Some more details on AOL's ad business after I finally got to listen to Time Warner's 1Q08 earnings call.

Overall advertising was up 1% to $552 million. That's down 11% from Q4. Besides screwing up its sales force, management blamed that result on:
- $19M accounting difference a year ago
- Ad.com's biggest customer, Apollo (aka University of Phoenix) only spent $17M this Q versus $56M a year ago. Apollo generated $250M$215M in revenues for AOL last year.
- It got rid of $10M worth of bounty fees from an unprofitable sponsorship deal with Goldrush
- CPM compression was was "an issue of our own yield management" -- ie they sold too much network inventory instead of premium O&O inventory

Display ad sales on AOL's own properties were down 18% to $191 million. This was blamed mostly on the sales channel conflict between the network ad sales force and the AOL properties sales force, which should be fixed now (though full benefits beyond Q2). Users are flat (relatively good as AOL access business fades) and page views and pages/users were actually up nicely.

Third-party network sales were up 25% to $188 million. If you strip out Apollo and acquisitions, growth was "much higher."

Adify got snapped up by Cox a few days ago for a reported $300 million. You may recall that I mentioned Adify in a recent post about vertical networks being all the rage right now.
Cox will use the Adify platform to help its own media outlets and partners build out networks online, a way to increase reach and revenue for all involved. Each partner will have a different group of little sites to manage, from blogs to fan sites. These small sites don't necessarily have the panel data available that newspaper and TV advertisers typically want, so there might be some difficulty for the sales department. The CPMs could be low until this is figured out.

What's wrong with this sentence?

The marketing hoax is an attempt by the South Korean electronics company to overcome the commoditization of the television business.

Perhaps this is an attempt at irony; surely it's not an accurate description of LG's marketing strategy. LG is trying to combat TV price declines via design -- in this case, color. And promoting the idea via gimmicky marketing events, which to judge by the story, were largely successful.

If this is what happens when Murdoch takes over and threatens to fire a lot of editors, then I'm not impressed. C'mon guys, you're still my favorite newspaper.

Both Agencies and clients have asked who and what type of agency will best drive the evolution to a more integrated and ‘connected’ agency.

I recently heard much frustration from one large advertiser who sees his primary agency partner buying - quite largely - into digital, mobile…yet the agency still delivers ad plans to his marketing team which are essentially 100% television-based. A strategic contradiction that hinders his company’s evolution, “don't they understand that they aren’t helping me move to digital?”