AOL’s Musical Chairs: Ad Head Coleman Out, Google’s Levick In

30
Apr

AOL’s Musical Chairs: Ad Head Coleman Out, Google’s Levick In

author: editor category: TechCrunch

With AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong in place, the game of musical chairs is under way. The first big departure being announced today is AOL’s head of sales Greg Coleman, who only joined in February, 2009 from Yahoo. Replacing him is Jeff Levick, who worked under Armstrong at Google as VP of Industry Development and Marketing in North America. Levick’s new title at AOL will be President, Global Advertising and Strategy, where he wlil be in charge of AOL’s ad network Platform-A.

Coleman was not Armstrong’s hire and obviously he wants his own man in such a key position. Advertising revenues were down 20 percent in the first quarter. Armstrong needs to right the AOL ship before Time Warner can spin it off, which it is planning on doing.

Meanwhile, the aftermath of Armstrong’s departure from Google continues. After Armstrong left, there was an internal power struggle at Google to see who would take his spot. When Dennis Woodside, the chief of Google sales in the UK, won that battle, one of the other contenders for the spot, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, left for Accel Partners Then just yesterday, on an unrelated note, former DoubleCklick CEO David Rosenblatt and currently head of display advertising at Google, announced that he too will be leaving. Meanwhile, the longtime chief of all global sales at Google, Omid Kordestani, is transitioning into a senior adviser role in order to make way for Nikesh Arora, currently President of International Operations, to take his spot. Arora was also an internal candidate for Armstrong’s position.

While all of these executives are running around to find a new musical chair to sit in, Armstrong is standing in the middle, watching with a smile.

(Photo credit: Flickr/makelessnoise)

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