AOL’s Tim Armstrong Aims to Build Digital-Ad Empire at Verizon

When AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong was in Las Vegas (NV) in January for the tech industry’s big trade show, he met a parade of ad buyers in the private suites of the Aria and Cosmopolitan hotels. It was his first real chance to pitch the way AOL—fresh off its sale to Verizon Communications —planned to become a credible threat to Facebook and Google, the juggernauts of digital advertising.

“Data is the oil of the mobile economy,” the 45-year-old Armstrong said at one meeting, apparently. Imagine, he said, if a hotel chain supplied Verizon with a database of its frequent guests. That could be matched up with data on Verizon’s more than 100 million wireless customers, plus AOL’s own data, to target guests with ads for promotional offers. Later, the hotel’s sales data and the telecom giant’s customer data could be cross-referenced to see how many of those people subsequently visited the hotel. AOL won’t have that capability until later in 2016, but it reflects Armstrong’s lofty ambitions. He told the advertisers in Las Vegas that he aims to build the top mobile-media company in the world by 2020, one that reaches two billion users, up from a current 700 million, and generates $10 billion to $20 billion in revenue, said a person familiar with the meetings.