Pangea Day and Platform A

Emily Riley | September 19, 2007, 10:11 PM

Avenue A, for a special charity project, released a video on YouTube for their PangeaDay event, which invites international filmmakers to submit entries that will be broadcast around the world. The video has gotten almost 300k views over the course of the last week. Within the same time period, the crying Britney Spears fan has gotten almost 8 million views. So I wonder, what does success mean in this case? 300k sounds like a lot to me, but not compared to 8 million. Should we all hope to be the next creepy crying teenager?

In other news, AOL announced their newly formed Platform A. AOL has so far done reasonably well keeping their acquisitions (Ad.com, Lightningcast, 3rd Screen Media) at arm’s length while simultaneously allowing them to cross-sell for each other. Platform A takes these companies and incorporates an ad-server (Adtech) and another network (Tacoda) - becoming a slightly ungainly collection of media and technology. (Comparisons to MSFT/aQuantive anyone?) I would like it a lot more if Adtech weren’t included and it was simply a cross-media network. I’m just not sure how AOL’s newly aggregated sales teams will be selling so much stuff, and how much they will service their giant owner vs. their 3rd party advertisers and publishers. The best scenario currently would be to simply allow the new aggregate network use AOL’s inventory and ignore Adtech. If AOL could manage more premium inventory, then package deals for brand advertisers and great behavioral targeting could up the ante.