AOL's Mike Kelly: Building Emotional Connections with Advertisers

Jeff Bewkes, Chairman of the Time Warner Entertainment & Network Group, stopped by table six at Michael's last week where I was having lunch with AOL Media Networks' president Mike Kelly and commented to Kelly, "You're doing a great job!" Although Bewkes has no direct responsibility for the AOL division, which reports to Jon Miller and Don Logan, it was a nice moment of corporate acknowledgement and collegiality that was rare at the merged company until recent months

When Mike moved to AOL last year from Time Warner's corporate Global Solutions division, many observers commented primarily on his years of experience at Time Magazines, where he started out as a sales rep in Chicago for Fortune magazine and eventually moved to New York for Fortune, later joining Entertainment Weekly as its fourth employee and becoming publisher in 1996. Mike's experience and preparation for the AOL opportunity goes far deeper, however, than the entrepreneurial task of building Entertainment Weekly. Virtually from birth, Mike has been prepared for challenging, difficult and politically sensitive tasks.

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He was born into one of the great political families in Chicago, a notoriously political city where his great uncle, Edward Kelly, had been mayor from 1933 to 1947. In 1972, Mike earned his own political wings as a volunteer for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, and he continues his "modified" political activism today as Time Warner's representative to the "Professionals in Advertising Political Action Committee," which promotes first amendment rights. But Mike's political savvy may have more to do with growing up with five older sisters. "Growing up with older sisters creates a lot of emotional intelligence," Mike believes. "I learned never to pretend to understand women, but I did learn early about empathy and relationships. An ability to relate to people and the issues they're dealing with works at all levels in a large corporation."

His understanding of the power of emotional connections is serving Mike well at AOL, which has struggled to rebuild its momentum both within Time Warner and in the ad community. "Creating well-programmed environments and experiences that users become emotionally attached to is what marketers want," Mike believes. "AOL is building the best produced content on the Internet and we are empowering users to go on self-directed online journeys."

Mike's passion for the Internet did not suddenly appear when he was promoted to the AOL position. "I love the magazine business and I'd been at Time Warner most of my professional life," Mike says. (He started at the Chicago Tribune newspaper as a sales rep.) "But I knew the Internet was the next big chapter of the communications industry and I wasn't going to miss it." In 2000, Mike was locked in an important two-day Time Warner executive think tank on digital strategies and the potential uses of Road Runner. "In the midst of this meeting, I had to leave and drive to Fairfield, Connecticut to sign my son up for Little League, and then drive back. I was in a meeting discussing the future power of communications and had this personal experience that called out for better use of the Internet for the public." Within weeks, Mike had written the business plan for American Town Network, which develops websites for local communities and enables residents to be connected with essential community information. He started the company with $9 million in venture funding and today, dads and moms can sign their children up for Little League via American Town Network in 84 towns.

Mike's family connections and support are not exclusively political. When Logan invited Mike to rejoin Time Warner and head the Global Marketing team, Mike's sister Susan, who had launched and sold the Whispering Pines catalog, to take over American Town Network, keeping the company in the family. Mike's dad (who had four sisters) spent much of his career in the newspaper business, starting at the Sunday newspaper supplement This Week and, in 1972, launching Newspaper One, a promotional group that marketed the use of big city newspapers to advertisers (and was later absorbed into the Newspaper Advertising Bureau). Mike moved with his family from Chicago to New York when he was 11, and when his family returned to Chicago three years later, two of Mike's sisters stayed behind. Today the family is scattered among Chicago, New York, Connecticut and Los Angeles. They still converge each summer at "terra firma," the name Mike gives the family home in northwest Wisconsin, which has expanded to a three house compound on 100 acres, and where his mom still spends her summers. Although Mike credits his sisters for being "my good friends" as he was growing up, he gets some pleasure that of their nine children, seven are nephews and two are nieces. Mike, though, is proud of his own two daughters, 15 and 13, and admits to a special bond with his son, 10. He met his wife of 22 years, Martha, when she was a copywriter at McCann Erickson. "I knew I had met the right woman," he laughs, "when all my sisters embraced her."

As Mike reflected on the path that has brought him to a pivotal position at AOL, he recalled the interrupted Time Warner think tank four years ago. "It's a cool thing. The business plans written in 1998 to 2000 in those strategy sessions were all dependent on digital television, and the real results are now just being seen. The business as we envisioned it even then is just really getting started now. By and large, the baggage we've been dealing with has been cleared up. The content focus at AOL in areas like AOL Food and AOL Living are creating important emotional connections to subscribers that advertisers value. My job is to go to the market with passion and intelligence and to increase shareholder value. Within two years, AOL will again be the market leader in advertising revenue."

With the passion he has for his work and his family the one loss Mike feels is for his golf game and his "long, lost ten handicap." Those handicapping the future of AOL should have a conversation with Mike Kelly; they'll be confident the company's ad sales initiatives are in good hands