Jack’s wearing a lot of hats.
After several months of will they/won’t they, Twitter announced Monday morning that Jack Dorsey will go from interim chief exec – shoes he’d been filling since Dick Costolo stepped down in June – to permanent CEO of the company. He’ll also continue on as CEO of Square, the mobile payments startup he founded in 2009.
The Dorsey announcement came, of course, via Twitter.
?⚡️ Hello! We have some news to share!
— Jack (@jack) October 5, 2015
Twitter also got some of its other ducks in a row on Monday. Costolo will step down from the Twitter board, while head of revenue and partnerships Adam Bain, who was rumored to be a favorite for the CEO post, will take the reins as Twitter’s chief operating officer. [Twitter had been rudderless in that regard since then-COO Ali Rowghani abruptly resigned from the job in June 2014.]
In a series of tweets, Dorsey laid out his vision for Twitter on Monday in 140 characters or less: “Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily!” and “We’re working hard at Twitter to focus our roadmap on a few things we can make really great. And we’re strengthening our team along the way.”
But agencies also have a few opinions to share on what Twitter could do to make itself really great.
What’s the one thing Twitter should do under Jack Dorsey to make the platform more powerful for marketers?
AdExchanger caught up with Essence, Anagram and MEC to find out.
Click below or scroll down to read their responses:
- Gila Wilensky, director of search and biddable, Essence
- Adam Cahill, founder, Anagram
- Noah Mallin, head of social, North America, MEC
Gila Wilensky, director of search and biddable, Essence
“Jack should concentrate on improving brand safety. The real-time nature of Twitter makes it nearly impossible to control brand messaging adjacency to negative news content. It can often take advertisers months to craft the perfect social media strategy and paid amplification plans, but there is no way to prepare for current events. Advertisers investing in Promoted Trends and other Twitter formats risk a negative brand impact the moment their PTrend [Promoted Trend] appears above a hashtag like #UCCShooting. Real-time brand safety layers would likely reduce barriers to entry for incentive marketers, especially those conservative brands slow to jump on the social media bandwagon.”
“The most basic thing: Make it easier for people who already want to spend money on Twitter to actually do so. Twitter’s self-service buying platform isn’t at all intuitive, and there aren’t useful guides or help to turn to. You have to use your client’s login to set up and run a campaign, which doesn’t feel professional. If you’re doing an app-install campaign they just direct you to a list of outside partners to get an SDK installed with no facilitation or support. As compared to Facebook (which it always will be), the buying platform feels very much like a confusing work in progress. Overall I’ve just found it hard to go through the process of spending money on Twitter. So, make it easy.”
Noah Mallin, head of social, North America, MEC
“It’s something I’m already seeing happen – embracing change and not accepting any feature of Twitter as being sacrosanct. As a founder, Jack’s in a unique position to calm existing true believers while his product and revenue teams reach out to a bigger audience of users, advertisers and marketers. I don’t necessarily think that Twitter should change every feature that’s unique to the platform, far from it, but he’s clearly willing to put it all on the table to be tinkered with, discarded or upgraded and that is a big step forward. Ultimately, that should lead to more diverse and better opportunities for our clients, as well as a bigger potential user base to tap into.”
