Los Angeles — The ever flourishing micro-blogging outfit Twitter is flexing its wings globally! On Monday announced that it has bolstered its senior marketing team as the social media network looks to broaden its audience to more mainstream users and develop more custom ad partnerships with brands.
The five-year-old messaging firm has made two key management appointments in a bid to better explain the service to both consumers and advertisers, a director of global brand strategy as it moves to increase its revenues worldwide. Joining as director of global brand strategy is Joel Lunenfeld, CEO of Atlanta-based digital agency Moxie Interactive, a unit of Publicis Groupe.
Joel Lunenfeld
Lunenfeld has managed the Atlanta-based digital agency Moxie for nearly 10 years, which brought in $65 million in revenue last year – from advertising clients including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Verizon. “He will now be responsible for packaging custom partnerships for Twitter advertisers.”
Lunenfeld, formerly chief executive of Moxie Interactive, a part of the Publicis Groupe, a large advertising company, will “guide our Twitter’s efforts to develop custom advertising and partnership programs for Twitter’s most valuable advertisers,” said Twitter in a statement.
Twitter is also appointing longtime E-Trade exec Pam Kramer as its first VP-consumer marketing to bring the social media service to a wider band of consumers, and to better demonstrate Twitter’s offering to mainstream consumers, who have yet to understand the service’s use.
During her nine years at E-Trades she was responsible for E-Trade’s digital ads and Super Bowl spots. She left E-Trade in 2004, and worked for companies, including Lending Club and Zoomerang.
Regardless of touting more than 200 million registered users, the site has not revealed how many of those are active and there is still confusion among general consumers as to how best use the service.
In an interview with The Telegraph last year, Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders, emphasized that users needed to understand that they did not need to tweet in order to get the most out of Twitter, as he understood many people felt like they had nothing to say when they logged on and therefore did not always continue to use the service.
Twitter is increasingly being adopted as an advertising channel for brands using promoted Tweets. The site’s advertising revenue is forecast to triple to $150m this year, according to a report by Emarketer.
Twitter chief executive, Dick Costolo, added: “Pam and Joel are significant hires whose experience and leadership will help strengthen the way we talk to both consumers and major brands about Twitter around the world.”
The new hires follow a round of changes within the management team at Twitter. In June Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced he was stepping away from the company to start a new project with the site’s former CEO Evan Williams.
Co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter in March to focus on product development. Besides, Twitter is also currently spreading into Europe and appointed its first UK head, Tony Wang, who moved form Twitter in the US to lead UK operations.
The site experienced a peak in a general consumer interest in the UK earlier this year during the super-injunction scandal, as many people logged onto the site for the first time in order to find out which celebrities were trying to hide their identities. In an additional move, Twitter has refreshed its standalone search engine to bring its branding and functionality in-line with the main site.