Top role for Noto at Twitter as it 'spends $100 million' to boost online ad sales from ones who got away
It’s all go at Twitter this week: today it was revealed that the company had appointed Anthony Noto as chief financial officer - and it has bought for a reported $100m a company to boost its advertising return from people who enquire online.
Noto: Leading role at Twitter
Noto will replace Mike Gupta, who had been Twitter’s chief financial officer since December 2012.
Gupta will become senior vice president for strategic investments, said a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, overseeing a new division.
Just last month Ali Rowghani, formerly Twitter’s chief operating officer,stepped down to act as a strategic adviser to Twitter. Chloe Sladden, a former vice president of Twitter’s media division, also left last month.
Noto is a familiar face at the eight-year-old company, said the New York Times.
“As a top technology banker at Goldman Sachs, Mr Noto led Twitter through its initial public offering process in 2013, forging strong relationships with executives such as Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive.”
Noto announced his departure from Goldman Sachs in March.
At Twitter, he will earn an annual salary of $250,000, along with a one-time grant of 1.5 million restricted units of common stock, with an option to buy an additional 500,000 shares, according to the filing.
Twitter has seen widespread criticism recently from investors and analysts for problems with attracting new users to the service. The company’s stock has lost nearly half its value since its record close of $73.31 on Dec. 26.
The changes don’t just stop at new people.
Striving to become an advertising powerhouse, Twitter announced today that it had acquired, for a reported $100m, an ad-tech startup, TapCommerce.
TapCommerce is a New York company focuses on "retargeting" and contacting customers who have expressed an interest in purchasing something online but haven’t closed a deal. The buy is an attempt to put that right.
"Advertisers spend aggressively to get new users, but re-activating existing or previous users can provide just as attractive a return on investment," Twitter's vice president of global online sales, Richard Alfonsi, said in the company's blog post on the acquisition.
"It's another step in this bigger vision we've started to put together about mobile advertising,"Alfonsi told Bloomberg in an interview.
Twitter had already this week announced the official rollout of ads that allow users to install mobile applications, an advertising concept that has done well for Facebook and could work with Twitter's large audience of mobile users.
The micro blogging company began testing ads that allow users to instantly begin installing a mobile app in April, and companies such as ride-sharing app Lyft and video-game giant Electronic Arts praised the offering in Twitter's blog post on the official rollout Monday.
Twitter sold shares at $26 apiece in a 2013 initial public offering but at $40.97 on Monday, that price is still 45 percent lower than Twitter's all-time 'intraday' high of $74.73.
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