With AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong in place, the game of musical chairs is under way. The first big departure being announced today is AOL’s head of sales Greg Coleman, who only joined in February, 2009 from Yahoo. Replacing him is Jeff Levick, who worked under Armstrong at Google as VP of Industry Development and Marketing in North America. Levick’s new title at AOL will be President, Global Advertising and Strategy, where he wlil be in charge of AOL’s ad network Platform-A.
Coleman was not Armstrong’s hire and obviously he wants his own man in such a key position. Advertising revenues were down 20 percent in the first quarter. Armstrong needs to right the AOL ship before Time Warner can spin it off, which it is planning on doing.
Meanwhile, the aftermath of Armstrong’s departure from Google continues. After Armstrong left, there was an internal power struggle at Google to see who would take his spot. When Dennis Woodside, the chief of Google sales in the UK, won that battle, one of the other contenders for the spot, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, left for Accel Partners Then just yesterday, on an unrelated note, former DoubleCklick CEO David Rosenblatt and currently head of display advertising at Google, announced that he too will be leaving. Meanwhile, the longtime chief of all global sales at Google, Omid Kordestani, is transitioning into a senior adviser role in order to make way for Nikesh Arora, currently President of International Operations, to take his spot. Arora was also an internal candidate for Armstrong’s position.
While all of these executives are running around to find a new musical chair to sit in, Armstrong is standing in the middle, watching with a smile.
(Photo credit: Flickr/makelessnoise)
nice. lets hope they focus on branding and user exeperience. http://www.mediaglow.com looks like a yardsale of sites, subsites, and links. how much time before a spinoff? if the new platformA leader “he wlil” is smart im sure ill hear from him.
StrategyLocator.com – know where your going
Wonder what Greg got as a signing bonus?
@StartupLocator – Why does mediaglow.com as a web page need to be anything special? That “yardsale” collection of sites you refer to are some of the biggest names on the internet.
Clearly Omid’s departure hurts quite a bit for the American people, especially the NY office. No one liked Nikesh and the US team is voting with its feet. Woodside is an American, but clearly Nikesh’s guy and much more harsh/detail oriented than Tim ever was. The US guys know the game has changed big-time and without Tim and Jeff (and more to leave, surely), Google US sales is going to be rather terrible. Check out the Europe/UK morale if there’s any doubt what they can look forward to.
Minor correction: Coleman joined AOL from Netseer, not Yahoo. He left Yahoo more than a year ago.