Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s advertising chief, was preparing to interview Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, onstage at a conference last month when she received an email from a peer in the advertising industry.
Rob Norman, a former executive at the ad giant WPP, wanted to know if Ms. Yaccarino had seen the op-ed he wrote after Mr. Musk took over Twitter last year. Mr. Norman’s column discussed the tech billionaire’s amplification of…