I just think that AOL is a bit misunderstood. Maybe a bit shy too. It must be blowback from years of screeching modems and the ominous litany of “WELCOME TO AOL” intros.

But memories aside my mission is here is to espouse the virtues of AOL’s new sense of self. To me, it nearly begins and ends with Platform A. The acquisitions of TACODA, Third Screen Media, Lightningcast and ADTECH along with more recent deals the likes of Buy.at and Goowy have put AOL on a firm path. The shedding of AOL’s dial-up business will concretize the situation enormously. Also noteworthy of course are such offerings as TMZ and other digital real estate.

Microsoft’s failed bid for AOL [correction: I accidentally reported AOL, I really meant Yahoo!. Corrected at 12:17 AM Tuesday Feb 12th, 2008] was interesting. Now there is already talk about Yahoo! getting into game. While I understand the corporate need for consolidation, I think it will only hinder AOL’s recent progress. Yahoo!’s public brand doesn’t even exist to anyone under 30. Semantics aside, at some point we’ll find the need to curtail these big-name mergers for the very sake of preserving the function of branding.

Let us be realistic: most people like to shop at big box stores. Even if every local business went down tomorrow I guarantee that a segment of the population would drive to the next town over for a humane shopping experience.

I can already feel the Google fatigue. Can you feel it too? Yahoo! was exhausted long ago. I used to love them. While behind many of these names there is an apparatus far more serious and complex than the public often sees or understands, sometimes it is best to let that go for the sake of 98% of us that are chipping up to these guys.

I’ve chosen to mention AOL above because it derives from a personal and business perspective in that Fixion Media (my company) employs ADTECH’s services. (ADTECH is an arm of Platform A.) While I realize that Yahoo! buying AOL would help access to new markets, this situation runs of risk of hindering a sense razor-sharp focus that AOL has been giving off for months now. It is one of the main reasons we signed with ADTECH. In fact, we did more research on the parent companies of the major ad platforms than we did on ADTECH itself.

While aggressive posturing might be a sign to the industry that AOL is ripe for the taking, sometimes it disappoints me that most corporations are innately lazy, thereby lacking the will to completely flip a company into what it could and should be.

See AOL. (Maybe.)

Filed under: Publisher Side, The Future, Adtech Helios IQ, Branding

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