Jan Brandt

Janice Brandt is an American businesswoman and vice chair emeritus of America Online/Time Warner and the former Chief Marketing Officer of AOL from 1993 to 2002. She is known for her direct marketing campaign at AOL that increased the number of subscribers from 200,000 to more than 22 million.

Early life and education Jan Brandt was born in Brooklyn, New York and moved to New Jersey at the age of eight. She graduated from Boston University's School of Public Communications. Following graduation, she began working as a copywriter at Xerox Education Publications in Middletown, Connecticut. She enrolled in night courses at the University of Connecticut and decided to switch careers to marketing.

AOL

Brandt was hired with the explicit goal to grow the subscriber base and was given free rein over AOL's marketing strategies. After AOL began sending complimentary discs to people who requested them, Brandt set up a direct marketing campaign to distribute AOL installation diskettes in the mail. The trial campaign cost $250,000 and had an average response of over 10% uptake, with some mailing lists pulling as high as 16-18%. At one point, 50% of the CDs produced worldwide had an AOL logo. This "carpet bombing" strategy was instrumental in moving AOL beyond Prodigy and CompuServe to dominate the online service provider market.

Brandt was named twice by Fortune Magazine as one of the "50 Most Powerful Women in American Business", in 1999 and 2000. She also received Direct Marketing Days New York's "Direct Marketer of the Year" award in 2000, She currently sits on the board of directors for Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization for providing aid to women in war-torn regions. Brandt joined the board of directors of the Vet Voice Foundation in October 2022.