Media Curmudgeon

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October 22, 2007

Bewkes’s Choice, Not Falco’s

In my October 17 post, titled “Bye, Bye Matrix,” I graded AOL’s new CEO, Randy Falco, on some recent decisions. To quote, I gave “Falco an A for ripping apart the matrix and for cutting down the bureaucracy, a B for combining the Advertising.com and AOL portal sales effort, but an F for putting a techie in charge of sales.” I have since been informed that Falco did not make the decision to put Curtis Viebranz, the former CEO of the newly acquired behavior-targeting technology firm Tacoda, in charge of sales; Falco’s boss at Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, did.

I also wrote that “Jeff Bewkes, who is a programming guy…knows little about selling, so he won’t know if Falco is making the right moves or not.” Now that I know the decision to put Viebranz in the job was Bewkes’s, it makes it even worse. Here’s why:

I know nothing about Viebranz’s qualifications to run one of the world’s biggest and most complex online sales organizations. In reality he might be just the right person. However, the perception internally and externally is because Viebranz is an old pal/colleague of Bewkes from their HBO days, that the appointment is a political one—a decision that smacks of White-House-like cronyism and one that also emasculates Falco.

Tacoda, is a behavioral targeting technology company that also has a sales force that sells a network of websites on which behavior-targeted ads run. Therefore, when AOL bought Tacoda, it had three sales forces: AOL’s, Advertising.com’s, and Tacoda’s. Advertising.com’s sales force sold low-priced, low-quality, remnant inventory that AOL’s sales force couldn’t sell plus a network of websites that featured commodity priced inventory. Tacoda’ sales force sold also sold a network of sites with higher-quality inventory (because it was targeted) but still commodity-priced.

Bewkes and Falco had a problem—there was a fair amount of redundancy in the three sales forces. Which one would survive? Which one would sustain the most casualties? By announcing that Bewkes’s crony would get the top sales job, they encouraged the perception that the Tacoda sales force won because of politics, not necessarily merit, and, thus, struck fear and loathing among the AOL sales force and raised eyebrows in the ad community, which scratched its collective heads and asked, “Who’s in charge here?”

Furthermore, the new combined sales effort will be called Platform A, not AOL. So the ad community scratched again and asked, “What’s Platform A? A shoe or a train stop? We’ve spent billions of dollars on AOL. Did we make a mistake?”

By naming a crony, Bewkes/Falco open themselves up to comparisons with the current Republican administration, especially the Bush/Cheney White House. This is not a comparison that will engender a lot of confidence among investors or in the ad community. Politics as usual never does.

Posted by Charles Warner at October 22, 2007 09:15 PM

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Media Curmudgeon at October 23, 2007 09:53 AM writes:

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