Gawker: curt viebranz

At AOL, Lynda Clarizio takes her revenge on Tacoda's people, not its technology

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Since it acquired Tacoda last summer, AOL has done little with it but push top executives out of the company. 97 employees came over in the buy. Today, only 35 remain. The most notable departure was former Tacoda CEO Curt Viebranz, whom AOL promoted to head its advertising business, Platform-A. Viebranz was fired only five months later. Lynda Clarizio, the head of Advertising.com, AOL's online ad-network unit, took his job. And so it's no surprise that when VentureBeat intercepted an email from AOL to Tacoda clients, canceling all contracts within the next 30 days, that the blog jumped to conclusions and assumed Advertising.com stalwarts had finally had their way, killing Tacoda and its tech once and for all. A very juicy story indeed. Too bad it turned out not to be the case.

When PaidContent reached Platform-A boss Lynda Clarizio on the train home from work, she said AOL only made the move to rationalize the division's contracts with publishers. After the integration, Tacoda's behavioral-targeting tech will be Platform-A's behavioral targeting tech. A single contract will let AOL fill ads spots it can't sell via Tacoda with Advertising.com's remnant ads, but CPM rates should stay the same, Clarizio said. Clarizio and other Advertising.com insiders opposed the Tacoda acquisition, believing their behavioral-targeting technology could command a similar lift in ad rates, so there's some pride-swallowing being done here. But the ouster of Tacoda's executives and the neutron-bomb elimination of two-thirds of its staff should salve that wound.

Since we made the guess that Clarizio might be the a candidate to take charge of Microsoft's online division, insiders have laughed it off. Clarizio's a lawyer by training, they note — the ultimate diss in the tech world. But if this kind of inwardly directed knife-sharpening isn't what's called for in Redmond, we don't know what is.

Madison Avenue's revenge: New ad boss is AOL's seventh since 2001

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:14:03 EDT

When new AOL ad boss Lynda Clarizio replaced Curt Viebranz, his head was the sixth to roll at AOL since 2001. Viebranz followed Myer Berlow, Robert Friedman, Robert Sherman, Lisa Brown and Michael Kelly. Three lasted less than a year. None of them succeeded, according to Bits, because AOL's reputation on Madison Avenue remains tattered from the pre-merger days when Berlow and former AOL CEO Bob Pittman would spurn agencies to work directly with marketers, locking them into long-term deals at inflated prices. Take heed, Google's Tim Armstrong. (Photo by macloo)

New ad boss plans to lay off half of AOL's sales force

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:43:10 EDT

With Curt Viebranz out, AOL's new advertising boss Lynda Clarizio plans to integrate the Time Warner subsidiary's various ad sales teams — those from acquisitions Tacoda and Quigo, for example — into one. That will create redundancies which Clarizio plans to handle by axing about half of AOL's sales force, Silicon Alley Insider reports. Top executives at Advertising.com will fill new roles running all of advertising for AOL.

Platform A CEO is out

Evelyn Nussenbaum — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:59:57 EDT

Curt Viebranz, the CEO of AOL's ad sales unit Platform A, is leaving. AOL did not say why, but "sources" are suddenly tipping off a lot of blogs that he was fired. Viebranz, former head of Tacoda, joined Platform A at its inception last fall. The unit was supposed to house ad sales for all AOL units. Another AOL executive, Advertising.com president Linda Clarizio, will replace him. Advertising.com execs strongly opposed the Tacoda acquisition, saying Tacoda's technology was overrated. Guess who just won that argument?

Quigo CEO departs as AOL completes takeover

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:01:30 EST

AOL finished up its $340 million Quigo acquisition yesterday. To celebrate, Quigo CEO Mike Yavonditte will head for the door. He'll spend the next six months pretending to work as an adviser to Curt Viebranz, president of AOL's Platform A advertising division.

Guess Yavonditte doesn't want to stick around and find out if losing News Corp.'s business to Google will hurt as much as some are predicting. Dealing with that happy development falls to Quigo CTO Michael Fisher, who will become president of the subsidiary.

John Battelle wants to hike his rates

Owen Thomas — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:32:02 EDT

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Is preternaturally tan conference organizer John Battelle, who runs online-ad network Federated Media, here to interview top industry executives — or cut some deals of his own? "There's this idea that you can sprinkle some pixie dust on all this inventory and make more money," he observes, speaking of the mass of Web ads sold at bargain-basement rates. AOL's Curt Viebranz says that ads sold on Tacoda — the startup he just sold to AOL for a reported $275 million — sell at a $4 cost per thousand viewers. When he hears that figure, Battelle raises his eyebrows and asked Viebranz to talk to him after the panel.

The fall of AOL's Mike Kelly

Owen Thomas — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:37:08 EDT

Search and ye shall find — steady employment in advertising, that is. That's the lesson I'm taking from Mike Kelly's abrupt ouster, announced today, as head of AOL's ad sales. How abrupt? Mediaweek just named him one of the 50 most influential people in advertising. If you haven't heard of Kelly, here's his resumé at a glance: A Time Inc. ad sales guy who rose to become publisher of Entertainment Weekly, Kelly was sent down by Time Warner to fix AOL's relationships with advertisers. He largely succeeded in that, and also spearheaded the acquisition of Advertising.com, an online ad network that places ads on third-party sites. Advertising.com has provided much of AOL's recent growth in ad revenues. But elsewhere, AOL's ad sales have stalled. Especially in search. And Kelly, fairly or unfairly, is getting the blame.

Like Yahoo's ousted ad-sales chieftains, Gregory Coleman and Wenda Harris Millard, Kelly grew up in the world of print publishing. And banner ads, although smaller than full-page print ads, were comfortably close: Sold in large packages at a CPM rate to brand-minded advertisers.

That's not, of course, the world we live in today. Some advertisers still pay by the thousands of impressions, but others insist on paying only when users click through, or when an ad actually leads to a sale. The latter forms of ads, of course, dominate search, which is the largest category of Internet advertising today.

To sell search ads, however, you need a search engine. And though Kelly had been running AOL's search business, he hadn't been doing a great job of it. Former AOL executive John McKinley excoriated the company for slavishly imitating Google in its search-results design. And even copying Google, which already provided AOL's raw search results, hasn't stemmed AOL's steady loss in search market share.

Stepping into Kelly's place is Curt Viebranz, the CEO of Tacoda, an ad-targeting company recently acquired by AOL. Viebranz, like Kelly, did stints at Time Inc. and Time Warner, but he has a longer tech and new media resume. He'll be running a group at AOL called Platform A, which rolls together Advertising.com, Tacoda, and other ad-sales organizations. Perhaps MediaWeek can issue a rush update and slot Viebranz in Kelly's place.