earnings.
Mayer (Finally) Meeting with Yahoo! Ad Buyers – Business Insider
When Marissa Mayer was at Google “she was notorious for her unwillingness to meet with the advertising agency executives who were Google’s best clients,” Nicolas Carlson of the Business Insider reports. And this was one major concern of Yahoo stakeholders when she took the CEO job last July since Yahoo! is majorly dependent on ads for its revenues. But while she may not relish the idea of meeting with the people in suits, she knows that “scoring big ad deals” are part and parcel of her job and she is going to do just that. Citing a report by Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, Carlson reveals that Mayer is attending the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas which is set to happen in two weeks. She is supposed to meet with Laura Desmond of Starcom MediaVest Group and other “agency heavies” there. Hopefully, her “Marissa Halo” will work to win the ad agency types over and finally turn the performance of Yahoo! around.
Category: News In Review
