Wharton Journal

Issue date: 9/10/01 Section: News

Jim Bankoff makes good decisions. Despite the lure of consulting and banking, as a Wharton MBA student Bankoff decided to pursue the media industry, landing a summer internship at America Online. He returned after graduating, moving up the ladder from Director of Business Development at AOL Greenhouse, a former incubator funding content sites, up to VP of Strategy and Operations for the AOL brand. He’s also led AOL Music Programming and AOL Plus, and worked closely with Barry Schuler, CEO of AOL, on Netscape’s acquisition. Now Bankoff, President of AOL Web Properties including MapQuest, ICQ, Spinner and other AOL subsidiaries, has helped to transform the Netscape brand from former browser company into leading Internet site and media hub, making its mark in the massive web of the AOL Time Warner properties. What does this ’96 Wharton grad have to say about Netscape, AOL, recruiting, and his career? We talked about his perspective on the company and his career decisions.

Juene Ji: How are Netscape and AOL surviving the economic downturn?

Jim Bankoff: There are certain advantages that Netscape and AOL have in the downturn. We are the market leader so generally what happens, if you are an advertiser you have a discretionary ad budget, and you have to pull back on your more fringe type things. The advertising tends to consolidate around the market leader and that’s good news for AOL.

JJ: It was made public that AOL’s advertising revenue stabilized over the past year. Yahoo! however has suffered from its major clientele, dot-coms, no longer advertising with them. Was this at all the case with AOL?

JB: AOL thankfully never really got into that dilemma. Yahoo! unfortunately got stuck into a base where it’s advertising base was dot-coms. AOL has always had a blue chip appeal and now with AOL Time Warner, we had very little exposure in the scheme of things with the dot-coms. Fortune 500s make up most of our advertising base.

JJ: What is the vision for AOL and Time Warner? How will the two work in conjunction?

JB: Subscription relationships are really at the heart of this company, whether it is subscriptions to AOL or subscriptions to HBO, magazines, or cable. We have a lot of valuable consumer relationships. AOL TW fit so neatly together because we are so consumer focused. Everything we do, we do for our consumers. We also fit well together because we believe in the subscription model. Once you have the trust and confidence of a consumer and you are billing them every month, it offers a perfect opportunity to introduce them to more subscriptions in other parts of the family. It really feeds off of itself.

Continued...

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