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There's a truism that every corporate relocation, whatever the ostensible business reason, ends up shortening the CEO's commute. And AOL's Randy Falco has accomplished that much. By moving AOL's headquarters from Dulles, Va. to New York City, he's able to stop diverting the company jet to White Plains and go back to getting driven into Manhattan. Oh, sure, New York is a better location for an advertising-driven business. With the collapse of AOL's dial-up Internet business, Dulles's network operations are less and less important. Falco has much else to say in an internal company memo obtained by Valleywag. The full memo is printed after the jump, and I'll be back with more analysis of AOL's big changes.

Dear AOL colleague,

A little over a year ago, AOL announced its new strategic direction as a global advertising supported Web business. And with a series of announcements we're making today, we are - at last - fully embracing our new direction as a company.

When Ron and I came to AOL, we quickly realized that the advertising industry was undergoing a rapid transformation as audiences fragmented across the Web and advertisers increasingly demanded sophisticated tracking, measurement and targeting tools. To compete, we needed to build the biggest and most sophisticated advertising network — one that reached out across the entire Internet, not just AOL's piece of it. So, building on Advertising.com, which operates the largest third-party display network, we acquired TACODA, which has industry-leading behavioral targeting tools and its own third-party network. We also acquired ad-serving company ADTECH, and Third Screen Media, which gives us a platform in the mobile space.

We are now bringing all this together in a new entity called Platform A. With Platform A, we can offer state-of-the-art targeting, optimization and measurement tools across our network of third-party sites and our AOL network. These networks attract more than 90% of the domestic online audience. For advertisers, Platform A means advertising programs with more scale and better results. For publishers selling online ad inventory, Platform A means more revenue, more certainty and better transparency.

This is the next big step in our transformation to a full-fledged, consumer-driven Web business. In addition, all our products and programming groups will work closely with Platform A to make sure everything we do as a company is optimized for monetization.

Curt Viebranz will head up Platform A. Curt comes to AOL from TACODA, the behavioral targeting company AOL just acquired, where he served as CEO. He's a seasoned media executive with substantial print, TV and online experience in both the U.S. and abroad, having spent 17 years at Time Warner and Time Inc. before joining TACODA.

In this new role, Curt will be reporting to Ron. Rounding out the leadership of Platform A will be Lynda Clarizio, who will continue to head Advertising.com, and Kathy Kayse will head AOL brand solutions, which will focus on the top online brand advertisers. Both Lynda and Kathy will report to Curt.

Mike Kelly will not be part of the new organization, but will be staying on to help in the transition as he assesses other opportunities. I want to take a moment here to recognize Mike's many contributions to the success of AOL and the important part he played in our transition to an ad-supported business.

In his three years at AOL, Mike systematically rebuilt relations with major advertisers, revitalized our sales force, made critical acquisitions, and on his watch AOL's ad revenues more than doubled. He also played an important role in identifying the trend toward third-party networks, and in particular seeing the value in Advertising.com, which Mike helped AOL acquire in 2004. And he worked closely with Ron and me on the evolution of our network strategy this year and the series of acquisitions we made during this period to realize this vision. We've been lucky to have Mike as a part of our team and we wish him the very best in the next chapter of his career.

The next piece of important news is that we will be moving AOL's corporate headquarters to New York City from Dulles. We're an ad-supported business now, and New York City is the world's capital of advertising. By putting our headquarters there, we're sending a clear signal to the market that AOL intends to lead in this space.

We've leased offices at 770 Broadway, and the space is already being built out. Our plan is to have our New York operations - advertising and programming, as well as our executive offices - moved in by early next spring.

I know this change raises questions for many of you, not all of which I can answer here. Suffice it to say that for most of you, this won't affect your jobs at all. We will continue to have a significant presence in Dulles, and we will continue to have operations in Mountain View, Bangalore and our many other locations.

I'm also pleased to report that while we are making these changes at home, we continue to deliver on our aggressive global expansion plans. Today, in fact, we announced a significant new partnership with HP - the No. 1 PC maker in the world - that will pre-install localized versions of our AOL portal, toolbar and search, and set them as the default on millions of HP computers sold in more than two dozen countries.

This multi-year agreement with HP gives us a way to quickly and effectively showcase our products around the world. And by expanding our audience reach and engagement worldwide, we can extend the reach of our advertising network to monetize this global audience. This comes on the heels of our Italy portal launch, and just days before we launch another new portal in Spain.

In addition to this, we continue to make impressive strides across our programming, products and platforms. Today, for example, we unveiled our impressive new Bluestring product at TechCrunch40. All of this is generating positive buzz about AOL in the market and getting even our toughest critics to take a second look at what we're offering.

AOL has been undertaking one of the most complex transformations any major company has attempted, and we are doing it very successfully. We have a great future, and by completing our transformation, we are positioning AOL for long-term success as a global ad-supported business.

Randy