“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 15)

Friday, May 18, 2007 | 1 comment

Check other articles in the series...

Strategy, market opportunity identification, positioning … all this good stuff apart, a successful ad network would require Adify to be able to execute in conjunction with the large media companies at many more levels of operational excellence. There, as per my own experience, so far, both Adify and Washington Post are only moderately acceptable. By and large, my customer experience has been terrible. But then, with Google also, most publishers have been having horrendous customer experience, so that also leaves lots of room for improvement and execution excellence.

SM: Part of that perspective that I bring to your table, Russ, is that I just got this Washington Post Adify code inserted. I told them a few months ago I would try it out, but I did not put in the Adify code, so I was not actually pulling ads from Adify for a while.

Now that I have inserted the code, the only ad which Washington Post pushes onto my site which is relevant is Marriott. How much Marriott can my audience consume? That is one problem.

The second problem is that the customer support was not that good. There are going to be questions. My web admin had questions about how to do the house ads and the defaults. It was hard to find the answers to those questions. I was given two names within Adify, so I called and left voicemails and nobody called back.

I then called Jeff Burkett with the Washington Post directly and told him that since he got me into this, he should fix it. You know, it still isn’t fixed, although I finally found a guy within Adify to help us through Amit Agarwal over at Digital Inspiration, who is also a publisher using Adify and WPNI.

RF: From our end, we put a lot of money into our customer service group, and management of it. Aside from the interview for a minute, I would truly appreciate it if you would send me an email with what happened there, because I really do want to look into it. That is highly embarrassing.
















This segment is part 14 in a 15 part series
Jump to part: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Comments

[…] [Part 15] [Part 14] [Part 13] [Part 12] [Part 11] [Part 10] [Part 9] [Part 8] [Part 7] [Part 6] [Part 5] [Part 4] [Part 3] [Part 2] [Part 1] […]

Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Blog Archive » Defying Google : Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 16) Monday, May 21, 2007 at 5:55 AM PT

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


Free Updates

Subscribe to feed (learn more)

Or get updates by e-mail:

Recent Comments

  • These guys suck, they sell vaporware and just fired 16 of their 19 salesreps and their VP of Sales. Then their new VP of Sales quite after 2 months.… John on Deal Radar 2008: Genius
  • Sramana, This is the Best of all the interview series I read in your blog. Really great advice for startups. Keep them coming.… kalyan on The Montana Mogul: RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte (Part 7)
  • Sramana, absolutely fantastic series. It spoke deeply to both my heart and my head. I'll be awhile reflecting, absorbing and thinking about how to apply these "… Bob Kirk on The Montana Mogul: RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte (Part 7)
  • He...its a great idea..I have all these ideas to transfer these little nuances of Bengal/Calcutta to the world. Have also got an organisation called kolkata_nos… Sudakshina on Vision India 2020: Darjeeling
  • Sramana, Interestingly, In Vasant Vihar - new delhi there is Tea - lounge called "passion cup of tea". The place is doing really well. Idea of tea based tou… karmveer rathore on Vision India 2020: Darjeeling
  • you have written on what the customers want. You will be glad to know that my organisation is investing in enterprises/entrepreneurs who would likt to scale up … Saurabh on Vision India 2020: Renaissance