AOL's True Believers

Raul Mujica runs the AIM service, and he is a nonstop evangelist for the power of AIM within the enterprise. "Look at my own Buddy List," he says. On the right-hand edge of his computer monitor is a list of more than 170 people, grouped as "Web Props," "Partners," "IP," and so on. That is his business network; it is how he deals with just about everyone who is important to his job.

Two years ago, people at the old Time Warner might have regarded such a list as bizarre. Now many of them are setting up their own lists in order to cooperate with AOL executives. "As we work with the Time Warner properties," Mujica says, "we tell people there, 'AIM is the easiest way to reach us.' We answer IMs right away. It's more effective than voice mail or email. It's almost the only effective way to reach certain people."

Mujica is hard at work too, developing IM as a tool that can help AOL Time Warner do more business with customers. Currently, there are more than 140 million AIM registrations worldwide. And the very nature of the service makes it viral. Pass along a URL or a joke to a friend, and within a few hours, that message can make its way into thousands of people's lives.

For executives at the Time Warner properties, the chance to create positive word of mouth about a new movie, song, magazine, or book is too exciting to pass up. In January 2002, the company created IM tags that let Alanis Morissette fans send friends a link to a streaming-audio version of a hit song on the singer's new album, Under Rug Swept. That helped spur online listening to the song -- and nudged up sales of the CD.

Of course, even a big push from AIM can't make everything a hit. Late last year, Warner Music launched an unknown 14-year-old singer, Lindsay Pagano, and marketers thought that it would be clever to create a synthetic AIM version of the artist online. That way, her fans could "chat" with LindsayBuddy, even though they were actually interacting with a computer program.

Many teens tried chatting with the ersatz version of Pagano -- but hardly any of them bought her music. Some grumbled that the dialogue didn't sound real. (Ask, "Who's your favorite singer?" and out comes a stiff, 100-word answer that sounds as if it were culled from a press release.) Mostly, though, listeners didn't find her music compelling. Within AOL Time Warner, LindsayBuddy is spoken of as "an interesting experiment."

But Mujica isn't brooding about missteps. He is looking for new ways to turn IM into a business tool. One of his favorite examples involves A Walk to Remember, a movie starring MTV celebrity Mandy Moore that was released last year. That film is not likely to be mistaken for Citizen Kane. Critics called it a formulaic tear-jerker romance -- and those were the kinder reviews. Its big break came when AIM offered users a chance to see a trailer and pictures of Moore ahead of the official release.

That bit of guerrilla marketing helped the movie find its audience with teens who liked Moore and were willing to gamble on the film itself. Eventually, A Walk to Remember brought in more than $40 million at the box office -- a decent showing. And, as Mujica sees it, "We really made a difference."

The Mediator

Some people like orderly meetings. Marshall Cohen prefers noisy ones, with five conversations going on at once. All that commotion may sound messy, but it means that people are really getting to know each other -- and figuring out how to do some real business together.

Cohen is hosting a lot of noisy meetings these days. He's a longtime AOL veteran who now runs a marketing council that stretches across almost 20 business units. Every three weeks or so, the marketing chiefs of AOL, HBO, Time Inc., Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., and a dozen other properties all get together and talk about future projects and how to make them into bigger successes.

From the start of the merger, management wanted such cross-departmental planning to happen quickly and smoothly. But it's one thing to ask for that kind of cooperation. It's another to get it. After nearly 18 months of pushing for teamwork, Cohen is an expert on what's really involved. "It takes time to make it work," he explains. "You start with smart people, media and marketing all-stars. Everyone has their objectives and their numbers to look at. After a certain number of meetings, they finally trust one another. They see each other outside the meetings. They invite each other to screenings of new movies. And then real work can get done."

Some big projects can be planned out months in advance, such as this year's release of the next Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies. Just about every division will be involved in promoting those films. And for all of the excitement, those are low-risk projects. It's a safe bet that the movies will be big hits and draw on well-established fan bases. Clever cross-divisional marketing may push up revenue even more, but it's unlikely that any initiatives will fail badly.