Verizon Pushes AOL Past Cookies' Weakness

"This leapfrogs us," says AOL President Bob Lord of the Verizon-AOL acquisition. "There's just no question in my mind." For nearly two years now, Lord has been in charge of building AOL's advertising technology operation. He's nearly finished with his biggest project: putting together all of the company's disparate software pieces -- which do everything from buy ad space to analyze campaign performance -- into a single unified system called One. Just a few integrations remain. The technology is widely considered to be good, but like every ad-tech offering on the market (with the exception of Facebook's, maybe), it's missing a key component: the ability to reliably link user identity on mobile devices and desktop.

Cookies, which ad-tech systems rely on, are ineffective on mobile devices, making it difficult for advertisers to run coherent campaigns targeted to people using more than one device. When the Verizon deal is complete, however, Lord will be free of that problem. "We're moving from a cookie-based environment in targeting to a people-based environment of targeting," he says. Though cookies will still be used in AOL's ad-tech operation, Verizon's concrete data on 131 million mobile subscribers gives AOL the ability to move past the cookie's greatest weakness.