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AOL looks to pre-empt TV advertisers

A highly scripted event is designed to showcase online initiatives as marketing vehicles.

NEW YORK - AOL stepped up its bid to capture advertising dollars normally spent on television by showcasing five new interactive programs a month before the broadcast networks announce their fall lineups.

The online company hosted more than 500 advertising executives and media planners at a "First Look" showcase Tuesday - what chief executive Randy Falco described as a "coming out party for AOL" as a major online advertising platform.

"Everything is growing online," Falco told the audience. "If you want to be where the consumers are going, you have to be with us."

The First Look event, at the corporate headquarters of AOL LLC parent Time Warner Inc., comes as AOL seeks to increase its advertising revenue to make up for rapid declines in its legacy Internet access business.

AOL announced ad-supported initiatives scheduled to launch this fall or early next year: a site where users can submit photos, video and stories for use on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and three games, including a second season of reality TV master Mark Burnett's Gold Rush. A fifth program, a game based on the upcoming Shrek the Third movie, is to launch April 26.

Burnett and talk-show host Leeza Gibbons were among the celebrities appearing on stage, while DeGeneres and film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg addressed guests via recorded video. The hourlong event was highly scripted, with contestants in a "live" demo of Gold Rush given the answers to read on a teleprompter and eight models dressed in gold appearing on cue.

The major networks typically announce their fall schedules in May as part of events called "upfronts," so named because networks use them to presell the bulk of their advertising for hit shows. Falco said he wasn't expecting similar advanced sales resulting from Tuesday's event, but the timing wasn't coincidental.

"There's no hiding that," Falco said. "We're trying to get out there in front of the traditional broadcast upfronts so we can remind people who control budgets just how important online is becoming to their marketplace."

According to research by TNS Media Intelligence, spending on online advertising, excluding keyword search ads, grew 17 percent, to $9.8-billion, last year. But that's only 6.5 percent of all advertising, and television gets nearly seven times more spending than the Internet.

Although AOL used the event to introduce programs, the company also saw it as a chance to sell advertisers on the AOL platform as a whole, including a new Web e-mail interface in the works.

[Last modified April 17, 2007, 23:35:10]