For AOL CEO Jeff Levick, his social media platform is the connection to his people. Face-to-face interaction and actual human evangelizers have proven extremely effective for AOL’s brand, ensuring engagement, conversation, and trust.
With all the buzz surrounding social media — its different platforms, scale, reach, growth, and the constant hunt for the “next big thing” — it is important to remember that the core principles behind engaging with customers never change. That engagement can only be achieved through a real, human connection. Sometimes the simplest solution is to ditch the high-end, high-efficiency gadgets and widgets and just have a simple face-to-face conversation about your brand and what it stands for.
iMedia spoke with Levick, president of global advertising and strategy at AOL, on his background with Google, his vision for AOL, social media, the impact of the recession, and how he keeps up with the fast-changing digital marketplace.
Save the date! Jeff Levick will be presenting on the state of the digital advertising industry at ad:tech New York, Nov. 4. Learn more about ad:tech New York.
iMedia: How has your background in search (from your time at Google) influenced your vision for AOL’s ad strategy?
Jeff Levick: My background at Google has influenced my vision for what it will take to win in display. It’s about technology, it’s about a single platform for buying, delivering, and reconciliation, and it’s about doing it at massive scale. Those are the core principles of search that I think can be applied to winning in display. The other is the importance of metrics, accountability, and measurement.
But my background has also made it clear to me that search is not display. Display shouldn’t be served the same way as search, or talked about the same way as search, or reconciled the same way as search. The platform that display is built on is very different from search. And advertisers’ goals in buying and planning for display, and the results they look for from display, are very different than that of search. And that’s the part of the industry that has yet to develop. We need to move away from the pure direct-response mentality when talking about display, and move much more toward an objectives-based conversation as it relates to display. And the results and the metrics need to map more clearly to those objectives.
iMedia: What social media platforms do you find most useful to promote and maintain AOL’s brand image?
Levick: Right now our social media platform is our people — sending them out to talk to clients, talk to agencies, talk to the market about what we have to offer, and about the clarity of our message and our mission. When we get our people evangelizing our brand, that message will spread very quickly in the market. At Advertising Week in September, for example, we took 150 of our best people and sent them to the event to talk about how AOL is back. And it worked. That’s what people were talking about all week — the massive presence of our people.
iMedia: Now that the economy is stabilizing, do you plan to increase your digital spend or expand your digital efforts? If so, where and how?
Levick: Whether it’s a good economy or a bad economy, the advantage of digital is the accountability that’s tied to it. That’s why digital has proven so strong in downturns. We think the recession will ultimately have the effect of accelerating the shift of content and advertising to digital.
iMedia: In the fast-changing digital marketplace, what consumer insights are most valuable to advertisers?
Levick: Engagement with content is the most interesting thing right now because as the web continues to fragment, it’s less about where consumers go, and more about what they do. Insights in terms of what consumers are doing online, how they engage with content, how they engage with advertising, how they engage with all these different variables is really what’s going to be more interesting to advertisers. Those insights will help us make sure advertisers are having the right conversations with their consumers in the right formats, in the right places, at the right times.
iMedia: What do you consider the most important metric for measuring online success?
Levick: There isn’t one industry metric. There’s one metric for each individual advertiser. If it was buying, did consumers buy? If it’s reading, did they read? If it’s clicking, did they click? Our goal is to understand the metric that’s important to each advertiser and find the best, most effective way to achieve it.
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