GoogAOL wants to sell TV and Print ads, too

Filed in archive IPTV on December 22, 2005

"With this agreement, AOL's sales force will now be able to sell all types of Online Advertising ... and we'll explore expanding the partnership into selling television and print advertising," Time Warner Chairman-CEO Richard Parsons wrote in a staff memo, which surfaced Wednesday in a report by the Financial Times.

I am very interested in the television ad sales because I used to sell enterprise software into that market and Time Warner was one of my largest customers. It is also more lucrative than Google's search marketing niche.

Print advertising is a topic I am less familiar with, but Time Warner does have a vast magazine infrastructure from which to draw. Judging by Google's first test in print advertising, they will sorely need that expertise.

MediaDailyNews notes that a "big new Google advertiser, coincidentally, may be AOL. As part of the deal, Google is giving AOL an estimated $300 million in "marketing credits" to promote its content on Google, which at least one knowledgeable observer believes may be used for more than just paid search placements on Google's sites."

Surely, there are many chapters yet to write about this story.