Twitter is close to hiring a chief marketing officer and has a TV commercial planned

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Anthony Noto

Getty Images/ Brian Ach

Twitter CFO Anthony Noto.

Twitter's CFO Anthony Noto has been in charge of the company's marketing for the past three months or so.

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But that's about to change.

In a detailed interview with AdAge, Noto reveals that the company - which still hasn't made an announcement about a permanent CEO, following the departure of Dick Costolo at the start of July - is close to hiring a chief marketing officer.

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Candidates the company has met so far have come from industries including tech, CPG, and media.

Noto says Twitter is looking for "a proven leader," someone who is "really grounded in marketing strategy," someone who has taken a situation similar to Twitter's and used marketing to drive business results, and preferably someone who has worked for a global, digital, "quantitative-driven" company.

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Many of the people Twitter has spoken to so far think the job is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Noto said.

He didn't let on about a timeline for when an announcement will be made, but Noto said his "hope" is they will be on board when the company is in the "development phase and the creation phase" for a big marketing campaign penned for later this year.

Noto said the campaign will run across television and through to digital video. There will be a few different pieces of creative. At least one element will apply to Twitter's upcoming live events feature "Project Lightning." Some parts will rely on "direct-response" methods that encourage people to click through to the platform, while others will be more brand-focused.

Ultimately, Twitter wants its marketing campaign to help address its biggest problem among the majority of consumers - it wants to answer the question "why Twitter?"

Here's how Noto described the marketing brief:

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We think we have the best aggregated real-time content in the world. And that allows individuals to see what's happening in the world right now, to have a conversation about what they find interesting, to find others that are having conversations about what they find interesting. So the value of Twitter is that we give people both the opportunity to find out what's happening right now, but also we give them a microphone to project globally what they find of interest and their points of view. And we're trying to encapsulate both of those value propositions into a marketing campaign that brings that message to the masses but also brings it to the individual use cases of why people should use Twitter and marry that value proposition, that unique point of difference, into every decision we make, from product choices to content choices to media choices.

As Noto has mentioned before, Twitter has a 90% aided brand awareness. People are familiar with the brand, but that hasn't translated into users because most people don't know how to use it. Twitter had 304 million monthly active users at the end of the second quarter. Meanwhile, Facebook was celebrating this week about the fact that 1 billion people had used its platform in a single day.

By the way, the upcoming campaign from Twitter won't be the first time the brand has ventured into TV advertising.

Way back in 2012, Twitter ran ads during a NASCAR race, promoting how brands could use its hashtag pages, which pool together all the tweets and accounts around a particular subject or event.

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