Media Tech Business

Very cool to see friend and former boss (at TACODA and earlier at Real Media) Dave Morgan take on global advertising strategy at AOL. Nice interview with Rafat Ali here shows why one of the web’s great storytellers is the right guy for the job.

Following the earlier appointment of TACODA CEO Curt Viebranz to President of AOL’s Platform A, the portfolio encompasses Advertising.com, Adtech, Lightningcast, TACODA, Third Screen Media and soon to be added Quigo.

AOL appears to be stitching together a smarter plan than Yahoo!, which is back-pedaling into becoming a technology company again, rather than zooming ahead into a networked future. As one of the true global media powerhouses, TimeWarner has more to lose by becoming less reliant on its own content than does Yahoo!, which has de-emphasized media and re-upped the ante on technology.

The best news for TW and AOL is that the content is always there for them to use to attract and retain great audiences. And it’s also there for them to make money from Google and MSN and former almost-media company Yahoo!, all of which depend on the TW’s of the world to feed content to their hundreds of millions of hungry users.

As perennial underdog to Google, Yahoo! and MSN, AOL also has more to gain by being bold. Ditching the ISP business, continuous reorganizing, massive layoffs and other wrenching changes are necessary for the company to compete again. They’re moving on all fronts, but the steady drumbeat of acquisitions and appointments is the clearest sign that AOL intends to win the fight to become solid number 2 behind Google.

Yahoo! is also banking on maintaining and growing its global audience leadership through platform and network acquisitions, but ultimately they’re hellbent on doing everything the Y! way.

This concerns me as a Yahoo! shareholder (from its acquisition of Right Media in July), but more so as a Yahoo! loyalist whose browser home page has been set to my.yahoo.com since 1996.

Yahoo! can’t grow its audience by building a better mousetrap: It’s the cheese that lures users. Please, Jerry, give us more and different and better varieties of cheese, not a stronger, faster spring or better distribution around the kitchen!

Hearty congratulations and good luck to Dave and Curt and the gang at TACODA. And an equally hearty HURRY UP! to the Yahoo! crew.

Tags: Ad Networks, Ad Sales, Behavioral Targeting, Digital Economy // 2 Comments »