In chair news on the Titanic, comes this: Yahoo has hired Joanne Bradford from Spotrunner and formerly of roughly the same position at MSN. Bradford was at Spotrunner for less than 6 months. When the company hired her, I thought net-net it was a bad sign. The layoffs that were to come shortly after were even worse signs. I have nothing against her personally (she is even an Australian!) just that everything she has presided over has turned to pewter, while her ‘reputation’ remains gold.
Two people, her and Terry Semel, I have never been positive of. When Terry became CEO of Yahoo, for instance, he promised the company would have at least 50% of its revenue from non-advertising related revenue (including the dubious decision to count classified advertising as fees). Bradford similarly missed search, dismissing it often years ago before it was popular and then more recently and more unforgivingly she missed the boat on remnant display inventory while at MSN.
The latter doesn’t auger well for Yahoo, which owns some of the best assets around remnant display (the best an ad network can be that is).
