San Francisco — Barely weeks after taking the helm as chief executive at AOL, Tim Armstrong in his first management shake-up last week, appointed a former Google Inc. colleague “Jeff Levick” as president of global advertising and strategy, overseeing its Platform-A advertising sales business.
38-year-old Levick, who has most recently employed at Google since 2001, as vice president of industry development and marketing for the Americas, is the latest in a series of Google executives who have announced plans to leave the company.
Levick, will now become the new president of global advertising and strategy at AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., and will report to AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong who joined from Google on April 1.
In his new role, Levick primarily will be responsible for Platform-A, AOL’s advertising arm, and for developing global revenue strategies.
The appointment of Levick indicates that Gregory Coleman, a former Yahoo Inc. executive who had served as the president of Platform-A since February, under AOL’s previous CEO, Randy Falco, will be leaving the company.
“I have worked with Jeff for more than seven years at Google, and he is absolutely the right person to drive growth in our premium ad sales, dramatically scale our Advertising.com business, and further develop AOL’s research initiatives and consumer insights,” said Armstrong, a former senior vice president at Google who was named to replace Randy Falco as AOL’s chairman and CEO a month ago.
Google spokesman Matt Furman said Google is grateful to Levick for his contributions to the company.
The news comes a day after parent Time Warner said it expects to spin off all or parts of AOL, which has been struggling to evolve from an Internet-service provider to an ad-supported company.
Wall Street is closely watching the situations at Time Warner for news of move to separate the struggling Internet unit that saw its revenue dropped 23% in the first quarter, including a 20% drop in ad sales.
Time Warner Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes has said on several occasions in recent months that he is currently looking into the possibility of spinning off all or part of AOL.
There has long been speculation that AOL could be combined with another Internet company like Yahoo Inc or Microsoft’s Internet operations.
But last Wednesday, Time Warner indicated in a regulatory filing that it is now leaning toward spinning off the company to its shareholders though it said a final decision had not been made.
In another dramatic development earlier this week, David Rosenblatt, who led Google’s global display-ad business, announced his departure. Rosenblatt is a former chief executive of display-ad-technology company DoubleClick, now part of Google.
People familiar with the matter said a vast number of defections from Google to AOL seems unlikely given that Armstrong has already filled one of his top lieutenant roles.
Armstrong’s successor at Google, Dennis Woodside, and his boss, Nikesh Arora, its new president for global sales operations and business development, are expected to put their stamp on the organization by restructuring it further, according to people familiar with the matter.
Meanwhile AOL, which was once the gateway to the Internet for most of the people, has long since been left behind as a relic as cable and phone companies pick off subscribers with faster speeds than its dial-up service.
So far, AOL has been unable to build on its Web pioneer status in the online advertising sector as Google and others have swooped in to dominate.