Yahoo executive Coleman joins AOL
04 Feb 2009
AOL has named former Yahoo executive Gregory Coleman as head of its online advertising unit. Coleman becomes the third person in that role in 17 months.
Coleman, Yahoo Inc.'s former executive vice president for global sales, has replaced Lynda Clarizio, who was appointed in March last year. She was the former president of Advertising.com.
Clarizio, in turn, had replaced Curt Viebranz.
In a statement AOL chief executive Randy Falco said Coleman was chosen as someone who understand that "online brand building is the next frontier in digital advertising."
Coleman left Yahoo early last year as the company reorganised its management structure.
He joins AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., as it looks to transform itself into an advertising-based company and shed its roots as an internet access provider, a role it pioneered in the 1990s before steadily losing customers to faster connections. It created Platform-A out of a $1 billion worth of advertising-related acquisitions.
AOL was seeing rapid growth in advertising when it decided in 2006 to give away e-mail accounts and software previously available only to customers who paid as much as $26 a month for Internet access service. The idea was to drive traffic to AOL's free, ad-supported Web sites.