Yahoo is making a bold move in its battle against click fraud by appointing Reggie Davis, the search company's click-specialist attorney, to a vice-president level position in charge of "marketplace quality":

As vice president of marketplace quality, Davis is responsible for developing and executing a strategy aimed at driving more rapid innovation, greater transparency and faster delivery of product and service enhancements to build an even higher quality advertising network for Yahoo!'s customers. Davis will hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!'s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues. Davis and his team will also be responsible for increasing Yahoo!'s dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality related matters.  Source:  Yahoo! Press Release

According to C|Net, Davis said his new job was to "develop the highest quality (advertising) network in reality, and in perception."

I call the move "bold" for two reasons.

First, and foremost, it signals that Yahoo is pretty serious about combating click fraud and other customer service issues within its advertiser network.  At the very least, that signal should make a lot of advertisers happy.  And as any advertising-based business will tell you, happy advertisers spend more money and, thus, make for a better business.  Whether it works well or not remains to be seen.  But, as Davis pointed out, the perception of a more quality network is just as important as the reality of the situation.

But the other reason I called the move "bold" has to do with Yahoo and its business issues.  For months now we've been seeing signs that Sunnyvale was responding, albeit slowly, to the so-called "peanut butter manifesto".  The memo, which was released as a call-to-arms, suggests that Yahoo was spread too thin, had too many departments and segments, and had too many managers.  The company went through a pretty substantial restructuring shortly after the memo was released.

I'm not suggesting that the creation of a new vice president is an affront to those initiatives.  But I do have to wonder if a pre-existing department could have handled this issue.  The press release suggests that Davis will have employees spread out across a wide group of "quality teams".  Why aren't these quality teams already doing the job Davis is getting promoted to do?  Is he simply a new manager to pull them all together?  And if so, is that really necessary?

Under normal circumstances I wouldn't even ask.  But I know what happens when companies with too many bosses keep adding more… and more… and more.  Pretty soon you've got a company full of managers.

Who will be doing all the work?  (Haha… get it?)