Summary
I'm an associate director at Digitas. I'll be there for 6 years in May. We just won the Gold Medal for Media Agency of the year. I'm pretty good at my job. I spend my clients money on AOL. I have no idea what they really do anymore. That's a problem for everyone in this equation.
Analysis
AOL is in my office every week. They're lovely people and our media team has a good relationship with them. I did an informal study last week and I asked my team, other members of our media staff, even our traffic manager, "Do you use/read AOL content ever, do you know anyone who does or who do you think is AOL's audience?"
By most 3rd party research panel, AOL has over 100M unique users including AIM or Instant Messenger.
Yet, I don't think media people or anyone else has any idea who reads and
uses AOL content anymore- and that should scare the heck out of anyone
who thinks Time Warner is a value at its current level. In the wake of the Madoff scandal, I wanted to know more about the numbers. Who is this silent majority. Am I not able to take myself out of the equation?
But I don't think that's it. I think AOL proprietary content, more than any other property I can name, is dependent upon big numbers and their legacy. Even planners who don't consume the business content for which they place ads generally has an easier time explaining who the Economist or WSJ audience is. AOL's tougher but it's not because it's a portal like Yahoo or Google. It's tougher because planners need to defend what it's not (folks on dial-up and people in their 60's who just want to maintain their email account) rather than being something more vibrant.
Platform A helped give AOL the leading network they needed. The problem is with Platform A again is it's undefined even in their competitive set of networks. I get Google Display, I get ContextWeb, I get most networks even if I don't use them. Platform A is just big. I'm not always sure if it's contextual or behavioral. I don't know where they advertise.
I had a manager once who told me, 'the best ads are the ones your client sees." While some of that may be true, I'd like to know more about who is viewing my ads. I challenged AOL last week to help redefine themselves to the team. we'll see where they net out.
