The recent installment of Jeff Zucker as head of NBC Universal reminds me of former "Universal" COO Randy Falco, who stepped away from the company to head up Time Warner's AOL (TWX).
Answering questions at the iMedia Brand Summit, Falco said concerning the reason he left: "Isn't it better to be standing where the ball is thrown rather than scrambling to catch up to it?"
Of course he's talking up the sector here and promoting AOL as a highly-scaled platform for advertisers to market their goods on, while downplaying the big media companies who are trying to build out and scale their own Web properties. Concerning this Falco said: "My friends in traditional media are trying hard to understand the digital-media landscape ... these websites on their own will never 
scale up to AOL or Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO)."
While people have been throwing the decline of AOL revenue in their faces because the advertising hasn't been able to make up for the declining Internet subscription business they're no longer focusing on, Falco added that AOL is more than glad to be in the ad-network business.
He added that AOl is now the No. 1 display-ad network online and the No. 3 overall. "The share of marketing dollars flowing to those top four [Google, Yahoo, MSN (MSFT) and AOL] is increasing," he said, "the simple fact is it's hard to build a network with the scale of AOL."
His idea of scale does remind me possibly too much of "old media" thinking. While there may be some value in highly visited sites for some marketers, I don't think that it will necessarily be a great advantage in the future. The growth of targeted marketing will be much more important and valuable to marketers in the years ahead than just getting eyeballs to see your offerings.
The only thing scale may help with is in breaking down huge numbers so you can get a good look at the various specific niches and interests that visitors have. To think in terms of mass audiences on the Internet is just doing business as usual and is not the best way of marketing any longer.
I think a series of niche created channels will be far more powerful and effective for advertisers in the years ahead. The challenge will be in how to promote across the multiple online channels. I don't think we're too far away from solving that problem.
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