Verizon Communications completed its $4.4 billion acquisition of Aol today in one of the more peculiar strange-bedfellows digital matchups of the decade.
On first glance, the combination of a mobile phone provider and the owner of content sites Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Engadget may look like a desperate attempt to diversify into tangential lines of business.
Dig a bit deeper, however, and Verizon’s strategy becomes clear: it’s all about advertising.
Aol: Ad Technology Player
Aol’s content properties are part of Verizon’s strategy, to be sure – more on that in a moment. The real jewels in Aol’s crown, in fact, are its advertising technologies and services, which Aol has lumped together under the AOL Platforms brand.
The list is surprisingly deep, including the One by Aol automated platform for buying ads across different media, ADTECH integrated ad serving solutions, the Advertising.com ad network, and Pictela high-definition global content marketing platform.
All in all, Aol has at least ten ad-centric lines of business that Verizon will now be merging into its Digital Media Services division – a fancy name for the telco’s advertising line of business.
To understand why Verizon was so fired up about Aol’s suite of advertising businesses, it’s important to understand the company’s modern, digital context.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/06/23/youve-got-ads-verizon-buys-aol-in-digital-advertising-play/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Mars Infomage.
