AOL's True Believers

What's more pertinent to AOL Time Warner's growth hopes -- and a lot tougher to pull off -- are the routine projects. Every month, all sorts of smaller initiatives need a marketing push. So far, marketers are still learning to make those routine projects worthwhile. But Cohen sees some encouraging progress. Last September, Turner Broadcasting executives were devastated when their plans to air a John Lennon tribute unraveled at the last moment. Their on-air date was September 12 -- but the terrorist attacks of the previous day made it suddenly futile to put such a program on the air.

"We regrouped with a lot of marketing on AOL," Cohen recalls. "The program was rescheduled for October. Turner had already used up much of its marketing budget, and it was too late to get more ad pages in magazines. But we did a lot on AOL to let people know that the program was coming. We pulled in as big an audience as it had originally hoped for."

How far should AOL Time Warner push to promote its own products online? Years ago, Time Warner officials thought that they could score big by creating a "walled garden," where their online sites became nonstop promotion vehicles for their own wares. But that didn't work out, and now executives take a warier view. In music, for example, WMG offerings may get as much as one-third of the promotional slots for music available on AOL. That's nearly triple Warner's overall share of the U.S. music market. But it still leaves most of AOL's promotion opportunities available to Sony, Bertelsmann, and other labels.

"In order for the AOL service to be successful," Cohen remarks, "it has to be very member oriented. Our members want information about movies and DVDs. If they're interested in what's on TV, we'll make a strong effort to tell them what's on the Warner Bros. network. But if we don't tell them what's on CBS and NBC as well, they won't feel well served."

The People's Champion

Belinda Hankins managed to get through the first 43 years of her life without knowing a thing about Harry Potter. But in early 2001, she got a call from Warner Bros. executives. They wanted to build a Web site to promote their forthcoming movie about the young wizard, but they weren't sure how to get Web surfers truly engaged. As long as Hankins was in charge of online-community initiatives for AOL, would she mind helping them?

The only possible answer, of course, was, "I'd be glad to." Hankins raced through a CliffsNotes summary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Then she got to the section where the new students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry sit under a "sorting hat" that assigns them to different buildings on campus. That's when she and her colleagues had their own "aha" moment.

"We should create our own sorting hat," Hankins and some colleagues decided. The Web site would ask a few questions. What type of spell would you like to cast on yourself? What pet would you bring to school? Visitors could zip through the quiz. At the end, their answers would determine whether they would be assigned to the virtuous Gryffindor house, the sinister Slytherin house, or one of the other houses.

It was a simple feature to add. But its very simplicity was what made it brilliant. When www.harrypotter.warnerbros.com was launched, the sorting hat became the site's most popular feature. The visitors lingered on the site -- and began emailing Warner Bros. about how they could buy Harry Potter gear. The movie was already destined to be a smash, but the Web site helped Warner Bros. benefit even more.

To people brought up in the big-budget, perfectionistic cultures of Time Inc. and Warner Bros., what Hankins does can seem quirky and on the fringe. But it's no accident that AOL has been so successful at connecting with its paying customers. Better than any other company except eBay, AOL understands how to create a dialogue with its users -- and, in many cases, even lets them create the product.

In order to do that properly, you have to be open-minded and nonjudgmental. A while back, one of Hankins's employees noticed that the message board for "tightwads" (yes, they really call themselves "tightwads") was full of postings about "Dumpster diving." Some thrifty folks were pulling things out of Dumpsters and chatting with one another about their finds. Rather than sneer at the habit, the AOL Community team decided to break off Dumpster diving as its own focus area, with full-time message boards and chat groups. Create such affinity groups, Hankins explains, "and all of a sudden you've got 50 friends online who need to stay connected. They aren't going to switch to MSN for their Internet service no matter what. When AOL fills a niche like that, it becomes more than email and access to the Internet. It becomes a need. And we want people to need us."