Attila Gazdag, Euro head of Disney Internet, is gone

Just a short note to say that Attila Gazdag has resigned from Disney. Gazdag had been the vice president and managing director of the Walt Disney Internet Group in Europe, and has been with the company since 2001.

A spokesperson tells me that Gazdag's last day was Friday last week and that she does not know where he is going.

And it's not exactly clear why he left, either, although the Disney Internet Group is most certainly in a state of flux right now: Disney had a rude awakening last year when it realised that many youthful surfers out there were congregating around non-Disney web sites for their Internet entertainment. The company's currently in the middle of revamping its own home page, incorporating things like user-generated content, in order to try to win those kids back.

It's a little confusing how Disney organises (or rather, how it does not organise) its digital strategy overall--there is the Walt Disney Internet Group, there is Disney Online, and there are the web properties for all the different Disney subsidiaries such as ABC and the film studios; then there are different digital products sold online as well as through physical media. Reporting lines for all of this have never been completely clear.

The company is going to report its quarterly results on Wednesday, which may shed some more light on Disney's digital story.

Perhaps therein lies some answers for why Mr Gazdag is with Disney no longer.

Anyone out there with some info please get in touch with a comment below....

Busy Disney

As connected kids hunker down to tinkering with the computers, PlayStations, Nintendos, XBoxes, mobile phones and other Internet-friendly devices that they got for Christmas this year, the granddaddy of mass-media content for children, Disney, is gearing up for a relaunch of its web site.

According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, Disney has been caught out by how other online properties offering things like chatrooms, blogs and other social networking features have stolen a march on it when it comes to capturing young audiences online. This is a huge problem for Disney, since increasingly the Internet is the medium of choice for targeting children as consumers.

Rather than trying to buy a kids-focussed version of YouTube/Myspace/Digg like Club Penguin, Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, says he is trying to tweak what Disney already has to make it more like what others already offer: it's creating a place for kids to communicate with each other, namely about Disney-related things, while partaking in different bits of Disneyana such as music, cartoons and games based on Disney characters.

One big catch however seems to be that initially the company will not allow users to post non-Disney material. As one television executive said to me recently, kids don't care where they get their content--the TV is no longer the magnet it once was. I would say that the same lack of territoriality probably also exists for media brands. Kids don't care who owns the rights to Donald Duck and Daffy Duck, but when they can't import Daffy onto their new Disney page, they might just move to another place altogether.