Posted on Feb 5, 2009

It’s About Service

Since I got my first job at fourteen years old, never once did I think I would ever work in advertising. Yet here I am almost twenty years later doing that very thing with Fusion Ads.

Most of us think negatively when we hear the very word advertising. With Fusion, we wanted to enable content creators to earn some income in a way that doesn’t turn off the content consumer. Like The Deck and Sidebar Ads before us, we aimed to give both bloggers/publishers and their readers a positive experience.

And although I have no experience in advertising, it hasn’t taken very long to see that it’s like any other business. If you want to have some success, you have to give good service to your clients. In our case, it’s easy to see the readers as the client, but in reality it’s the advertisers themselves—after all, they are the ones putting out the money for this service1. I’ve had to amend my thinking to think of everyone involved as a client.

In the case of the advertisers, better service means helping them sell their product. Because we aim to only promote products we believe in, that makes the idea a whole lot easier to digest. And during the process, we’ve been able to develop relationships with a lot of indie developers which just increases our desire to see them succeed. As a media consumer for the past thirty some years, this goes against a lot of the feelings I’ve developed for the entire industry of advertising.

Thank God.

Readers. Bloggers. Advertisers. Developers. Each group is better off and happier when they get good service. That’s what we’re trying to do. We don’t know exactly where we’ll end up with Fusion Ads even a few years from now, but I hope this small business, in-it-for-everybody feeling doesn’t wear off.

  1. This is also a touchy subject as a lot of people are against the idea of a personal blog serving advertisements. This post is not on that subject, but my involvement with Fusion shows my opinion on that debate. At the very least, I think we all can thank Jim Coudal for leading the way in making ads on a blog a lot more tasteful. [↩]