SM: You are then providing the ad network infrastructure to these aggregators? RF. Yes, we are a technology and services platform that allows any network operator to build and maintain their own highly targeted ad network. If we had existed back in 2004 our pitch to FM would have been that instead of spending millions
We talked about the fragmentation in the media business, with the long tail developing a stronger influence overall. Adify’s genesis is in this trend. SM: What is the significant opportunity you see in the fragmentation phenomenon? RF: First we realized that brand marketers are going to have a challenge.
SM: Let’s fit Adify into this framework. What is the value proposition, what is the business model? RF: When we started Adify, what we saw was the ad networks were trying to aggregate bulk amounts of inventory and apply targeting algorithms to that in order to sell a huge amount of direct response advertising. That
SM: Where do you see Federated Media? RF: I really like what they are doing. We don’t look at them as a competitor, but we look at them as broadly in a similar space to what we do, and they are very, very smart. For Google and Yahoo, it’s not that they don’t play in
SM: Do you think the Doubleclick acquisition brings relationships to the table which would take Google a long time to build? RF: I don’t know about that. I don’t mean this in a negative way about the acquisition. I am skeptical that there is any relationship which DoubleClick has, which Google does not already have.
SM: How do you view the DoubleClick acquisition by Google? RF: It looks like a very smart acquisition, because it looks like it helps Google get where they were going anyways, just faster, which is being in the ad serving space and really trying to compete in the display ad portion of the market. I
In this segment, Russ talks about the various players in the online ad network space. He classifies Google AdSense as a Direct Response Ad Network, while Yahoo is a bit more of a brand advertising play. SM: From your point of view, having been in the online advertising / ad network business since the beginning
I have written about Adify recently in Adify Challenges AdSense. In this series, I have a long conversation with Russ Fradin, an online advertising industry veteran, and currently the CEO of Adify, an innovator in the Online Ad Network space. Presumably, they will help a lot of media companies and upstarts build vertical ad networks,