The new AOL

I've noticed that your marketing has gone down. I haven't been getting a disk every other week.
No, what we announced back in the April-May time frame was that we would be launching this new software and that seasonally, the summer is the worst time to kick it off. So we said we would start in the late August-September time frame and really kick it off the end of September and early October. Trust me: Shortage of disks and name awareness of AOL won't be an issue come 30 days!

What marketing campaigns are in the works?
A major new advertising campaign--
60-second and multiple 30-second brand-oriented advertising that really reaches out to the 89 percent of America that's not on the Web, not online--that says, "Now it's the time. Come experience the magic and see what you can do." Secondly, you're going to see a whole new season of programming. I've long believed that AOL has the opportunity to become the fifth network, like ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, but I think AOL will be a network where we buy content from third parties like CNET. We're going to launch a new fall season. We'll be canceling shows, and bringing in new shows. What I'm most proud of is all the original new content. Every medium that develops goes through the phase of showing reruns and then taking steps to original content. I remember the days of Nickelodeon where "Nick at Nite" used to show "Gilligan's Island" and "The Donna Reed Show" or on HBO, when it just showed movies. Now they show movies with their own programming, like "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Dream On." That's what I see happening for AOL.

Who are you targeting today? Are you targeting first-time users to the Internet?
I was watching the Democratic and Republican conventions and they were talking about a "big tent." AOL is a big tent in that when you look around, we've got the gay and lesbian community represented by Planet Out and Digital Queers here; we've got Christianity Today; we've got Net Noir, the first Afrocentric programming environment; and we have literally in San Francisco alone more than 250,000 paying customers. Finally, it reaches out to really mainstream America. We believe we're at that critical mass. For example, today America Online is larger than USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and the San Francisco Examiner combined. If we were a cable company we would be in third place behind TCI and Time Warner. Last night, I'm pleased to say that more people between 9 and 10 p.m. logged onto America Online than watched "The Larry King Show." So, we've become like a cable channel to mainstream America.

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