As far as advertising is concerned, people are heavily focusing on Facebook and Google. What are other ad businesses, like AOL and Yahoo, supposed to do to stay relevant when all ad dollars are going to the top dogs? Tim Armstrong, chief of AOL and Yahoo under Verizon, let us in on a little bit of Yahoo and AOL’s strategy for competing with Facebook and Google during a podcast with Recode.
AOL and Yahoo merged together to form Oath as a subsidiary of Verizon. Tim is focusing on finding ways AOL and Yahoo can get around these tech giants by offering solutions they don’t. “I think the worst thing we could do is – Facebook and Google are Olympic athletes with gold medal performances,” Armstrong said. “We have a differentiated strategy to partner with Google and Facebook but not directly compete with them.” Though they have plans to offer advertisers unique solutions, Armstrong isn’t revealing much of how they plan to do that.
“I’m not going to go deeply into our strategy, but we have a different distribution model, different measurement model and different data model than they’re building,” Armstrong said. “I think you will see us, over the course of the next 12 months, roll out a series of products that are differentiated from Google and Facebook.”
“This is also not a winner take all market, as big as those guys are, and they are big and they are ferocious from a competitive standpoint, there is so much opportunity left in the world,” Armstrong added.
As far as strategy goes, AOL is on to something. It is pretty clear that trying to directly compete with Google and Facebook would go south for AOL and Yahoo. It will be interesting to see how Oath differentiates itself over the course of the next 12 months.
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