Twitter hires two new high-level marketing execs

Twitter has added two new executives to its flock, one to focus on marketing to consumers and another to work on the company’s partnerships with global advertisers.

With both hires, Twitter is positioning itself as an important front in mainstream digital media, one that’s becoming impossible for large brands to ignore.

Pam Kramer joins Twitter as the startup’s first vice president of consumer marketing. In a release, the company described her role as one that will “strengthen Twitter’s brand and tell the Twitter story to mainstream consumers around the world.”

Kramer is no stranger to the startup scene. Her LinkedIn profile says she co-founded an unnamed company back in May, and she served as an advisor to Lending Club, which raised a total of $37 million during her involvement. She also served in executive marketing roles at E-Trade, GreenRoad and MarketTools/Zoomerang.

At Twitter, Kramer will “create and execute plans that highlight what makes Twitter compelling and relevant to a wide range of audiences around the globe, with the goal of significantly increasing our engaged user base,” a Twitter spokesperson said to VentureBeat. “This will include solidifying the unique attributes of Twitter and ensuring that we make it as easy as possible for anyone to discover and use Twitter.”

Joel Lunenfeld, who will be Twitter’s new director of global brand strategy, has spent the better part of the past decade as CEO of Moxie Interactive, an Atlanta-based marketing agency with clients as internationally recognized as Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Maybelline, Nestle, Puma, The Home Depot, Verizon and 20th Century Fox — exactly the kinds of big-name brands Twitter is looking to bring on board as advertisers.

In a release, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stated, “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. I’m thrilled to have them join our already strong senior management team.”

The company’s strategy on the ad front has been taking on a much more definite form over the past year. Last year, just after Costolo took the CEO position, he said the company had “cracked the code” as far as advertising was concerned. At the time, he said to an interviewer, “In all of our advertising products, what we’re trying to do is… to say, ‘This is organic content that people like. How can we take this thing that’s organic and enhance a company’s ability to communicate with their customers?’”

As the ad strategy took shape, it was clear that marketing would be deeply integrated with the product itself, from promoted tweets to promoted trends and even promoted accounts. It’s the kind of ad that doesn’t look so much like an ad, and insofar as the content is related to what users want to see, it is much harder for users to ignore.

Twitter’s new hires should spell more mainstream users for the still-niche service — and more of the big-brand support the startup will need to continue its quest to become a household name.