In May 2015 Verizon agreed to purchase AOL for $4.4 billion. As many analysts quickly appreciated, the real attraction of AOL was its CEO, Tim Armstrong, the first head of advertising sales at Google and the man who oversaw its transition from Madison Avenue–style advertising to AdWords' breakthrough discoveries. He was president of Google's Americas sales division when, like Sheryl Sandberg before him, Armstrong left Google for AOL in 2009 with a profound grasp of AdWords' surveillance DNA and the determination to rescue AOL's balance sheet with surveillance capitalism gene therapy.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 528