Buddy List Ads
In order to generate incremental revenue for AOL, I drove the requirements and led the project for adding banner ads to the Buddy List and IM windows. Our development team was initially completely against moving forward with this initiative due to concern about user backlash. By sharing 5 year extremely positive revenue forecast, feedback from users on Yahoo and survey and focus group results that I conducted, got the the project green lighted.
Power Browser Deployment
Device Marketing decided to deploy the Power Browser only on new devices vs. on both new and legacy devices due to fear of negative impact on consumers. I needed roll-out to occur on all legacy devices to drive immediate impact on business goals. I conducted focus group testing, quantitative tests and brought in rep from another carrier to validate that the adoption of a similar product was high and well received by consumers. Based on these validation points and feedback, DM agreed to deploy the Power Browser on a small portion of legacy devices and on the rest of them 3-6 months later if no consumer backlash. This still did not meet my business goals so I worked with the vendor to create a kill switch for the product. Once this was presented to DM, they agreed to launch on all legacy devices.
Retail Apps over Celeb apps
I felt retail apps were a much better long term business for RM due to lack of competition in the space. Investors felt celebrity apps should be focus due to sexiness of celebs for PR purposes (especially after David Letterman show demo). They said they had the connections to bring in tons of business. I agreed to focus for 60 days on the celeb app platform and reconvene. At board meeting showed several retail app term sheets that were in negotiation while there was only 1 celeb that they brought us - Manny Paquiao, with a huge cost. Investors agreed to my plan to focus on retail and hyper local deals.
Location Based Recommendation
Senior mgmt wanted to go with Placecast because of bigger name, more deployments and existing ad sales force. I convinced management to go with Zumigo because they were more scalable in years 2 and 3; had worked with VZW’s location backend before; local and quicker time to market. Felt the difference between the amount of carrier deployments issue was not a concern.