• by May 6, 2004

America Online has named Tom Bosco to the newly created position of director of broadband sales. Bosco, formerly a regional sales director at MSNBC.com, was part of the team that designed and launched the Microsoft Corp. unit's MSN Video Service earlier this year. Bosco also developed the advertising sales strategy behind the service, working with agencies and advertisers that now appear on it, including Revlon and Procter & Gamble.

Bosco has worked in cross-media ad sales for more than a decade, both in online media companies--he was director of advertising sales at Snowball.com--and traditional media, working in ad sales for Southern Living, U.S. News & World Report, Fast Company, and Success magazines.

At AOL, Bosco, who's been on the job for just four weeks, interfaces with programming chiefs, advertisers, and the sales organization to convey the market opportunities in streaming media and to translate them into saleable products.

"My job, first and foremost, is to help develop and solidify the broadband sales advertising strategy across the AOL division," he says. "I'm working with the programming people to make sure we're balancing the best advertising experience with the best user experience."

He recently met with programming chiefs in the games, news, and sports areas of AOL for Broadband. "I'm hearing about their assets and helping them monitize those assets with what I know the market needs right now," he adds. Those developments are then communicated back to the sales organization. Bosco reports to Janet Balis, senior vice president, sales development, who reports to Michael Barrett, executive vice president, sales and partnership, AOL Media Networks.

"Broadband is a big programming strategy for AOL. It's a pretty nascent area, and marketer feedback is critical," says Barrett. "There needs to be a consistent feedback loop from the marketplace to the programmers," which Barrett explains is where Bosco fits into the mix. In addition to being a critical link between the programming chiefs and the sales organization, he'll also be evangelizing the streaming ad opportunities on AOL among agency folk.

"Right now, we want to make sure that we have a highly competitive streaming [advertising] product," Barrett says, adding that beyond that AOL will look at video opportunities within banners across the service, and then broadband ad opportunities that are programming agnostic. While some streaming ads run on the service today, for example, on AOL's Broadband Rocks music content area, inventory will take off in the late third- and into the fourth quarter. "Entertainment and music are sweet spots for us," Barrett says. And something else: He expects AOL to participate in the network and cable upfronts this season, packaging streaming ad inventory across the network.

AOL, as of the end of the first quarter, counts more than 3.5 million members on broadband price plans.

"The marketplace is looking for places where it can use assets other than the traditional TV buy. The broadband push at AOL, from an advertising standpoint, is very exciting to me," Bosco said.