Coleman Appointment at AOL Continues Game of Portal Musical Chairs

In the can't-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard department, the game of musical chairs among online ad sales execs continues at the major portals with word yesterday that former Yahoo executive vp/global sales Greg Coleman would be the new head of Platform A, the AOL division which houses its ad business. What Coleman's appointment at AOL means remains to be seen, of course, but, for right now the winds at the major portals are blowing in the direction of those who have recent experience at Internet media properties coupled with decades of doing business the old-fashioned way in the traditional media business.

Before joining Yahoo, Coleman was a long-time executive at Reader's Digest. And his appointment to the AOL post comes five months after former Microsoft ad sales chief Joanne Bradford joined Yahoo as senior vp, U.S. revenue and market development. Bradford, who, like Coleman at Yahoo, had an enormously steep learning curve when she joined Microsoft in 2001, was a long-time print sales executive at BusinessWeek. Having had encounters with both, I can say that both can speak to the bits and bytes that make up the online world and the needs of big-time advertisers, who, still, 15 years after the Internet revolution began, need some level of reassurance about spending their ad dollars on those wacky Internets.

The outlier in this portal musical chair game is Microsoft. It's playing the game, but running around the chairs in the other direction. In December, it picked former Yahoo executive Qi Lu to be president of its online services division, which includes its ad sales business. The appearance on the scene in Redmond of Lu, who had been vp of engineering for Yahoo, caused Brian McAndrews, senior vp of the advertiser and publisher solutions group to leave Microsoft. McAndrews, who came to Microsoft when the company bought aQuantive, of which he was CEO, also had deep traditional media experience; he spent most of the 1990s at ABC. Still with me? Good.

So are AOL and Yahoo right in settling on Coleman and Bradford? Or is Microsoft right in choosing Lu? That's a question better answered in a year, when we know how they fared in a difficult environment.