• Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11 AM

The future of Time Warner unit AOL largely hinges on the success of Platform A, an integrated advertising services network that hasn't gone to market yet. In the wake of the dismissal of former president Curt Viebranz, Lynda Clarizio, the former head of Advertising.com, is now charged with the task of integrating $1 billion worth of AOL ad network acquisitions into the division she formerly headed.

Platform A is said to have the widest reach of any ad network in the country--reaching 90 percent of the U.S. online audience, according to comScore--but The Wall Street Journal says it isn't able to effectively sell across that network yet. The disparate units that make up Platform A still operate with independent sales forces, effectively competing against one another for the same clients. As such, its parts suffer from staff duplication in sales, technology and other groups.

Clarizio's charge is to fit everything under the successful structure of Advertising.com, the rapidly growing ad network that accounted for nearly one-quarter of AOL's revenues in the most recent quarter. The new structure centralizes the disparate units into one sales team, one technology team, one product and operations team, one marketing team and one publisher-services team.

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