What’s That AO Smell?
After completely overhauling their brand’s design, dropping beaucoup bucks everywhere on event marketing and then adding on a massive digital staff to gain a foothold on online buzz (Asylum)… AOL decided to go one further and add “advertorial content” to their front page. Wait. What?
Forget any half-assed destruction of their recent rebranding campaign in exchange for minor Hollywood marketing dollars… These geniuses are going Kamikaze. Ignoring all trending summer blockbusters, they’ve focused on giving tiny-font media critics a run for their money. Now, some small-time regional radio station might get away with saying “MacGruber is the funniest SNL film in ages…”, in exchange for a press-junket gift basket. Not AOL. They’ve decided to show everyone how the big-boys play, by making EVERY STORY ON THEIR NEWS PAGE about the new Katherine Heigl / Ashton Kutcher movie. The one that seems purpose built to obtain the lowest rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Way to pick a winner! This will be like Coke Zero branding with Avatar’s release… If you replace “Coke Zero” with “AOL.” And “Avatar” with “Herpes.”
We’re not even saying “Space Herpes” (YouTube). I mean… Don’t they think that maybe, possibly, this could be a bad idea?
Then we saw this beauty. Some clown obviously had money to do an NYC cab campaign… But couldn’t afford a site? Looking over the vanity plate phrasing and antique account, we’re guessing it’s a baby-boomer who thinks they have advertising figured out. Which begs the question – why isn’t he running a digital agency? They meet the criteria we’ve seen: old, clueless and at the cutting edge of 
On Dec. 9th 2009, AOL is getting divorced from Time Warner. Which bookends one of the biggest head-turners of the dot-com bubble (ver. 1), when AOL bought the world’s largest media entity (Warner Bros, HBO, CNN) for $162 billion. After Wednesday, AOL is going solo and will be moving into a shared apartment with CompuServe and Prodigy.