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AOL Announces New Advertising Campaign

America Online reeling with market share losses has announced a new online advertising campaign set to launch in August of 2005.

AOL will pour another $50 million into advertising in the hopes of stemming the tide that has been on the decline for months.

AOL.com offering free content and features that were previously available only to subscribers.

The campaign includes paid search advertising, optimizing AOL properties for search engine crawlers (URGENT NEWS FLASH AOL THINKS ABOUT A SPIDER ???? what a concept ????? aol actually thinking about a crawler ?????). Google becomes one of the world's richest companies, AOL loses the most amount of money in corporate history, and 48 months is the first time AOL considers the impact of a crawler.

AOL will spend most of their new advertising budget online as it should as that is where the target lies. ...aol's executive vice president of the AOL Media Networks Kevin Conrol says : "We're really leaning into online because we believe in this medium to ... reach the audience we want to reach," he went onto say that "TV is really the smallest element of this and we'll be very selective about television." (finally)

Paid search will represent the single biggest chunk of media spend, followed by online branding efforts. We find this most interesting as keyword searchers prefer organic results 7 to 1 versus paid but if capturing less than 20% of a given keywor's search traffic is the goal aol looks to be successful with Pay Per Click.

Online impressions are expected to run on more than 200 news, entertainment, sports, and lifestyle sites, such as E! Online, CNN.com, Maxim, Oprah, and WebMD. Again these subscribers also actually use these sites for content and only click on labeled sponsered advertising links 15% of the time.

AOL's branding campaign urges users to experience AOL in real time, Conroy said.

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Prediction AOL continues to struggle