Just last week Adify was a vertical ad network doing considerably well. This week Adify is a vertical ad network doing great. Russ Fradin, Adify CEO referred to this week’s announcement of the Cox Enterprises’ acquisition of Adify as ‘Rodney’s brainchild’. Rodney is Rodney Mayers, AVP of Interactive Media for Cox Enterprises.

Earlier today Rodney and Russ spoke to AdMarkTech about the acquisition and how Cox Enterprises came to the decision that acquiring Adify was a particularly smart decision. After looking at and speaking with the major players in the realms of online advertising networks and through a process of elimination Cox Enterprises arrived at one choice – Adify. “It’s beyond technology! Define management teams that you feel fit the culture and approach of your company, then truly Adify best fits the type of operational focus and the type of customer focus we felt most comfortable with.” Stated Rodney.

“We’re all seeing the same trends that are frequently reported. More advertisers are moving their dollars online. The question for us was how do we participate in the growth of this new industry? We had participated in every medium over the last hundred years and, outside of our Autotrader.Com asset, I was trying to figure out how. We only had a couple of choices.”

The choices consisted of either buying a major online web portal in the belief that success would be forthcoming or look into networks. “Networks were something that worked well with the Internet. Content was fragmenting and with that audiences were fragmenting. The fundamental rule of media, aggregating content and audiences with the only way of delivering relevant audiences to advertisers, was through a network.”

In the words of Russ Fradin, “there’s no change apart from having a corporation behind us with the resources to support our growth,” means that Adify has potentially just become one of the biggest vertical ad networks in the world.

At the end of 2007 there were 243 million Internet users in North America. With a population of 337 million people that’s an Internet penetration of the total population of 72%. Without a doubt, the Internet is certainly the place where American’s are spending a great deal of time and these figures are only growing.

With the acquisition of Adify by Cox Enterprises, both companies have certainly been dealt an A.C.E.