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

Posted on Friday, May 18th 2007

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.

[to be continued]

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]
[Part 7]
[Part 8]
[Part 9]
[Part 10]
[Part 11]
[Part 12]
[Part 13]
[Part 14]
[Part 15]
[Part 16]