Logan: AOL Has Strategy In Sync, Time For Results(reg. req.)

Don Logan has fewer responsibilities these days at Time Warner — he’s now non-executive chairman of Time Warner Cable — but plenty to say in a recent interview with AdAge’s Nat Ives.

On breaking up: “Usually when you break something apart, it’s because they aren’t performing, the results aren’t there. But every single business in this company was up double-digits last year. If they weren’t performing, you’d look at it differently … But we don’t have that, so when you say they’d do better, that’s where the logic kind of falls down. How could they do better? I mean, what are they gonna do? ”

On AOL: “It’s on solid footing. It has a strategy that’s in sync with what’s happening in the marketplace. But I’m always a show-me kind of guy. You’ve got to put it in the bank. It’s nice to talk about growth but it’s better to put quarter after quarter, year after year of actual results in and they’ve got to demonstrate to everyone and prove that they can do that. So they still have that to do. But they have the means. They have the resources. They have the strategy. They have the plan. They have the pieces in place to do it now.”

On new media: “The more you can sell the same product, the better margins you’re going to have off of it. To me, it’s more a line extension of existing content than a whole new media form that’s going out. … Let’s take what we have, find the best of it, package it and put it in there. If over time it morphs into a different kind of business, it’s easy to staff up and to add the creative folks and begin to think of it in a different way. But the first thing is to make it successful.”

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