AOL's Board Draws from All Parts of the Media-Tech-Advertising Ecosystem

AOL named the board that will serve it after it spins out from Time Warner today, and it’s a revealing reflection of what AOL essentially is, and always has been: a populist technology company. While the board certainly has tech representation, it also has old-school media and advertising representation, and the players on the board mostly fit into tidy groups that echo the state of the media/technology/advertising ecosystem. Here is a dissection of who fits where:

Technology

• Richard Dalzell, former senior vp, CIO, Amazon;
• Karen Dykstra, COO and CFO of Plainfield Direct, a division of Plainfield Asset Management, board member of technology consulting firm Gartner, Inc., former CFO of Automatic Data Processing;
• William R. Hambrecht, chairman/CEO, W.R. Hambrecht & Co., which heavily invests in tech;
• Michael K. Powell, former head of the Federal Communications Commission, and currently a partner with Providence Equity Partners, which invests in media, entertainment, communications and information companies.

Media

• Patricia E. Mitchell, president/CEO of The Paley Center for Media (as in Bill Paley, once head of CBS), former president/CEO of the Public Broadcasting System, and a director of Sun Microsystems;
• Fredric G. Reynolds, who had various senior positions with both CBS and Viacom;
• James Wiatt, until recently, chairman/CEO of The William Morris Agency.

Advertising

• James R. Stengel, former chief marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser.

AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka is probably right in noting that many of the board members were also picked because they are, well, older, while new CEO Tim Armstrong and company are a long way from getting their first membership solicitation from the AARP. But I think something else is also at work here. Sure, any company in AOL’s business should have people with deep technology expertise on its board (not to mention a few people with the ability to raise funds), but AOL also is also increasingly becoming a go-to place for pop culture media, as evidenced not just by TMZ, but also by sites such as the sports locale Fanhouse.

The appointment of people who have deep experience in mass media, such as Reynolds, and former talent agency boss Wiatt, speak to that part of the current AOL business. As for Stengel, his inclusion is obvious — at least to those of us who have spent much of our careers in advertising. No company in the world may be smarter about advertising than P&G. Stengel, who worked at the company until earlier this year, will give AOL special insight into how to beef up its core revenue stream.

Previous coverage of AOL at BNET Media:

• AOL’s Business Model: “High-Quality Content to Scale”
• Is AOL on a Mission to Save Journalism?
• AOL’s Tim Armstrong on the Value of Premium Online Content