Adzerk Team Blog

A couple months ago I was sitting in a conference room with a member of the Adzerk team. We were using one of our cell phones on speakerphone talking to an experienced marketer in the ad tech space. We were talking through ways to promote Adzerk in the industry and the topic of writing guest posts for popular industry news sites came up. What the marketer suggested was that he write a detailed post about a hot industry topic and then they put my name on it as if I wrote it. The marketer even pointed me to posts on top sites with high profile CEOs listed as the author that he had written for them.

Now what stunned me wasn’t that this happens - I think we all know that it happens form time to time. What shocked me was that this appears to be standard practice in the ad industry. I would bet that 80% or higher of the articles you read coming out of ad tech companies aren’t written by the person on the byline.

Do you really want your first interaction with a potential customer or partner to be based on deception?

I come from blogging. I started my first blog in 2003, gained a small following, and eventually couldn’t keep up with it as I got too busy with a growing family and a number of growing startups. To me writing and blogging is very important for a company - it connects a company with the community in a real and visceral way. It makes your company and the people behind it real - to post stories and posts that aren’t written by you but claim to be written by you is going against everything we have learned in the last 10 years.

Be Real. Be Authentic. Talk Directly to Your Customers.

This is something you just can’t outsource.

At Adzerk we have three different blogs. We have our team blog which is an “anything goes” blog that team members can use to talk about what we are up to, we have a product/company blog that is for official announcements, product releases, etc. Lastly we have the Run of Network blog which is our thoughts on the industry, and we also pay outside authors to write for Run of Network. There was never a question in my mind that when paying outside authors we should give them full credit for what they wrote. On all of these blogs you can be 100% sure that whoever’s name appears on the post or article wrote that post or article.

-James