Also plans to make a lot more changes in the company's management structure

Sep 22, 2009 09:28 GMT  ·  By
AOL's Tim Armstrong plans to make a lot more changes in the company's management structure
   AOL's Tim Armstrong plans to make a lot more changes in the company's management structure

Advertising Week is underway in New York and all the big players are there. Yahoo is expected to launch a huge marketing campaign there later today but AOL also had a big presence with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong himself answering several questions regarding the company's ongoing restructuring process but also the overall outlook especially for ad market; this was an ad event after all.

In a joint interview with Paid Content and All Things D's Media Memo, Armstrong confirmed that the Internet giant was still very much in the middle of its restructuring plans and there would be a lot more changes in the coming months possibly expanding to early next year. Expect several more shuffles up top, like last week's departures, as the company comes up with a better management structure but also some possibly significant layoffs. As of right now it's unknown how deep these cuts will go but AOL has several teams re-evaluating the company's employee structure.

The Internet giant is also looking for a world class chief marketing officer to help it strengthen its brand as it plans to spend a lot more on marketing and branding than in the recent years. This is the same strategy Yahoo is using while it's undergoing a pretty similar process of refocusing on content creation and better brand image. Just like Yahoo, AOL is trying to unite the large number of new products and acquisitions it made over the years with a more coherent branding and naming scheme but also by making the different components work closer together.

Finally, Armstrong believes that the ad market is starting to recover or at least bottom out, a view shared by some other top execs at tech companies, Google's Eric Schmidt to name one, and that advertisers are starting to make plans to increase their ad budget as the economy starts picking up. Along with the renewed optimism there will also be a big shift in the way the money is spent with online advertising taking a much bigger cut but this is coming from a man running a company increasingly dependent on online advertising.