The Inside Story: An Anonymous Ex-AOL Exec Tells All

When AOL CEO Tim Armstrong joined the company in spring 2009, he announced he’d take just 100 days to figure out what to do to turn around the one-time tech industry leader.  In about a week, it will be a year since AOL celebrated the end of those 100 days with a big party in Dulles, Virginia on July 24, 2009.  It’s been a huge 12 months for AOL since. There were layoffs, a massive voluntary-buyout program, a re-branding, major product-rollouts, and of course, AOL’s December 2009 spin-off from Time Warner.  Also during that time: just about every corporate-level executive left the company – usually to be replaced with an ex-Googler.  Recently, we spoke with one of these former AOL executives to find out what it was really like when Tim Armstrong came to save AOL.  Here’s that inside story.

SAI: How did word break in February 2009 that CEO Randy Falco and president Ron Grant were out?

Former AOL exec: As soon as it happened Ron started calling his team. Word obviously spread incredibly quickly. Rumors started to break that afternoon because [Time Warner CEO] Jeff Bewkes made a surprise visit actually to the AOL headquarters downtown. For Jeff Bewkes to come out of the Time Warner building on the Upper West Side was highly unusual. So I think people were extremely sensitive to what was going on when he was spotted in the building — it’s a very open layout, the office space, so everything’s pretty visible.   Upon Jeff leaving people started twittering and everything else and I think that’s why Ron started picked up the phone so quickly and just started dialing.

Read More: BusinessInsider.com

DoubleClick White Paper: The Value of Dynamic Pricing & Auction Pricing

We’re often asked to quantify the incremental value DoubleClick Ad Exchange can provide compared with publishers’ existing yield management techniques. According to proprietary research conducted in the first half of 2010, the combined effects of auction pressure and Dynamic Allocation in DoubleClick Ad Exchange resulted in an average CPM lift of 136% compared with fixed, upfront, pre-negotiated sales of non-guaranteed inventory.   In a new white paper, we take a step back to explain how publishers are managing yield across their pool of non-guaranteed inventory today, and what steps they can take to create efficiencies and boost overall revenue. Key elements of the white paper include:

• How publishers segment and sell ad inventory. How manual optimization processes often fail to capture all available revenue opportunities
• Dynamic Allocation explained. What it is, how it works, and what it means for publishers’ bottom lines.
• Auction pricing mechanics. Real-time pricing’s core advantages over the use of historical CPMs for non-guaranteed ad space.
• A brief look forward. The potential for DoubleClick Ad Exchange and its ecosystem of publishers, technology providers, advertisers and agencies.

Read More: DoubleClickPublishers.blogspot.com