At AOL, Lynda Clarizio takes her revenge on Tacoda's people, not its technology

Since it acquired Tacoda last summer, AOL has done little with it but push top executives out of the company. 97 employees came over in the buy. Today, only 35 remain. The most notable departure was former Tacoda CEO Curt Viebranz, whom AOL promoted to head its advertising business, Platform-A. Viebranz was fired only five months later. Lynda Clarizio, the head of Advertising.com, AOL's online ad-network unit, took his job. And so it's no surprise that when VentureBeat intercepted an email from AOL to Tacoda clients, canceling all contracts within the next 30 days, that the blog jumped to conclusions and assumed Advertising.com stalwarts had finally had their way, killing Tacoda and its tech once and for all. A very juicy story indeed. Too bad it turned out not to be the case. More »

ValueClick to buy Revenue Science?

Behavioral targeting is all the rage in online advertising. The technology aims to show ads to Internet users based on the sites they visit and the actions they perform, rather than targeting words they search for, as Google does, or matching advertisers' desired demographics to a site's audience, as most banner-ad purchasers do today. ValueClick has introduced its own product, in competition with AOL's Tacoda and Yahoo's BlueLithium. But ValueClick's executives may not be particularly confident in the product — if rumors are true that they're talking to startup Revenue Science about an acquisition. Revenue Science has raised more than $70 million in venture capital, and recently appointed former ValueClick executive Jeff Hirsch as its CEO.

Former Tacoda exec joins ad network that can see into your very soul

In the middle ages there was alchemy — the fool's science of turning ordinary metals into gold. Today, there's ad targeting technology. See, it used to be marketers bought ads next to content they figured it would be good for their brands to be seen supporting. Nowadays, technologists think they can make its so that content doesn't matter, so long as their ad-targeting technology knows exactly who's looking at the screen that content is on. As a result, we've got contextual targeting, behavioral targeting and now, semantic targeting from likes of such company's as Peer39, which in in an embargoed funding announcement set for June 30, claims it can "understand content meaning and sentiment, enabling precision targeting down to the page level so that display ads appear on pages most relevant to their message." Believers include investors Canaan Partners, Dawntreader Ventures and JP Morgan as well ex-Tacoda VP Matthew S. Goldstein who's joined the company as COO. Non-believers include, well, us. The full release is below, but trust us, its less entertaining than Ben Jonson's cozening characters. More »

Fred Wilson: VC needs "a new path to liquidity," the 100-word version

Microsoft is asking News Corp. to help it buy Yahoo. Yahoo wants AOL and Google to help it remain independent. Meanwhile, writes VC blogger Fred Wilson, websites and services acquired by these companies like Flickr, AIM, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Groups, and FeedBurner continue to languish. Which is why Wilson thinks venture capitalists need a new path to liquidity besides flipping startups to a big company (too easy) and going public (too hard). He'd like to see a private-equity marketplace, where entrepreneurs can cash out without selling out. His 1,104-word argument cut down to size, below: More »

New ad boss plans to lay off half of AOL's sales force

With Curt Viebranz out, AOL's new advertising boss Lynda Clarizio plans to integrate the Time Warner subsidiary's various ad sales teams — those from acquisitions Tacoda and Quigo, for example — into one. That will create redundancies which Clarizio plans to handle by axing about half of AOL's sales force, Silicon Alley Insider reports. Top executives at Advertising.com will fill new roles running all of advertising for AOL.

Platform A CEO is out

Curt Viebranz, the CEO of AOL's ad sales unit Platform A, is leaving. AOL did not say why, but "sources" are suddenly tipping off a lot of blogs that he was fired. Viebranz, former head of Tacoda, joined Platform A at its inception last fall. The unit was supposed to house ad sales for all AOL units. Another AOL executive, Advertising.com president Linda Clarizio, will replace him. Advertising.com execs strongly opposed the Tacoda acquisition, saying Tacoda's technology was overrated. Guess who just won that argument?

Top advertising exec Dave Morgan quits AOL

Former Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan has quit AOL exactly three months after being named EVP of global advertising strategy. Morgan sold ad-targeting firm Tacoda to AOL in September for $275 million. Now he's planning on getting back into startups. He might even take investment from AOL, he told PaidContent, which characterizes the departure as "cordial." We're surprised in one sense — Morgan was telling people last fall how excited he was to take the job — but not in another. In an internal memo, AOL COO Ron Grant called Morgan an "entrepreneur at heart" and frankly, their kind isn't welcome long at AOL. Morgan's departure follows Kathleen Kayse's. Kayse, AOL's former EVP of digital media sales, left last week.

AOL dealmaker now has to make deals work

So rarely do the executives who strike deals have to execute them. The hard work of fitting acquired companies together is usually left to less-glamorous grunts. How satisfying, then, to see Jon Werther, recently in charge of business development at AOL, made responsible for "integrated operations". Werther will have his hands full shaping AOL's numerous online-advertising acquisitions into the new Platform A business. Specifically, we hear that the folks at Advertising.com, AOL's third-party Web-ads network, loathe the newcomers from Tacoda. Good luck with that, Jon.

The fall of AOL's Mike Kelly

Search and ye shall find — steady employment in advertising, that is. That's the lesson I'm taking from Mike Kelly's abrupt ouster, announced today, as head of AOL's ad sales. How abrupt? Mediaweek just named him one of the 50 most influential people in advertising. If you haven't heard of Kelly, here's his resumé at a glance: A Time Inc. ad sales guy who rose to become publisher of Entertainment Weekly, Kelly was sent down by Time Warner to fix AOL's relationships with advertisers. He largely succeeded in that, and also spearheaded the acquisition of Advertising.com, an online ad network that places ads on third-party sites. Advertising.com has provided much of AOL's recent growth in ad revenues. But elsewhere, AOL's ad sales have stalled. Especially in search. And Kelly, fairly or unfairly, is getting the blame. More »

For Fred Wilson, Tacoda's more than just another win

Can we, at last, put to rest any whispers by jealous Sand Hill Road rivals about the strengths of Fred Wilson's portfolio? The New York-based venture capitalist, a partner at Union Square Ventures, has ably spotted the most profitable segments of targeted marketing and online publishing, from social bookmarks (Del.icio.us, sold to Yahoo) to RSS-feed advertising (FeedBurner, sold to Google) and now, behavioral ad-targeting firm Tacoda, sold to AOL for a reported price of more than $200 million. This deal is more than just a financial win for Wilson — it's a vindication of his entire strategy. Here's why. More »