Tech Brew Ride Home - (IHP) She Gave The World A Billion AOL CDs

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

Originally published August 2014 Jan Brandt is a legend in the world of marketing. She singlehandedly led the famous AOL "carpet-bombing" campaign that put millions of AOL trial discs and CDs in everything from magazines to popcorn boxes to banks. AOL was able to leap to the front of the online pack, over competitors like CompuServe and Prodigy largely on the success of this campaign. Jan tells us how this strategy developed, the thinking that went into it and goes into great detail about what worked and what didn't. But she was also a very early AOL executive, so she is able to give us some fantastic background about AOL the company: its culture, its people and its visionaries–people like Steve Case. She takes us from AOL's beginnings, through its considerable growing pains (remember "America On Hold?") its rise to dominance in the dot-com era, and even gives us her perspective on the legacy of the AOL/Time Warner merger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. This is the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. This is Chapter 3, Supplemental Episode 2, an interview with Jan Brandt. Jan Brandt is a legend in the world of marketing.

She single-handedly led the famous AOL carpet bombing campaign that put millions of AOL trial discs and CDs into everything from magazines to popcorn boxes to banks. AOL was able to leap to the front of the online. online pack over competitors such as CompiServe and Prodigy, largely on the success of this campaign. Jan tells us about how this strategy developed, the thinking that went into it, and goes into great detail about what worked and what didn't. But she was also a very early AOL executive, so she is able to finally give us some fantastic background about AOL the company. It's culture, its people, it's visionaries, people like Steve Case, and, so she is able to finally give us some, some fantastic background about AOL the company. It's culture, it's people.

So she takes us from AOL's beginnings through its considerable growing pains. Remember, America on hold. Its rise to dominance in the dot-com era. And she even gives us her perspective on the legacy of the AOL-W-Time Warner merger, which we will be talking about in a future chapter. Jan Brandt, thanks for coming on the Internet History podcast. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. So at the risk of buttering you up right at the top,

you're really a bit of a marketing legend. And so I wondered if you could start off by giving us a bit of a background in terms of your education, you know, getting into the marketing field, who your influences and your mentors were, that sort of thing? Sure. I fell into the marketing world in one way. I think sometimes I think I came out of the womb marketing. I said in later years. But in my undergraduate studies, I was studying at Boston University School of Public Communications and really in journalism. And we had a lot of free-form kind of projects where we could sort of choose the discipline that we wanted to work in. And one of my professors actually later became the dean pointed out to me that I kept doing projects in advertising. and did I want to consider going into advertising and marketing?

And I said, no, I really don't that I did projects in that area because I wanted to understand something that was trying so hard to control our lives and persuade us. So I actually came to marketing more from a social psychology viewpoint of really wanting to understand, really wanting to understand what motivates law. large groups of people. In later days, I would say, I want to make, like, lots and lots of people do what I want them to do, essentially, in terms of marketing or persuade them in certain directions. But I don't really want to talk to any of them individually, that I'm more behind the scenes. My first job was at Xerox Education Publications, which famously published My Weekly Reader, which was the largest classroom publication and probably the largest publication in the country at that point, along with a lot of other school publications and

products for home. And that's where I found my earliest mentors, you know, people like Pierre Pasvon, a very famous, very famous and rightfully so marketer. He and I became friends. Kathy Howe is my first boss. Bob Quigley, who I worked with for, I think we figured this out. We worked together 50% of my career back and forth, most of the time, him being my boss and sometimes me being his boss, like at AOL, Tom Ryder. I was really, when I look back in my career, I was really blessed with always having wonderful, smart, engaged people who took an interest in me. And, you know, as a side note, it's probably the reason why.

I do so much mentoring and I still do and always did it at AOL or any of my previous jobs is that I really felt blessed that, you know, these people would, were interested in me and interested in helping my career along and giving me advice. And I think about some of the things that, you know, a 22-year-old would ask, you know, a senior vice president of marketing and have the, you know, sort of hoodsputter go into his office and ask. and I sit back and think of those things and how I can't remember any time that I've reached out to someone at any level for some kind of support and didn't get it in every job, at a later job, at Colonial Paying Group, someone named John Colonna. certainly when I went to education group, we had, for a small little company that that was of under $10 million in revenue, we had an all-star cast of I had taken over John Klingle's job, John Klingle being one of the godfathers or grandfathers of publishing. And he and I, to this day, remain great friends, Tom Ryder, who went on to a series of, of very significant jobs culminating with, you know, Vice Chairman of Reader's Digest, all people I keep still keep in touch with. So, you know, those were, those were some of my earliest mentors.

And then people that I worked with, the vendors, I was able to befriend vendors. I get into jobs where sometimes I had no idea what I was doing in certain aspects of the job. and I really counted on vendors to selecting good vendors and having them educate me. And in return, they received a huge amount of loyalty from me. And we became friends. So I learned a lot from a lot of the vendors that I worked with. Paradise and Matera was one. There was one person out in Chicago, Miss.

Mr. Palmer, who taught me a lot about, you know, some of the technical aspects of direct marketing. And these are people that, you know, I came to trust over the years. And they'd be my go-to people whenever I went to a new job. So it was smart on their side. But it was also that they were really, they're really good people. And I know I've left out a few people along the way. But I really was truly blessed in that regard. So what was the path that led you to AOL?

Did you have any sort of tech or tech background or experience with online services at this point? I did, but I think that what led me to AOL, I mean, literally what led me to AOL was John Klingle was serving on a board with Jim Kimsy. And, you know, Jim was early founder of AOL and the chairman of AOL at that point. and John Klingle and I had worked together for many years or a number of years in California. And Jim asked John Klingle, you know, if you knew someone who was a top marketer. And John said, told Jim that the only person he should interview was me. So that's what literally that led me to AOL. But more internally, what led me to AOL is what led me to be interested in it is,

I sometimes reflect that if AOL hadn't found me, I would have invented it. I'm certainly not the visionary that Steve is, but I would have invented it from a consumer viewpoint in that I loved AOL. I loved online services. Probably the first time I ever experienced, you know, the Internet was at the MIT Labs, you know, many, many, many years ago. and where someone showed me two people sort of talking to each other, and we're talking about, you know, in the 70s, to, you know, being out in California and someone showing me CompuServe, and that had to be in the early 80s.

So I did have that, but I also was, I was the first one to have everything, even though I'm a female. I mean, I was really an early adopter. You know, I had the first BCR. I had like the first cell phone that was as big as a suitcase. I had computerized companies. I understood, and I'm not a technical person at all. In fact, I strive not to be technical because I want to be about the consumer.

But I had always an appreciation for the technology. And probably the first, you know, the first company I computerized was probably had to have been about 1981 or 1982. I had a compact computer that I probably should have given to someone but throughout a number of years ago that was the transportable.

I was so proud, I brought it home with me on an airplane, I could stuff it into the luggage compartment but it weighed like 33 pounds and the screen was about six inches big. And that was the first computer I bought out of my own money for over

$3,000 back in 1984. Yeah, I just, I interviewed Rod Canyon of Compaq about, because you know, that ties into the Halt and Catch Fire show. So, yes, we know exactly what you're talking about. And so I was, you know, so I computerized

a marketing consulting firm that I was running at that point out in California. When I later went to field, the whole company was on IBMs and PCs, and

I was running at that point the advertising market. That was in the late 80s, the job just prior to going to AOL. And, I mean, I fought a huge, huge, huge headwind recognizing that the advertising group really needed to be on max. And we needed to decentralize. And we were at the forefront of decentralizing all of the processing that goes on in putting together advertising, images and so forth. So while I'm not a technical person, you know, I have to rank up there for people who have always appreciated the technology.

So when you do arrive at AOL, you know, roughly is this, this is 91, 92. What's the company like at this point? It was 1993. It was March of 1993. and we had a company had just gone IPO the prior fall, I believe it was, or spring. And wow, it was a little bit like the Wild West. I was, I think we figured out at some point that I was the 150th employee. You know, the culture, I sort of liked it.

I thought that I was a great bridge because I had worked in both small companies and large companies. And this was a small company trying to become a big company or trying to scale. And there really is a very different culture between small companies and big companies. And, you know, I almost always favor a smaller company. But it was, you know, I walk in there. I was the first one to have an assistant. And that came from a discussion that I had with Steve saying, you know, I am willing to work 24-7, but not making photocopies.

That, you know, if I'm going to be in the office at 10 o'clock at night, it's got to be because I'm doing marketing plans and strategy and managing people and not, you know, being a hero basically for, or heroin, basically for doing things that aren't productive. So it actually caused quite a stir. That actually, that leads me to a question. Sure. You know, did AOL at this time have what, in retrospect, we would think of as, you know, the stereotypical Silicon Valley startup culture in the sense that it was 24-7? Yeah.

Yeah. Go ahead. Absolutely. Absolutely. I, you know, I would, and I wasn't alone. So I'm using me as the example. But, you know, this was, became fewer and fewer people as time. went on as we got bigger. But in the beginning, yeah, I mean, I get into work. At first, I used to get into work at 8 o'clock because that's what I used to have to do in my prior job, but no one was

there at 8 o'clock in the morning. And in fact, my staff got really upset about calling meetings at 9 o'clock in the morning. So I ultimately meant to that. And, you know, we get in, you know, maybe 930, 10 o'clock in the morning. And my goal at, night was to leave in time to get back to my at that time of furnished apartment and time for the last delivery from takeout taxi so that I could actually have something to eat because I would be too tired to I'd be too tired to cook so it would be you know sort of me and my me and my dog sitting in bed eating cold pizza and I I I don't think that was uncommon.

In fact, let me put it the other way. I think it was common. I think in the early days, people who had families and other obligations, you know, at that time, I think they just brought this stuff home with them. I used to email in the middle of the night. I mean, I was probably as crazy as anyone in this regard. I hate to say it was more crazy. Maccorn was the person.

who in technology that was responsible for building out the network and still a wonderful friend. We used to have meetings at 3 o'clock in the morning. He'd be, the only difference is I'd be doing it. I'd be in bed on my computer. And, you know, he'd be in the offices on some, you know, firefight. So, yeah, that was absolutely the culture. It was 24-7. Um, you know, on my part, you couldn't, people, vendors especially want to take you out to lunch to dinner. I wouldn't know. I ate at my, I hated my desk. Um, I didn't have time. So for your, for your job specifically at, marketing the service, you know, at this point, it's sort of, um, a multi-horse race with, with CompiServe, with Prodigy, with others. Uh, how much was the priority?

staying ahead of the others, leapfrogging the others, and how much of it was just simply educating the public on this new product, what it was, and if we can just get in front of people, we can maybe we can convince them to give it a try. Sure. We were actually, it wasn't a matter of staying ahead at that point, if you're talking about the early days. We were third or fourth, depending on who you want to count among those, if you count Jeannie, in addition to CompuServe and Prodigy.

We were probably, I think, a little bit bigger than Jeannie when I came on board, but we were way behind. We were way behind Prodigy and CompuServe. You know, I wasn't, the direction I was given was to grow the business. And, you know, that's really, that's really what I focused on. And so, you know, I first set my side on. I think at the time, Prodigy was a little bit smaller than CompuServe at that point. I first set my size on Prodigy. The way the marketing came about was a little bit of what you said in terms of show them.

It was basically sitting there and looking at advertising and realizing that it's really easy now. We sit in front of a computer and we all have computers at home and we all have smartphones. but you have to stop and go back to a time when that just didn't exist. The penetration of computers in the home was tiny. I actually just the other day ran across a figure that said that as late as 93 or maybe it was 94, only about 23 or 24 percent of American homes even had a computer, much less a computer with a modem at that point. I think that it was less than that.

I believe the statistic that you have, but I think it was less than that. that because that was during a period when offices were still gearing up. You know, 100% of the offices, or probably 75% of the offices, didn't have it. And people's first introduction to computers was really through the office and email and through, you know, internal kinds of things that we were doing. I think at the company I was at prior to AOL, I had gotten onto Prodigy. because, you know, I was interested in the technology, but also I was watching it as potentially an advertising vehicle for our products.

But I think that just using that company as an example, I think that we probably didn't computerize the company until about 90, 1990 or so. And in terms of just even, and we're not talking about, you know, using the Internet in any way, just talking about internal kinds of things. So, I mean, I believe your number is at 25%, but it sort of goes against what my recollection was. Right. And, you know, so, you know, going back to the advertising and the marketing is, how do you describe to someone? If you close your eyes and you try to blank out the existence of everything that you know now

that has become so integrated into your life, but you say, okay, Someone sitting at home and you write about there were no modems because I could tell you what the best ed we had at the time was, which I'll get to in a second. But describing to someone that you're sitting in front of your computer, something that they don't really do that much to begin with, and you can talk to someone. You can actually type to someone and they'll get the message. And people would say, well, why not I just pick up the phone? All right. So, you know, you can sit with your kids and look up facts and information to do kids' homework on, you know, the encyclopedia. Well, I have an encyclopedia.

It really became difficult for people to imagine something that they didn't have any context for. and so that's really I believe was one half probably more than one half of why the CDs and the floppies initially distribution became such a wildly profitable

way of doing it. I think the second reason was that at that time we were doing floppies at that time floppies had a value they weren't cheap I think if you went into the store they probably cost, you know, 10 or 20 bucks for, you know, a 10-pack. And so the fact that you're getting a

floppy disc in the mail for free felt like it had some value. The next thing, which is, you know, just coming out of pure marketing and from some work that I had done previous in a company prior was I felt that we started packaging them in boxes and tins and things like that. It was my absolute belief it was my absolutely belief that you could not send someone a package in the mail and I don't mean an envelope I mean

a package that you could feel and not open it part of direct marketing and the big part of it is getting people to open getting people to open your package your mail

I felt that it was constitutionally impossible for someone to get a small box in the mail and not be inspired to open it. We also were able to track how many times we mailed someone before they actually signed up. So, you know, the notion of the carpet bombing, I know it felt that way and I giggle about it and everyone makes a joke about it. But I could tell you at that point, I could tell you exactly. precisely how much it cost me to get you as a subscriber after I sent you, you know, that,

that particular disc. So there was a huge, there was a huge amount of data crunching and data analysis. I mean, I sort of laugh now when people talk about, you know, everything on the internet being data driven now. Well, everything on the internet when I was there was data-driven. It was just the explosion in the market in terms of AOL's popularity and, you know, the adoption of home computing. And, you know, we're certainly riding, riding and pushing the curve on that, that made it so, made it such that all of those just were wildly profitable for demand. I didn't mail any that were not profitable or put them in, you know, retail outlets. And if they were unprofitable, I stopped doing it. Well, let me cycle back just a bit to set this up.

And correct me if I'm wrong in any of these details here, but Prodigy Right spent a lot of money on things like television ads. Right. But you guys go in a different direction that starts. Does it start out with direct mail? had you done any direct mail before this? AOL definitely had done some direct mail before. And I think, you know, I think, you know, I was brought in, I was brought in part because of my prowess in those areas. Okay, so in Kara Swisher's book,

she sort of describes a scene where you go into Steve Case one day and you say, okay, I want to do this, but I want to do this big time. it's going to cost a lot of money. And he sort of laughs you off, but says, okay, go ahead, knock yourself out. Yeah, I mean, I'd have to say that that's literally correct, but the nuance is a little bit, is a little bit off. I mean, that literally did happen. It was actually a phone call, and the campaign was going to cost $250,000,

and that was our first campaign, and it was a lot of money for us at that time. You know, Steve teased me that it wasn't. going to work. I mean, he has, you know, something of a dry wit, but he backed me completely. You know, he backed me on that. He backed me on the next millions of dollars and the race, you know, race to go forward. He was, he was absolutely supportive of everything I did. So, I mean, that was it, it was a TZ. I'll go try it. you know, I think in a way it was like laying down the gauntlet a little bit. I don't think that, I think that he believed that, either believe that it would work or believe that there wasn't much to lose, you know, by trying.

So let's go into some of the details. You, at the very beginning, this is before CDs, so you're doing floppies. And is it true that you had to push to keep the software small enough that it could fit on one floppy? Yeah, I was crazed about that. I mean, there was a lot of struggle internally because the software is becoming more and more complicated as we got more and more complicated and offered more services. And, yeah, I wouldn't allow it to go on to two floppies because it's all about the consumer stupid. it really is. And making it easy and taking away barriers is what good marketing has to do.

And I really felt that I felt that having it on two floppies and having people have to manipulate that too much would just be a barrier. Or lose one. Right. Or lose one or not know which. I mean, you know, we're talking in some instances back in days when I did focus group research and someone took a, we're watching this and someone takes a computer mouse and is pointing it at the computer like a remote control and wondering why nothing is happening. And one person took it on, and put it on the floor and tried to use it like a sewing machine pedal. These are people

who would call into customer service and say, well, now, you and I are at Skype now, so maybe it was more forward thinking, but at the time saying, can you see me? Well, so did you target known computer users first? I couldn't get it known. Yes and no. In certain channels, I was able to target known computer users. And in other channels, I had to, in most channels, I had to infer computer users. And what is the uptake?

Like, is it good right away? does it start to lead you in directions that makes it better for you over time? Oh, I've done a lot of first campaigns and launched a lot of products. And this obviously wasn't a launch of a product, but it felt that way in a little bit in some ways. I have, this was beyond imagination in terms of this campaign. this campaign I had lists that now understand that these were

these were not just I selected the lists that I thought would be close in and the whole objective in my marketing is if you can think about the marketplace as being concentric circles with the first inner circle being people who are you know, probably in tech or administrators or programmers themselves or consultants. They already have computers. They, maybe they're on prodigy, maybe they're not.

You know, it's people that are sort of prime right there. You know, but there's no list of people like that. You have to sort of, you know, again, infer that. The next concentric circle might be people who, you know, something about them, that they have an inclination towards science. or popular mechanics or science today or scientific American or sports or, you know, you start building the concentric circles out. So when the first campaign that we did that, you know, I spent a quarter of a million

dollars on, which was a large test by direct marketing standards, or a costly one, and it cost a lot because I was doing it mostly with the disks as opposed to more conventional mail. You know, I got in as close to that court as I could infer. And so the overall response to that campaign was a staggering over 10% uptake. And remember, these are people who are, this isn't people saying, I think I want this. These are people who are taking the disc, putting it into the computer, signing up and giving us a credit card. So there's a big distance there. This is not a, even though it was a free trial, they still had to give us the credit cards.

So there was a lot of resistance, you know, that they had to, or a lot of doors they had to walk through to do that. The top list on that I have never seen in my life before or since was a 20% response. Well, even 10% for any kind of advertising or marketing campaign is insane. It was stratospheric. I mean, when I saw that, honestly, it was better than sex. I mean, it was stratospheric. You know, the problem then, the problem then, though, as happy as I was at that point,

is that that was in a fairly confined market. And my goal, you know, throughout my career there was to put, those boundaries. Remember, I'm in that little circle in the center of those concentric circles, is to push those, to bring up mass market and to push those boundaries out, which we had to do, you know, we did little by little. So, yeah, it was an, it was an amazing thing, but what it really said was, yes, there was a market there, and, you know, we chose the list brilliantly. it didn't really say that much about mass market well you know this will be jumping ahead a bit in terms in terms of time but so going after the mass market i mean you guys were insanely creative i mean

you know getting to the era when when there are CDs at blockbuster at banks and cereal boxes and things like that um like how how are you guys coming up with with these new channels is it just like we'll try anything if we can get in front of a larger mass market. Before I do that, let me tell you about how Blackbuster was the first one. And Blackbuster to me was really an inflection point. And it was the first one where I said, oh my God, we're really mass market. We're going to be mass market. To me, it was an enormous turning point.

And it's worth, if I can in technology. in exactly how that happened. Sure. We talked a little bit about how crazy the time was and how it was all work, no plague. And so Friday night, for me, one Friday night, many Friday nights would look very much like leave work at whatever time, drive down to Boston chicken,

and almost go grocery shopping because I don't have time, a desire to cook. So I get chicken and enough for like, the weekend and vegetables and so forth. And across the street was Blockbuster. And I'd go and I'd pick up eight movies at a time. I mean, weekends for me were like watching movies and working. And they had a sample box there.

If you took three movies, you could get one of these boxes free. And in the box were things like product samplings, like, you know, maybe a discount coupon on future Blockbuster movies. or membership, little thing of sample of popcorn, little samples of candies, you know, sort of theater-related kinds of things. So I walk up to the front desk with my eight movies because I don't know what mood I'm going to be in on Sunday, and I'm not coming out of my house until then. And I look at the person at the register and I said, I've got eight movies, I'm taking two

of these boxes. So I took both boxes with me home. Monday morning, I brought them into a very talented, very aggressive, wonderful marketer, Margaret Mooney, who was my first vice president of marketing, and handed her the box and said, I want you to get us a disc in here. And she did. And the response to that was about, that first one was about 3%. Now, we talked about percentages a little bit earlier. And in terms of direct marketing, direct mail, we talked about 10%, 20%. You know, the percentages really depend on the product and the offer, but sort of a rule of thumb is, you know, you don't often see responses to mail higher than 1%, on average. in terms of a box like that, like you take one box, usually, you know, you're happy to see something, and again, depends on the offer and the economics, usually you're happy to see something that may be a 0.3% response, maybe a 0.5% response. So we're at 10x, and I'm like, wow. And that was really what started. It was the blockbuster box that put me off to the races and us to the races. And I started a new, channel that I called, I made up the name of it, and I just called it alternative media or

alternate media, it was for like everything else that we couldn't fit into the category. And so that, you know, that was, that, that was really, and then it was, and then it was, we will try anything. I had, I strategically, a lot of companies will separate out a test budget. or research and testing budget in their marketing budgets. And I don't do that and I never did that. And the reason I never do that and didn't do that is because it's too easy to hack away at it. And I think that testing is absolutely vital.

From my earliest days in my career, it was all about testing. It's so quantifiable. it would be it would be idiocy not to be testing all the time. But by not segregating a test budget, the people that worked for me always had money to test. It basically got incorporated into the economics, you know, of the acquisition. So if it was, you know, if the acquisition cost was, I'd just pick a number because it was anywhere, you know, depending on the chance.

channel. If it was $20 and maybe, you know, maybe their budget was allowing for $23. And I didn't care how they got to that 23. Just using that as an example, whether they got to it by cutting costs or cutting testing, that was up to the channel. That was up to the channel manager. And they had to compete with each other for budgeting, for budget dollars. That makes me wonder, for these channels and these partners, are you offering bounties? Is there a rev share in terms of, you know, we'll give you a certain percentage of someone that signs up? In the earliest days, in the earliest days, I really was against a revenue share because I knew it would work against us. And so I held out until we couldn't hold out any longer. and that was until later in the game, when we had, and it was started most of the computer manufacturers

like the compacts and the dills and the gateways who were started, they started to see the magic of recurring revenue and were insisting on getting piece of the action. In the earlier days, I didn't do that because I didn't have to. You know, I did it, I did it. at the point that I couldn't not do it anymore. So in the early days, let's take the Blockbuster box. We paid them, probably paid them a flat fake for being in that box.

For let's take, you know, Barnes & Noble as an example, which was we had them take one boxes and counters and Barnes & Noble's nationally. We were paying them a bounty, and that bounty was negotiated every year. And one of the changes that I made, probably because I was greedy, was when I got there, because some of this was already going on, bounties, particularly for subscribers we got, we call them packed in to or bundled with the computers. We were giving people bounties for that, and I changed them all to be bounties on conversion, meaning we were giving people bounties for someone taking the trial.

And I switched that for a lot of them where I could to bounties once the person had made one payment or two payments, whatever we were able to negotiate. But in the later days and the later stages, we were forced into giving people a peace in the action. What was, actually this is a two-part, what was the most unusual channel you tried? And what would have been the most unusual channel you tried that, to your surprise, was successful? Well, I have to go back to, I have to go back to Blockbuster because that put me into the, in terms of, I had no idea that was really a lark. It was really a lark.

You know, I was standing there and I looked around at the people in Blockbuster on Friday night, and they looked like a lot of them had kids, and it was cheap entertainment. And we knew that one of the cohorts that was important for us in the early days was a presence of children in the home. people were buying computers, frankly, I think, I sort of think in the beginning, it was a lot of guys were buying computers and able to justify the expense because they had kids. And they said, well, this will be good for the kids and for school and for homework. But actually, it was the father that wanted to tinkle with the computer. I think that's exactly right. Yeah.

And so I'm looking in blockbuster and I'm saying, well, okay, there's a lot of guys in here. and I know that a lot of them had kids. So that really was seminal. That really was seminal. But we had so many that was so interesting. One of them was we packaged floppies into packages of Omaha steaks. So that sounds interesting all by itself, but what we had to do was flash freeze.

the flopping, thawed out, because it had to travel with flesh frozen meat. We had to thawed out and see if it still work. And it did. It survived, wow. Survived. It survived. We, you know, taking a trip into, you know, I'm talking about my own personal experiences,

but I had a department of people doing this stuff. So the ones, of course, that I remember the most are probably the ones that I stumbled on. but I had wonderful, amazing, brilliant, talented staff. And so I don't mean to keep being I, I, I, I, I. But these are the things that are embedded in my memory, was taking commuter flight into New York City and seeing people, this is, I guess, back at a time they still served food. And there'd be like a breakfast tray with coffee and a donut or something.

And I look around and I say, oh, these are all business people. And so we cut a deal with, I think it was American Airlines and United to actually have the flight attendants put a disc on each of the trays or wherever the trays got packaged up on commuter lines. So that was another one. and that did that did really well. It's another one that just sticks out in my mind. We went to NASCAR races. We put discs on seats at the Super Bowl. I'm trying to think, I mean, I can't, I'm sure there's some that didn't work along the way.

There's a famous Quora thread that by the time you get to the era of AOLs on a CD, that at some point, you know, you've 50% or something crazy like that of all the CDs and production had AOL logos on them because at this point, you're everywhere. That's absolutely correct. This was an impossible question to answer, but like, do you have any kind of ballpark idea over the course of years how much money was spent on this level of marketing? clearly it's in the hundreds of millions. Did it maybe reach billions or anything like that?

Yeah, I'm sure. Well, if you're asking the question in terms of total marketing spend, it was definitely in billions. Someone had asked the question, and I actually went back and tried to talk to, you know, I'm still good friends with so many people I work with, tried to sort of come up with some number for what we would have spent on discs, but, or CDs. you know, in total. And the fact is, is that, you know, no one had, I asked a couple of people, you know,

I had a department's CFO and they had a person that was in charge of production. And no one had the volume and what we were paying at the time. So I couldn't come up with the number for what it cost in discs. But in terms of marketing spend, it was definitely in billions. And so cycling back a bit, I mean, this is, this is really the thing that helps AOL get traction, these campaigns to first leapfrog to the head of the online services pack. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like when, okay, clearly we're out ahead now. We're looking at Prodigy and CompiServe starting to be in our

rearview mirror. Right. Someone once asked me, What kept me up at night? No, typical question. You know, someone in a leadership position. And I say, wake up every morning worried that I'm going to see prodigy or comp you serve using the discs the way that we're using them. That I'm going to see it stuck onto the front of a magazine or that I'm going to see it in the mail. And the thing that was really interesting about that point, and one of the reasons, you know, I gave very few interviews. In fact, it's noted somewhere that I really wouldn't talk to the press at that point.

And the reason I wouldn't is, but I would never have talked to them the way I'm talking to you about it now, because I felt like I was sitting there, you know, with the secret sauce and that everyone was going to want to know what were the responses, what were the costs? and I wasn't going to tell them. So I didn't think I'd make for a good story. But Ted Leonesis was once on a panel with someone from CompuServe. And the guy from CompuServe, and I don't remember who it was at the time, said to Ted, you guys are crazy. And that person running marketing has got to be a nutcase for the amount of money

that you're spending on these discs. And Ted comes back and reports to me, reports this to me. And I said, next time someone says that agree that I'm a dumb broad and that you've been trying to get me fired from the company for a long time and you haven't been able to figure out why you haven't been able to do that. And the reason for that really is they weren't, I couldn't believe that they weren't trying it. And it was because they were making a really common, frightfully common mistake about not understanding the economics of the business. In any business, I think people become very focused on costs. I will always say to you that you can't grow a company by cutting costs. but there's always two sides of the equation.

Okay, so if we go back even to that first campaign or not even to that first campaign, if I'm spending, you know, five times as much on the marketing, but I'm getting 15 times the response and then factor in how much money I'm getting. getting lifetime value. You know, people were just not looking at the response piece of the equation. They were looking at, oh, my God, it's costing her a buck 50 for each one of these packages as opposed to, you know, an average direct mail package, which might have been 30 cents. They're not looking at the true ROI that you can see.

That's exactly. That's exactly correct. And it was amazing. It was amazing to me. And it was one of the reasons I never talked to anyone. And even internally, I didn't, you know, I talked to people. I had a lot of friends. But in terms of the numbers and so forth, I just didn't want people talking about it

because I felt that it was such a rookie error, you know, on their part, you know, to not be looking at it from that viewpoint that it was astonishing to me. And I didn't want to give anyone any little breadcrumbs or clues to that. And eventually I did see, and I thought it would be the day that I probably have a coronary. Eventually, I did see something that was done. I think it was by prodigy. They finally did something with the disc, and I was like, okay, now we're really off to the races. And it didn't work for them.

And I think that it was too little, too late. and I think there was also, in addition to brilliant marketing, which, and I go back and say, I had a brilliant team, they made me look good. It was also, it was the product positioning. Our service was called America Online. Microsoft service was called Microsoft Network. You know, it really showed the different. difference in the focus of the companies, in my view. Microsoft about Microsoft and AOL about

customers and more outward. And, you know, CompuServe was just sort of a geeky name. In a similar vein, how about the simplified pricing compared to competitors? There was a lot of debate about that, I think, inside the company? Yeah, there was. But if we go back, we go back even before. Before that, when you talk about simplified pricing, I will never forget the day. We knew that Prodigy, and this is before we were unlimited, we knew the day that Prodigy was going to be changing their pricing. And at that point, we had simple pricing. It was a certain amount of, I don't remember what it was at the time, you know, $2.95 an hour or something, 1995 plus $2.95 or $9.95 plus $2.95.

I, you know, it was relatively straightforward pricing, albeit not unlimited. And Prodigy, you know, was at that time, was still our, you know, main nemesis. And I was waiting for the pricing to come out and was sitting in the marketing department. And I got called into the vice president of marketing, a guy named Marshall Rands. And he says, look at this. and I look at the pricing they put out, and it was a series of choices, arcane, you know, and I did, it was, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was complicated. It was, you know, if you use it during the day, or you can have a medium level, you can have this many hours for this bundled price, and, and I just looked at it, and I just looked at Marshall, and I said, thank you, there's a God out there, you know, that they have. had made such a big tactical error in making things so complicated. And again, not understanding

that customers one step simple and easy. So there was, you know, that where I felt that we dodged, that we significantly dodged a bullet. Because wasn't it, at some point, it's, what is it, $9.95 a month, and then whatever it is hourly? Right. It's just simple. It was, hours was really simple. And what Prodigy did at that time was they made three or four different levels of pricing. And I really, I was like screaming in the halls of the marketing department. I was so excited because it was tough. I mean, they could have come in and undercut us significantly. We weren't, you know, profitable at that point.

Again, this is, you know, the earlier, you know, pre-unlimited days. And we were just starting to turn profitable. Well, shifting just a bit again, you know, so you guys are able to leap to the head of the pack and put Prodigy and Copyserve in your rear view. but at around this time when you're finally, you know, getting the traction you've always wanted, the competitor on the horizon is Microsoft. And I think, I mean, maybe it got credit at the time, but AOL doesn't get enough credit for the fact that they really were one of the few that stared down Microsoft in an area and came out completely beat them.

Yeah, it was an amazing thing. I remember, you talk about another one of your podcast, the meetings that took place where I wasn't at this meeting. So I just know this from hearsay, but the hearsay was from a very high source. And, you know, this was a meeting in which, you know, Gates basically, Bill Gates basically said, you know, I can buy you or bury you. I don't know if those was his exact words, but that was the concept. that I got out of it. And, you know, I remember Steve and I having lunch shortly after that. And I, and it wasn't long after I had come to the company.

So I was really not so interested in anyone purchasing us. I was loving the company. And, you know, I just looked at Steve and I said, well, what are we going to do? And he says, I'm not selling. You know, we're in it. You know, he had a vision. He had a vision for this company that was way bigger in terms of its impact on the world and in terms of its impact on the culture than where we were at that point. And he was not going to give that up.

The deal that we did was we did an exclusive deal with Microsoft for them to be the exclusive browser on AOL. and that was in exchange, that was going to be an exchange for us having very prominent distribution on, in the operating system. So it's curious to me, right, because you want to get, you want to get the icon on the desktop of Windows 95, right? It's curious to me that Gates, it's almost like he was so obsessed with Netscape as a threat at that point that, you know, he, he kneecaps. MSN, and that sort of allows you guys the opening to slide past them again, because he, for whatever reason, thought that Netscape was more of a threat than you guys were. I think that was part of it, but I also think that he had the Department of Justice breathing

down his neck on, I was the Department of Justice on the anti-competitive, anti-competitive, monopoly stuff that was going on. So there was like a lot of there was a lot of pressure. I think there was a lot of pressure on them in that direction. And I also think, and I don't have, you know, the best insight into this, but I also think that Microsoft was, you know, at the time, fairly arrogant and felt that there wasn't anything that they couldn't lead or overcome. You know, it was, you know, it was a really good deal for them.

and it was a fabulous deal for us. But there was a lot of consternation about it internally. There was a lot of discussion internally about choosing Netscape or choosing Microsoft. Well, but AOL has the advantage then of writing the adoption of Windows 95 because now that you're on the desktop, Windows 95 is really when the computer does penetrate the home and you guys get to be the favorite way that people get online for the first. first time. Right. And I remember, and I believe, and I now was scratching my memory, but I believe that the, I probably shouldn't say this because I can't remember exactly, but I believe that the subscribers that we got from them were either free or very low cost. And we were getting

600,000 subscribers a year from that source. I mean, it was huge. Yeah, that's a sweetheart deal. It was a sweetheart deal, but it wasn't one that, you know, it's sweetheart because of how it turned out. Right. You know, but we could have been really, it could have backfired. Right. You're dancing with the devil, you never really know.

Right. Right. And also, you know, again, from a consumer viewpoint, there was an area that was starting to, rumble a little bit, even back then, of, you know, we were becoming not the anti-brand. You know what I mean? We were the underdog. A lot of people liked us because we were the underdog. You know, some of our earliest adopters and most loyal, fiercest adopters came out of Apple and Mac. And that was what, you know, that was their culture too. I mean, as a group of, I'm not talking about the company now, but the conclusion.

consumers back then were a little bit anti-establishment, a little bit, you know, wanting to be in the know and so forth. And they were starting to hear rumblings about, you know, AOL was starting to become a little bit mass market. You know, the Netscape really had the cachet for that group for the early adopters. for the really met savvy people, an edgier brand. So there really was discussion, a lot of discussion about it. But it definitely worked out in spades. And that led to, let's talk briefly about, you know, some of the growing pains, especially moving towards the flat pricing, unlimited pricing.

Is it true that at various times the technical people would come to you and kind of say, hey, maybe ease off the gas a little bit. We can't handle all these new members that you're bringing in? Well, we, in our first offices in Vienna, Virginia, we had taken over offices that were owned by some high security firm. I don't remember who it was. And they had this big safe, I mean, huge safe, like a room, like a room, like a small room. And I was up there visiting some of the people, and that was on the technology

floor, I was up there visiting some of the people in technology. And some of the early, early people, they sort of lured me into the room and I didn't know what it was and locked me in there and said, now stop it. All in, all in, all in, all in, just. But yeah, but I had, I had, and still do. I mean, we're just out hiking last. week. I had an amazing relationship with one of the top geeks, Matt Korn, who really was responsible, and under him Geraldine McDonald, also brilliant, responsible for doing what no man or woman had done before, was building out this network. And, you know, Matt and I were really joined at the hip. and probably

probably the best geek slash you know marketing relationship probably on the face of the earth because traditionally these two groups of people that don't exactly communicate that well with each other and you know we

I remember sitting in his office and he'd be drawing diagrams and like I had he was my eyes were glazing over but I I felt like I had to sit there while he would draw a diagram on the white board or the white wall that was explaining to me in terms I could never understand how we were going to get past 13,000 simultaneous users. And I felt like I owed it to him to sit there and be his audience as he sat and thought of it out loud kind of thing. I had no clue what he was talking about. but yes

I mean people would come and tell me to you know take my foot off the gas and I didn't in that context the decision to go to unlimited

usage of you know unlimited per month right pricing man that's balsy because you know it could I know that the thinking eventually was, well, we need to get mass adoption and then we can start making our money as a, you know, we can charge people to put their content on us and we can do e-commerce, we can do all these other

things. But still, I mean, you're risking, breaking the whole enterprise and kind of almost did. Was there a huge debate about moving towards unlimited usage? Huge debate would be such an incredible understatement. And I'd have to say in the early days, this is where I give Steve like just enormous, enormous credit for his vision and understanding. He was on the right side of this, and that was to absolutely go unlimited. And I was not initially. I had data. I had projections of how much money we would lose.

because the company is growing rapidly and, you know, we're paying, you know, we're charging people for subscriptions. It's not like, it's not like, you know, we're trying to make it all on advertising at this point. And to just turn around and say, okay, let's just, you know, cut that off and, you know, and reduce it and so forth, we had so many people that were paying us, you know, $50, $60, $70. So for a long time, you know, Steve and I had a lot of discussions about it and there was the data and so forth. And he brought me over to his side, you know. He brought me over to his side. But I have to say that it's a decision that was very, very, very tough for the.

company and it took its toll, you know, all over the company because it was so controversial and had such a huge impact, not only on the finances, but it was like jumping off a cliff. I had hoped that, and we did it right before our major campaigns, and we were doing mailings and campaigns all, you know, every month of the year, but the biggest sweet spot for us was in was in the holiday time frame. And so it was my hope that we would sort of shore ourselves up by letting those campaigns go out at the regular pricing and then switching after we had the people on. But there was a huge amount of pressure coming from the field and from competition.

And competition then becoming more of the unbranded ISPs. that, you know, we just sort of held hands and pulled the trigger. Well, this is a bit of a leading question, but so in that post-Christmas period when, you know, people are struggling to get online and there's all the bad press about America on hold, what is the feeling inside the company? Is it panic? Is it, if we just get enough time, we can get through this? I think it's if we just have enough time we can get through this. But it would be hard to say that there was no panic. I mean, No one wants to disappoint customers that much.

And, you know, that's really, you know, that's really what was happening. So, no, we weren't happy about it. I don't think we really anticipated, I know that we really didn't anticipate the extent of, we knew that it was going to be a problem, but we didn't anticipate really the extent of it. Well, it definitely worked out for you in the end. We also didn't have a self-awareness, you know, in a way because it's hard to describe this. We're growing, you know, we're not insular or insulated, but we don't really have a internalized grip on how important we were to people's daily lives. So what we didn't calibrate was the velocity or the ferociousness of the response.

So we underestimated because you couldn't estimate what going unlimited would do with that large number of people. Well, and in a way, ironically, it almost proves how big you had gotten because people were so desperate to use the service. It's like, okay, this proves that we're huge. It was crazy and it was really enlightening and it really, you know, again, a little bit difficult to describe, but it was like, oh my God, people love us. They really love us. Or at that point, they love, hated us. Right, right. Well, in the interest of not taking up too much of your time, let's, you know, let's stipulate that, you know, after that period, you know, AOL is really, you know,

dominant almost, you know, in the late 90s and the dot-com era, you know, AOL is, you know, the prime player in terms of whatever this new online space is going to be. I have to imagine that, you know, that era was, had to be incredibly personally satisfying when you're starting to reach, you know, 20 million subscribers and things like that. Yeah, and for me, I really, I really, I call it. coined the phrase, you know, I bleed AOL blue. I bleed, you know, my blood is blue. And that was our company color. For me, it was what we were doing to the culture. It was, I remember, you know, saying, you know, no one can hide anymore. There can't be another Tiananmen Square for those,

you know, listening to might remember that, where, you know, a whole country is blocked out. and has no news and no way of finding out that the whole world is watching. You know, I would give talks and I'd have a grandmother. I will never forget this, you know, come up to me and this happened, you know, more than once, and say, you know, my kids, my kids, grown kids moved to another state. I was in Pennsylvania at the time. They moved to where Ohio. And I thought that I would never just have the relationship with my grandkids that I would,

if they were, you know, around, they'd never see them, never talk to them. And she said, you know, AOL, I talked to these kids. I talked to them after school. We're instant messaging. We're emailing. She said, I have more contact with them now than when they lived next door or they lived in the same town. And, you know, or I talked to online because I had many personas online. And I was probably one of the executives who used the service the most.

post. And I was everywhere on the service. I was in every kind of chat room, you know, at one point or another just poking around. And I befriended some guy who told me at some point, and he didn't know I worked for AOL. It was in some funky name. And he said that he thought AOL saved his life. And I said, well, what do you mean by that? He said, well, he was a police officer and he was wounded in the line of duty. And he had very serious injuries and he was really bedridden. He was really confined a lot of the times to his home. And he said in the beginning, you know, friends would come and other, you know, of his coworkers would come. And he said, but his life had become very circumscribed and didn't have a lot of company. And that AOL was like a lifeline for him. To talking to women online who said, you know, I'm bored, I'm home all day with the kids and they're taking a nap and I need some adult companionship and that's some adult conversation. So to the, you know, gay kid and, you know, back then in Kansas City, who thinks he's probably the only gay person in Kansas and having a way to connect communities and people together

from all over the country. To me, the community aspect of AOL and how it has become, you know, to this day, part of people's culture how you keep in touch with people to me was the the most important thing and um that was the most gratifying the fact that at 11 o'clock at night my adorable niece um would be iMing me and saying you know she's in denver and i'm in virginia and she's saying uh i hate my family And I'm like, oh, what's up? Oh, my mother won't let me do this or that or something else. And she says, well, can I run away to your place?

And I said, of course, if you need to run away, come to my place. And, you know, it's just sort of adolescent angst and so forth. But I was able to be there in a way that she wouldn't have picked up a phone. You know, we were sitting there and I-Ming. And that was happening millions of times over all across the world. And to me, that was the most important thing to me. You mentioned AIM, Instant Messenger. I haven't gotten to this chronologically in the podcast, but just briefly, I mean, how important do you think the ICQ acquisition and eventually AIM was to AOL in the later 90s going into the 2000s?

I think it was huge. I think unfortunately with ICQ, as with many acquisitions, we were so focused on the motherload of AOL that I think that I think that, I think that, integrating companies that we purchased or partnered that we purchased was not our strong suit so I think that

everyone sort of felt underutilized and possibly either under or overmanaged but in terms of the incident messaging I really think that it was the foundation of how we're all communicating

with each other now it is you know it's it's the predecessor towards to texting. Facebook, Facebook now, you know, has, it's growing in popularity, you know, its own form of instant messaging, as does, you know, as does Apple. Well, and that's my, I think that's what my thesis will be is that it, that was almost, aim was almost training people for social media. It has status updates. It has a social network of your, your buddy list, you know.

That's exactly right. And so, things like Snapchat even, like all that stuff, that instant, you know, messaging and texting and stuff like that. That's all AOL is training people or AIM is training people for that. Well, I looked at Snapchat. I looked at the purchase of Snapchat and I said, oh, it's like what we did, we did ICQ. And in the instance of ICQ, they were the largest internationally. Our footprint was huge, not exclusively, but almost exclusively in, you know, in the United States or at least in the northern hemisphere. And, you know, ICQ was, you know,

humongous internationally. And briefly, just some thoughts on the merger and its legacy. Do you remember when you first started to hear rumblings that possibly, you know, AOL and Time Warner were going to get together? Oh, yeah. It was the weekend before the announcement. And what was the feeling at AOL? I say that in Jess.

There were no rumblings. Okay, right, I got you. This deal went down, basically, and the senior executives were on a phone call. I think the night before it was going to be announced, it was very, very closely held. And what were the feelings inside AOL about this? I'll speak for myself. Sure, absolutely. I came out of publishing, and I came out of publishing, so I was very familiar with Time Inc.

And in fact, a lot of the early mentors that I discussed, you know, art timing people, they were fabulous training grounds in publishing. I was familiar with Time Warner. I really felt personally that it was brilliant conceptually and, again, enormous vision that we had the way, they had amazing content. And let's not forget, they had, you know, the cable company, and it was at a time where we were struggling to cut any kind of reasonable deal on broadband. You know, people will say to me, why didn't you guys do broadband back then?

And I sort of smacked my head, and I said, we never thought of that. You know, we were struggling because these companies saw, you know, especially the phone company analogs saw that we had turned them into dumb pipes, you know, essentially with a well, and they weren't going to let that happen again. And we just couldn't out. The deals that we were able to cut were just crazy and expensive and unaffordable. And it was horrible. So the notion of getting a cable company was brilliant.

And the content that came with Time Warner, you know, was amazing. And AOL had had a long history of content partnerships with Time Inc, yeah. Actually, actually, I was part of the first one, the first one that we did with Time Ink, which is sort of an interesting early story that talks about how we changed. Time Inc. had all the content. and I had most of the, a lot of the way we were able to get content onto the service was through my budget. So the only people who really had substantial, especially in the beginning, substantial budgets were me in marketing and the technology group for building out the network. And everyone else had to sort of just figure out how to get money.

And I don't mean that, you know, so literally. but that's where the big pockets of money want. And what we would do with content providers was we would charge them for being on the service, but let them earn it back in marketing bounties. So, but timing came to us and they wanted, you know, they wanted, you know, some kind of payments. And the person who was in charge of, you know, cutting the details, you know, cutting the deal called me up.

And this was at a time where we didn't have any major, in my view, any major consumer brands on the service. We had an encyclopedia. I don't remember, I think it was World Book or might have been Britannica at the time. And we had a lot of the PC magazines and the Mac magazines, the computer-oriented stuff. But we didn't have really a lot in the big brand consumer. And I remember saying to this, John,

Jonathan Bulkley, don't come home without timing. In other words, I'm willing to pay whatever it takes to get timing so I can put it into my advertising and help broaden us as a consumer platform as a consumer brand. Two years later, AOO has grown. We're now, again, in a bidding war for Timing, and Jonathan comes back with me. comes back to me again, the same thing. And, you know, they want two million bucks. Are you willing to pay that much?

And I said, come home. I said, let CompuServe a prodigy have them. And that's just during that period of time, how we had become much more of a consumer brand, it was at that inflection point. But getting back to the original question in terms of how did I feel about it, I knew the culture.

And it's a very, very different culture. they became very successful at a very decentralized kind of organization where everyone was on sink or swim. They didn't use the word synergy. Probably the most often used word in their vocabulary was, we can't do this because it's not politic or political. The AOL environment was so completely different. It was all about, it was all about working. together was all about the mother load. I would sit there in a room with a person who was in charge of what essentially would be

ad sales or interactive marketing and the person's in charge of business development, you know, Maya Burlow and David Colburn and me in marketing, and we'd look at a big deal and we would figure out what was best for the company in terms of how that deal got expressed or how we structured the deal, you know, was it better for us to, you know, complicated deals, you can have the outcomes be, you know, go in many different directions. Was it better for marketing or was it to give marketing the P&L? Was it better to give it some interactive marketing? And we'd sit there and have that discussion.

And it was a discussion, it was not a fight. It was what was going to be better for the company? If you sat in a meeting and someone was being really obtuse, you know, I might say something like, oh, didn't they give you stock options when you join the company? You know, we were really at the senior levels, and there was a lot of craziness that went on below that, but at the senior levels, we were really very focused on, you know, on working together. That was a very different, very different culture than, you know, these brilliant and fabulously successful brands. that Time Warner had that were operating mostly in silos. So it was a humongous clash of centralized versus, you know, decentralized.

So maybe it's just ultimately a case of the culture just made integration ultimately impossible, maybe? You know, I think so, and I think that, you know, I'll speak for myself. And I know if you talk to the, there were other things that went on. I mean, at the point of time of the merger, we also had, you know, the dot-com bust. And what had happened also on the Time Warner's side is that all of a sudden they had these AOL options and their pensions and so forth. And this is just me speaking tonight. You know, all of a sudden they're looking at their pensions and stock options and so forth that aren't worth what they were. what they were.

And this is coincident, almost coincident, with their merging with us. And so I think that there was a great feeling that if they just had stayed Time Warner, you know, their pensions would not be worth now 50% of what they were before.

So it was real. I mean, you can understand where some of the angst came from. And then, you know, we were, AOL was, you know, riding on top of the world. I'm sure we had our own form of arrogance.

you know, in terms of feeling like you're, you know, ruling the roost essentially, and they're an old line company and this upstart company comes and buys them, basically. We call it a merger, but we really purchase them. You know, so, I mean, there were a lot of, there were a lot of reasons even at the time, you know, that you could see that things were, you know, were not going to work. I mean, I couldn't get people from the cable company. I, at some point, was charged with providing free customers to the cable company. In other words, I'd be advertising, I'd be using the AWOL platform and associative products to advertise for the cable companies and hand them the subscribers free.

and that was really intended to be a demonstration of the power of what could happen working together. And there were times I couldn't get people to answer my phone call. And as you said in the beginning, and I'm not saying this to sort of took my own corn, but there was the perception that I was sort of the marketing queen of the era. And to not be able to get a phone call return from inside your company when you want to give them free subscribers. I mean, it was a little bit, you know, a little bit crazy now. I'm sure that they were very busy with other things, but, and that we did things probably on the AOL side that, you know, we had our, as I said, we had our own form of arrogance that that probably, you know,

was not respectful of, you know, the stature of the kind of company that we were being, that we were associated with. Right. Do you still have a role, uh, with AOL today? No, I know. Okay. When did you... It called, I would serve. Right.

When did you, when did you end up, when did you end up leaving? Pardon? When did you end up leaving AOL? I have to couple of, I can never remember this either. This in the early 2000s, probably 2003-ish. And then I had, I had, I left, but I had an association with the company for, you know, for a while. So I think the Association probably ended around 2004, 2005. Well, the fun thing about a lot of these interviews, especially from this era, is that, you know, a lot of this stuff is exactly 20 years ago right now.

So I know. I like to kind of end up by asking, you know, when you look back at what you were doing at that time, what you were able to achieve, you know, has the technology world, been everything that you imagined it would be? Has it become what you thought it would be more than you thought it would be? We still have room to grow. What do you think of when you look back on 20 years and stuff? Well, I think it has fulfilled a lot of, I think it's fulfilled a lot of what we thought. I think in terms of the media converging, especially, which was not so clear back then,

But in terms of, you know, I watched TV on my computer. I have like a huge, huge TV in my house. And, you know, half the time I'm watching on my computer and the other half I'm watching on my, you know, mini-ip. So in terms of the media converging, I think in terms of the ubiquity of the Internet and the access, I think that that absolutely. The place where I'm still disappointed and hopefully,

hopeful that, you know, this will change is I really like the idea of the democratization of information. I think that people having information, I'm not talking now about privacy, but I'm talking about information. People having information makes them stronger, better citizens, better consumers, better educated. And, you know, I still think in this country there is a significant digital divide. And certainly as we look to developing countries where, you know, the Internet is not available, or it's easily turned off by regimes who don't want people to have access to the news, I find that disappointing, but I think that that's, I think that the vision that I had in those

early days for me, which was that can't be a Tiananmen Square again, where it hasn't come soon enough, but I think it is coming. I just don't think that, I just don't think that government's going to be able to keep information away from its citizens. And they're not going to be able to keep the outside world out of their countries indefinitely. And so that's sort of what would drive me. Well, Jan, thank you so much for taking the time to remember all this for us. It's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

If you're enjoying this podcast, there's one simple thing that you can do to help us out. If you do nothing else, just go to iTunes. iTunes and rate us. One to five stars takes about two seconds. Or give us a review because the weird way that iTunes works is it's not just the number of downloads, it's also the number of ratings and reviews. As always, you can join the conversation at www.com.com, get more info, see pictures, and see my full bibliography for each episode. The show's Twitter is at NetHistryPod, and my personal Twitter is at Brian MCC. Thanks for listening.