So what’s the deal with the different backgrounds?

The constantly changing images behind the logo are also intended to elicit surprise, said Ms. Wilson and Jordan Crane, creative director at Wolff Olins New York.

“It’s a mix of [...]]]> AOL has unveiled a new logo, or, rather, a series of new logos to replace the running man:

So what’s the deal with the different backgrounds?

The constantly changing images behind the logo are also intended to elicit surprise, said Ms. Wilson and Jordan Crane, creative director at Wolff Olins New York.

“It’s a mix of do-it-yourself and high production values, crazy stuff and elegant stuff,” Mr. Crane said, “simple and engaging and bizarre — all the things the Internet is.”

You know– goldfish, yarn, and jellyfish –all the things we normally associate with the Internet.

And they typography?

The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

Early response has not been favorable, including this article from Inquisitr titled “AOL Loses Serious Bet, Launches New Joke Logos.”

Try telling that to AOL chief of staff Maureen Marquess, who explains why critics don’t really matter–

Whatever AOL does or does not do, Ms. Marquess said, there will be gibes from critics, whom she called “the snarkies” after the snarky comments they invariably make.

The snarkies. There you have it.

Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive was more candid in his assessment of the company’s brand:

“There was a lot of feedback from people: should we even stick with the AOL brand?”

After studying research conducted by the Leo Burnett unit of the Publicis Groupe, which AOL hired in September; discussing the issue with employees and advertisers; and reading “a lot of e-mails from consumers,” Mr. Armstrong said, the company decided to keep the name. It is “one of the most powerful brands on the planet,” he said, albeit one that “needs updating, that needs to work on products and services” deemed more relevant to today’s Internet users.

You see these kinds of cosmetic changes from companies who have allowed their customers to drift away over time. (Consider Radio Shack’s recent transformation into “The Shack”.) While there is nothing wrong with reviving the brand image through a change of logo, such efforts (and the undue emphasis placed upon them) are signs of a company that is t00 quick to believe its own press. Unless Armstrong can completely transform AOL by breaking its association with dial-up service, these efforts are going to lead nowhere.

via Advertising – AOL Revamping Its Logo, in Hopes of Reviving the Brand – NYTimes.com.

As a rider to my earlier piece, AOL has apparently discovered another way to help its P&L: slash headcount. Roughly 2,500 people will cease working at AOL, thereby saving the once-great platform a cool $300 million per year.

Wait, what?

By my math, $300 million divided by 2,500 employees works out to around $120,000 per [...]]]>

As a rider to my earlier piece, AOL has apparently discovered another way to help its P&L: slash headcount. Roughly 2,500 people will cease working at AOL, thereby saving the once-great platform a cool $300 million per year.

Wait, what?

By my math, $300 million divided by 2,500 employees works out to around $120,000 per employee. Even with benefits, infrastructure, and equipment thrown in, that seems an awful lot per employee. AOL must be counting on permanently turning off the lights in a lot of facilities to make these numbers work… and it won’t do a thing to stem the tide that is responsible for such painful decisions in the first place:

In terms of what was once its core business — selling dial-up Internet access — AOL had the most subscribers in the third quarter of 2002, when it counted 26.7 million of them. At the end of the most recent quarter, it had 5.4 million. Through the first nine months of 2009, AOL lost 1.9 million subscribers, or more than 200,000 a month.

This business is still profitable for AOL, although it is declining rapidly.

via AOL Plans to Cut Its Work Force by One-Third – NYTimes.com.

America Online, that venerable stalwart which introduced a generation to the Internet, has not been doing well lately.

First, it completely missed the consumer shift toward all-you-can-eat Internet consumption pricing. Next came the disastrous deal with Time Warner, a deal considered by many observers to be the worst M&A event in the history of [...]]]>

America Online, that venerable stalwart which introduced a generation to the Internet, has not been doing well lately.

First, it completely missed the consumer shift toward all-you-can-eat Internet consumption pricing. Next came the disastrous deal with Time Warner, a deal considered by many observers to be the worst M&A event in the history of business. Now, AOL has to sit on the sidelines while sites like Facebook and Twitter flout their social networking prowess, which must be especially hard for AOL to bear, since it created one of the first popular, large-scale social networks to begin with.

Enough, says AOL: time to call in the ad agency.

The chance to be associated with dusting off the AOL brand and reintroducing it as a public company is one that few shops would pass up. That it called upon Leo Burnett — perceived in the ad circles as old-school and conventional — indicates that AOL, an internet company with a 25-year history, has no intentions of trying to be cool…

By the sounds of it, AOL is looking to Leo Burnett to help it tweak and refresh its image, rather than make wholesale changes. The company name is remaining intact, but in early fourth quarter, a “refreshed” AOL logo will be revealed, aimed at bringing “more energy and more life to [AOL's] visual representation,” Ms. Partoll said.

The likelihood that Leo Burnett will actually be able to shift people’s perceptions about AOL are remote, to say the least. What, exactly, is AOL going for here? A cheap-and-easy rebranding effort, a la Pizza Hut circa 1999? It will take more than a new logo for AOL to be taken seriously again in the world it helped create.

via AOL Hires An Agency To “Refresh” The Brand (TWX).