While talking to AOL about the Dove campaign, Tina Sharkey, SVP of network and community programming, described the “Chief Everything Officer” microsite and contest as a “network special” and said it was the first of several that would be rolling out over the course of the next year. Now that AOL is accessible to the wider Web and not just to subscribers, the company will use special content like this periodically — in a sweeps period-like approach — to drive traffic. The hope is that such content, (Sharkey mentioned the Good Morning America partnership for “America Takes it Off” as another example) will give AOL cross-media exposure for its content.
“Now we’re doing this one, and we have a whole slate of things rolling out over the year in our network specials line up,” Sharkey told me. “It’s very analagous to sweeps in television.”