Word: warner
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Robert Pittman is often described as a marketing genius, but by the time he sat down with his boss before the July 4 holiday, he had nothing left to sell. As chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, Pittman had spent close to three months commuting from corporate headquarters in New York City to the America Online offices in Dulles, Va., where he was assigned to rescue the online service from slowing subscriber growth and a plunge in online advertising. Fixing AOL was going to be a long-term project--and Pittman was no longer in for the long haul...
That's the official version, and no doubt much of it is true. But there's more to the story, which reveals a sharp reversal in strategy at AOL Time Warner...
Pittman had worked from the top down to fulfill the grand promises of the January 2001 merger of AOL and Time Warner, trying to force the proud and relatively autonomous old-media divisions--cable TV, movies, music, publishing, TV channels--to work more collaboratively with one another and with the online division, especially on joint advertising deals. But Pittman was a polarizing figure, as were his proteges from the AOL division. Youthful, cocky and ostentatiously wealthy from their AOL stock options, they swooped down on Time Warner as if they held the secrets to some new business reality. They quickly...
...head-knocking search for synergies failed to appreciate that Time Warner's strength lay in the seasoned operating executives at the top of its various divisions, who have produced solid earnings quarter after quarter, regardless of which vision of the month their corporate overlords were selling to Wall Street. Time Warner's weakness has been the inability of the dreamers and bureaucrats in its headquarters to effectively tie the whole enterprise together. Parsons, who took charge as CEO only in May after the retirement of Gerald Levin, had limited experience as a big-league operating executive and knew that...
...labor between him and Pittman. Logan and Bewkes bring relevant experience and talents to the assignments that lie ahead of them. Logan, 58, the burly and taciturn Alabaman who has rebuilt Time Inc. (parent of TIME) into a publishing dynamo, will oversee the subscription-based businesses, including AOL, Time Warner Cable and Time Inc. Bewkes, 50, who has led HBO to critical acclaim and rising profits, will add to his portfolio the Warner Bros. and New Line movie units, Warner Music, the WB network and the Turner cable networks such...