Transcription

• Speaker #0

  2024, there was just over $700 billion spent on digital marketing. It's the first year that digital marketing exceeded traditional marketing. And based on our very conservative estimate, $140 billion was stolen from marketers. I did have a client who had a competitor committing fraud to him to a set of 15,000 a day. What? This is a $140 billion theft. That's huge.

• Speaker #1

  Can you actually get any of this money back?

• Speaker #0

  If we take that audience right now, you get an audience coming in 25% of that, but we remove that audience that's bad,

• Speaker #1

  exclude them so that your budget goes a little and your ROAS goes up. If I'm a seller, how do I even identify if I'm getting ad quid fraud? I don't think a lot of people realize the extent of this problem. And if you're running a lot of ads, this is major, major money.

• Speaker #2

  Your watch on marketing misfits. Norm Farrar and Kevin King.

• Speaker #1

  Back in the saddle again with my buddy Norm Farrar. How you doing, man?

• Speaker #3

  Good, good. And it's close to cigar time.

• Speaker #1

  It's close to, the closer to cigar time, you get your hands ready. It's like when I eat dog ice cream. It's like... You have a funny mannerism that I've noticed just hanging out with you and traveling with you and being around. Whenever something is, you're looking forward to something, you know how a dog comes up and it kind of wags its tail? The dog just wags his tail. It's happy. It's waiting for the treat. You know, maybe you got in your hand and you're walking and it's following you. Well, when you walk into it, whether it's an ice cream store or it's about to be cigars or something, you get to do that. But you have another thing is you have under your breath. You're like, it's almost like a release. It's like, all right now. OK, it's like you're about to open the door to go into the cigar lounge. All right. OK, I made it. it's like oh it's got a lot of things and i'm like it's it's kind of funny it's a little i pick up on little tiny mannerisms of people and that's one of your actually kind of sounds creepy i just naturally do it it doesn't matter uh and it's everybody but you know speaking of mannerisms and stuff uh there's a lot of uh you know you and i both have done a lot of advertising online and do you realize now in the world of ai how much is going on that's not actually real. And even, you know, I don't know if you've ever done this, but this just came to mind. Sometimes when I'm on Amazon and I'm searching for my competition, Googling or looking for my competition, see what they're doing, type in the keyword, up comes all the results. And I don't scroll down to the organic listings. I click on their freaking ad. You know what? I do that too. I do it on purpose. I'm going to click him. charge you a buck just to actually look at your thing or 20 has it yeah or whatever it's 20 of a supplement um but you know that's that can add up to a lot of money and if a lot of people i'm not saying people are doing that but just there's a lot of things going on out there that um just you know there's a lot of money being wasted and i think the the big companies are like yeah it's not our not really our problem it's kind of set their attitude yeah it happens and we'll look into it. So our guest today, that's basically what... I mean, he's been an ingenueur forever, but he's actually big into actually helping recover some of this money and to help prevent this. So this is going to be a little bit different kind of talk, but it's going to be, I think, pretty fascinating. We're going to probably all learn some stuff that we didn't realize was happening and some things that we can do.

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, and it's a huge problem, so I can't wait to bring on Rich. So let's bring on Mr. Rich Kahn. Hey,

• Speaker #0

  everybody.

• Speaker #3

  Hey, how's it going? All good.

• Speaker #1

  So. $100 billion in ad fraud? Is that what I heard you or read somewhere that you said?

• Speaker #0

  $140 billion.

• Speaker #1

  $140 billion. No, sorry. I said it wrong. $140 billion. That's per year. Well,

• Speaker #0

  this was 2024 because the 2025 numbers haven't come out yet. Then 2024, there was just over $700 billion spent on digital marketing. It's the first year that digital marketing exceeded traditional marketing. And based on our very conservative estimate, $140 billion was stolen. It was almost 25. It was like 22%, 25% was stolen from marketers online.

• Speaker #1

  I mean, because I know Amazon is like $68 billion in ad revenue. You look at Facebook is like $200 and something. Google is up like $400 billion or something. I don't have these numbers right. And like Walmart.com is only like at $6 billion right now or something. They're trailing behind. So you add all those up and that's what you're saying gets to the $700 billion number.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, when you add up all the channels, you got programmatic, you got affiliate marketing. When you add up all the channels of digital marketing, that will sum north of $700 billion according to the stats that we read.

• Speaker #1

  And 20% of that basically is fraudulent. 20% to 25% is fraudulent.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  And by fraudulent, is that people like me that's just clicking on my competitor's ad? Or is that bots? Or is that them saying that was a click when it wasn't a click or attribution issues? So what is fraudulent? When you say fraudulent, that immediately thinks someone's trying to steal from me. That's what makes me think.

• Speaker #0

  And when we talk about fraudulent, yeah, we're talking about someone trying to steal from you. And it's usually through bots. malware or human fraud farms. So it's not the, you know, an occasional competitor, you know, there's something called competitor fraud. We don't look at that because it's a real person coming along. They click on somebody's ad. Okay. They charge them a dollar. It's not like the end of the world, you know, and if a couple of people did it a day, it's not the end of the world. However, I did have a client who had competitor committing fraud to him to the extent of 15,000 a day. What? What he did. And it was actually. did some research and I found the actual software this guy was using. There's a piece of software you can buy for a couple hundred bucks called the Ed Clicker Bot. And you can tie it into a proxy network so you can bounce off of different IPs. And the way the software worked is you typed in a couple of search terms and then you typed in a domain name that you wanted to target. So if I'm advertising on car insurance, I just always use that as a generic one. And let's say my competitor is isellcarinsurance.com. And I am on there and I have some other domain name. I don't want the software to attack my domain, so I want it to attack my competitor. So he typed in the search terms and then he typed in the domain name and he said, click on it until it's gone. And it would basically, since the guy was spending $15,000 a day, as soon as his ad started showing, as soon as the time targeting kicked in, he started showing his ad, this plot would kick into gear, start clicking on all those ads and basically. deplete his budget. So now the competitor can show above him and take his position. Meanwhile, he's got, you know, and I'm very, very rarely ever see Google over like 15 to 20% fraud. If you're just doing Google search, if you add in the display network, okay, now you're closer to 50% fraud, but this was over almost a hundred percent fraud. And I'm like, I've never, and I said, his only way of defending it at the time before he came to us was he would have another site. you know, duplicate site built on a new domain name that was ready to go. He had the campaign built. So as soon as he started seeing fraud, which for him, he wouldn't know about it for days. So then he would have to, he would go in, swap out the domain name, swap out the campaign and all of a sudden be fine. So what we did was we did a couple of things. One, we're able to identify the devices that were being used. So we can put blocks on those devices. But we also had a real time filter. As soon as we started seeing fraud, we would send him a text message to say, you're being attacked right now. So he wouldn't have to wait a week or whatever it took him normally to find it. He would know about it in real time. He'd be able to swap out the campaigns in real time and be back online, would not skip a beat.

• Speaker #1

  Norm, you and I know a guy that if someone crosses his path, he's done things like to mess up your Facebook pixel. So it's not clicking on it so much as he'll go and he'll run some ads in like Brazil, really cheap ads or something for like some sexual toy or something using a spoof of your pixel. to ruin your pixel and all your pixel data, and it ruins your entire account. You know, that's not click fraud, but that's another way of just, you know, taking someone down. So how do you know when something is happening? You said you notified this guy, Rich, you know, in and out of the days to find out. How do you know? Is it just patterns or AI analyzing this? Or how do you know that something's going on?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so what we're doing is we're analyzing the visitor that clicked on the ad, right? When the visitor comes into the site, lands on the site. We analyze over 800 data points on that user's environment. How do they connect to the website, right? So real people have a certain way of connecting. You're on a device, you're on a browser, you have your basic tools. Frontiers have a very different way because they're trying to hide themselves, right? They'll bounce off of residential proxies. They'll bounce off of different proxy servers. They'll spoof their device. They'll do all kinds of stuff to try to hide themselves. You know, because Let's face it, going back to this example, I just said the story I just told you. If this competitor hit that ad with the same IP address, same user agent, right? Same device and all that stuff. Well, it's going to be obvious and Google will probably catch it and shut it down. Not a big deal. So they have to bounce off of different IP addresses. They have to spoof their device so it looks like different devices so it looks more organic. And when they do that, that's what our software is really good at picking up on. And once we identify it, then we can do something with it.

• Speaker #3

  So before your app came out, there was nothing. No,

• Speaker #0

  no. Well, go back in history a little bit. I had an ad network, which just for the audience's sake, if they're not sure what that is, think of Google, but really small, right? We had a small company in 20 years at about a hundred million in sales. So not really small, but compared to Google, everything else is small, right?

• Speaker #1

  When you say ad network, just explain that. That's where you're on other people's websites. It could be banners or it could be something you're just on a network of websites that has a code that actually shows the ads that you sell to people, right?

• Speaker #0

  Right. And we had access to over 100,000 different websites at the time that we did this. And they were all like good blog sites, like just people just talking about stuff in more detail. So like you go to Google, you do a search for, let's go back to car insurance. Well, you go to Google for car insurance. Those first two or three ads, you know, are paid ads. And then the organic stuff hits. So if they're doing research, they would go down to the organic ones. There'd be blog sites. And that's, those were our clients. Those were our sources of traffic, you'd click on it, go to your site. And we'd have some type of ad up there, whether it was graphical or text-based. And that was the ad network. And in the very beginning, we launched it in 2003. About 2004, late 2004, we started having some issues with traffic quality. People were saying, hey, the traffic quality isn't what it was. Something's going on. So I did some research and realized right away there was fraud. And I remember telling my partner, look, I don't want to be the guy solving fraud. I literally just want to buy a solution, bolt it on, and be done. Well, in 2004, 2005 era, there weren't any fraud solutions like us out in the marketplace. In fact, the first commercially available one didn't come out until like 2008, 2009. So I'm a developer. So I figured the only way to save the company is to write software that's going to solve this problem. And I did. Took me a couple of days. I wrote some software, worked great. And then it didn't. Then I had to keep evolving the software to keep up with the trends. And that was... 21 years ago we started that project. So we didn't really launch it as a standalone product until 2017. We had 2014, 15, we had clients asking, hey, can I license that software for other networks? Like I'm buying from Google, I'm buying from Facebook, whatever. So one guy came to me and he's like, I'm getting organic traffic and it's got fraud. I'm like, I've never seen this. I got to see this for myself. So we figured out a way to shoehorn our software onto a site and just do a proof of concept. And sure enough, he had 30% of fraud coming from organic traffic. We were able to identify and eliminate it, and it solved the problems that he was having. So we said, this has some legs to it. Let's run some tests. Let's compare it against other market players and see if we bring something special to the table, which we did. So we built an interface, separated the company, and then launched a new company. And actually, tomorrow's our nine-year anniversary. April 1st of 2017 was our launch date. And so to this day, there's probably about 100 companies out in the marketplace that do something like what we do. But if you're all familiar with the IAB, it's the Internet Advertising Bureau. They kind of set the standards for pretty much anything digitally related in the market. So about 10, 12 years ago, they came out with industry standards for a fraud detection company. If you're going to be a fraud detection company, here's a list of standards, that bare minimum standards that you need to follow. And then there's a couple of companies out there that will certify you're actually following those standards.

• Speaker #3

  Right now, there's only six of us that are actually following those standards.

• Speaker #1

  Hey, Norm, do you know any sellers out there that are just burned out doing this e-com game?

• Speaker #3

  You know, I know a lot of people that have talked to us, you know, when we go to events. And it's not only that, they don't know where to start.

• Speaker #1

  And who would you recommend they talk to?

• Speaker #3

  The first one that comes to mind is Quietlight Brokerage. And here's why. They're going to build you up. They're going to understand your company. And at the end of the day. you're going to know how to maximize your valuation. So the very first thing you need to do is go and get your free confidential valuation at QuietLight.com. They're going to ask a couple of questions. You're going to meet up. It's one-on-one with somebody over there. And then, you know, let the games begin.

• Speaker #1

  Awesome. What was that website again?

• Speaker #3

  It's QuietLight.com.

• Speaker #1

  Awesome. I'm going to head over there.

• Speaker #3

  So if I'm a seller, how do I even identify if I'm getting ad click fraud?

• Speaker #0

  Well, there'll be some... Okay, so here's how it kind of works. If you have less than 5%, you're not going to know, right? But 5% could be a significant amount of money. You just... It's hard to identify if it's 5%. Once it breaches 10%, There's something going on. You can start to feel it. The data tells you if you're following the money, looking at chargebacks, or if you're doing lead generation, you can see the leads aren't, you're calling the leads, they're not answering. And curious where you got their information. Once you break 15 or 20%, the sky's falling. You know there's a problem. And that's usually when people call us. It's like, something's going on. I'm losing clients. You got to help me. What's going on? So the easiest way for you to know is we offer a free traffic quality audit. So we'll audit your traffic for free and identify how much fraud you have. And then based on that, we'll know where you're getting your traffic. and we'll come up with a game plan of how to use... in order to solve that problem. And at that point you can run the math and make sure the finance, financial, you know, system makes sense. And at that point you're set, but you know, you can come around and traffic quality audit and have no fraud and you'd be the first. But, but if you have no fraud, then you wouldn't need us. Right. And we're, I'm a developer. I'm here to solve a problem. I'm not going to sell a product to someone I can't solve a problem for, but everybody we test has fraud.

• Speaker #3

  How long does it take to see or notice a difference?

• Speaker #0

  Well, it depends on where you're buying traffic and how you're doing it. So like, in other words, when we first do our traffic quality audit, the first thing we want to do is identify how much fraud you have and where it's coming from. And we do it over a two-week window. So we have a significant amount of data, you know, two weeks of data is half your month. That's, you know, statistically significant enough for us to get an ID. We'll know it from click one. Like as soon as the first couple of clicks come in, we'll know exactly what your fraud level is. But of course you want enough data to really... get a good pattern on it. So that usually takes, you know, basically a week to two weeks to get all that data in and have an analysis on that. Once someone says, Hey, I've got 25% fraud, like the average client you work with, what can we do? So it depends where they're buying their traffic. So a lot of people are spending money on search and social, right? So we have a product called search and social protect where its goal is to cut the fraud in half in the first 90 days. So give you an idea of how that works. It doesn't matter if they've got 50% fraud, if they got 10% fraud. The general goal for that software is cut the fraud in half in about 90 days. And sometimes you do it a little faster, sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but that's generally the gist of it. Now, if you were buying affiliate-based traffic, a lot of people do a lot of affiliate marketing. Well, we can stop all that in real time and just literally shut the fraud off instantly because we no longer have to pay out for fraudulent visitors. Well, you can't dictate that to Google. They're too, like I said, it was a 400 billion, some crazy number. They're too big of an entity to allow third parties to dictate how they build their clients. So what we do is with Google, Facebook, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, all those guys, what we do is practice the art of avoidance. We identify where the fraud is coming from, and then we basically hide your ads from those people, from those devices.

• Speaker #3

  When's the perfect time to reach you? So what dollar level should you be looking at? When does it make sense? Where's the sweet spot?

• Speaker #0

  It's a good question. We generally, like if we're doing our targeting and more marketing, generally anyone spending $50,000 or more a month has a high ROI because you do the math on it, right? $50,000 a month and spend 25% fraud. That's $12,500 a month in fraud. We charge a fraction of that and it makes sense.

• Speaker #1

  We've taken- What if I want my airline points though?

• Speaker #0

  So yeah, so essentially- Ultimately, like I said, what you want to do is look at the different levels of fraud that's coming in, identify where it makes sense. We've had people, I've had clients that come in at the lowest I probably remember is about 10,000 a month, where it was kind of a break-even proposition for them based on the amount of fraud that we found for them. But they were a growing company like most companies, and they wanted to solve the problem today so that they can grow without having to have the issue of dealing with fraud.

• Speaker #3

  So question for Kevin. So, Kevin, you do a lot more Facebook ads than I do. Would this be something you should be looking into? Yeah. Well, I'm on the smaller side. We spent $25,000 last month, I think,

• Speaker #1

  on Facebook ads. Yeah. But, yeah, it's probably something I should take a look at. But I'm curious, though, how you actually prevent it. I mean, obviously, like affiliates, you can just shut off their link or something. They could go direct, but you just shut off the link. but on, on. or you'd stop the ads but if i want to keep running the ads are you going in and creating custom audiences or filters to say don't don't show it to these types of devices or don't show it uh in these countries or something that's basically the prevention mechanism to cut it down right

• Speaker #0

  you're right there so there's there's two ways that we work with it so the first way obviously is creating an audience that you're going to exclude from all your campaigns and we're going to dump into that audience lots of that audience maybe you can do that too But ultimately what we do is we're putting the device in there and saying this device we know is fraudulent. Stop showing my ads to this device.

• Speaker #1

  You can actually pinpoint, they can pinpoint down to the device.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  I didn't realize I could do that. Okay, so you can, it's like blocking your ex or something on there.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, exactly. It comes in. We identify this as a fraudulent device. We call the Facebook pixel and says, add this to the audience. It adds that device to the audience, and then that device will no longer see your ex.

• Speaker #1

  It's an exclusion audience. Yeah. Okay. That's one.

• Speaker #0

  Step two is everybody has some type of conversion pixel on their site. fraud fraudulent activity knows that they have to trigger that conversion pixel every so often to remain part of the relevant buy so what happens is if we identify the user as fraudulent first thing we do is put it into the audience so we know it's excluded moving forward second thing we do is prevent them from firing the conversion pixel because if the conversion pixel gets fired then facebook says oh you like that traffic you want more of that traffic we prevent that that pixel from firing so it stops prevent so it stops basically Thank you. getting that type of traffic. And Facebook says, oh, that traffic wasn't good for you. Let me find the traffic that is triggering the conversion pixel that you like. So it's a two-pronged approach. We do those together. And like I said, usually under 90 days, we cut the front in half.

• Speaker #1

  So most of this is not accidental. It's intentional.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, yeah. So here's a great example. I'm a big Shark Tank fan. I love watching Shark Tank.

• Speaker #1

  I do,

• Speaker #0

  too. I'm not caught up on all the seasons, but whenever I'm at a hotel, at traveling, There's always a channel that just shows Shark Tank like 24-7. So I get on there.

• Speaker #1

  It's CNBC.

• Speaker #0

  I get on there and I watch it. And I love listening to entrepreneur stories, how they got there, how they did their thing. But I love when they're trying to sell their product and they go, you know, this is a $3 billion industry. And I'm just trying to capture a little bit more of that. Or this is a $5 billion industry. And to make that number sound so big, this is $140 billion theft. That's... huge. What we're trying to do is prevent that for our clients. So we're trying to minimize that. So again, if we take that audience right now, you get an audience coming in, 25% of that is fraud. We remove that audience that's bad, exclude them so that your budget goes to the good audience, your ROAS goes up, and that's all you care about.

• Speaker #1

  So the Facebook and those guys, they don't care about this. I mean, it's not in their best interest to actually cut this off because they're making money. If you bring it to their attention. Okay, they'll do the right, maybe do the right thing, maybe. But they're like, that's not our problem, really. So can you actually get any of this money back? So obviously I can see you preventing going forward. But what if I do an audit and like, okay, the last year, looks like, Kevin, you've spent $920,000 in fraudulent clicks. Can you then go back to Facebook and say, hey, MFers? You owe me $920,000 and here's the proof. Or how is that? Or is that even possible? How does that work?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so Facebook and Google both have ways of submitting potential attacks so they can get refunds. I read an article on Google that I may have these percentages flip flop, but I believe they believe 10% of the people, the requests that come in, that that is truly fraud. And they'll give up to about 30% of. the fraud claim back to them. And so when you really do the math, the average person is making 3%. So you can run that exercise. And again, if you're a small advertiser, you probably don't have a dedicated account manager there. If you're a bigger advertiser, you can make a lot of noise. So it's all handled through politics, I think, at that point. For us, I'm like, let's just stop it from happening. You try to deal with them and see if you can get your money back. We'll give you all the reports that you need and the proof and everything that you need. But. Let's stop it from happening from this point forward so that you stop paying for it.

• Speaker #3

  So on my Gmail, I have pretty strict filters and sometimes I miss emails. So sometimes the good emails get mixed in with the others. They get filtered out. And I kind of if they want to get a hold of me, they'll get a hold of me one way or the other. What about this? Are they going to miss the people that you're or the bots that you're stopping? Is it 100% confident that it is click fraud or are you going to miss some potential clients?

• Speaker #0

  So you brought up a good point. The average fraud solution in the marketplace based on client feedback over the last nine years of selling this product has, I have gotten detailed reports from companies that the average company in the marketplace is a 15% false positive rate, which means 15% of the time that they mark something as fraud, they're wrong. One of the things that sets us apart is we have an accuracy guarantee. We do the five nines accuracy. So it's 99.999% accurate. We mark somebody as bad, which means we could be wrong one in a hundred thousand times.

• Speaker #3

  So with that,

• Speaker #0

  and then we put a guarantee behind it because at the end of the day, we want people to feel confident because some of our competitors have told our clients, oh, that's just a gimmick. They don't really, you know, they really don't, they're not that accurate, blah, I'm like, all right, we put our money where our mouth is. Well, we're going to, because essentially if a client comes to me and says, I think you mismarked this person that's real as fraud, they'll give us why they believe it to be true. If we can, we believe in their data, then we'll take that back to our engineering team, margin. team will go back to that transaction, find out what happened. And then if there was a problem with the algorithm at the time, make a tweak so it doesn't happen again. And then we'll give them a service credit and make sure it doesn't happen again. So we really care about the quality. So my team knows that the only way you can mark something as fraud is if you feel 100% this can't be done by anything other than a fraudulent activity, then you can mark it as bad. So it was a good question, like I said, because there, I mean... I have one, one of my competitors hates me and I get along with everybody. I'm just, you know, everybody likes me where I've been around forever. You know, I started my first internet business in 93. So I've been doing this for a long time. And I generally think most people like me. I like, maybe that's how we all think about ourselves, but I think I'm a good guy. And for whatever reason, they just, I think we keep stealing their clients. And I think that's why they don't like us. So I was told by one of their ex employees, our, our, our name is a curse word in their company. So, but I've gotten multiple people come to me and said that they had over a 50% false positive with that company. So you're better off just flipping a coin.

• Speaker #3

  Wow.

• Speaker #1

  Is there certain industries that this is more rampant in? Like supplements or for products or like- No. No? No.

• Speaker #0

  Legal injure your ass. Equal opportunity theft. wherever the money is they go they go after the money and they they try to do it across the board so that they're not focusing on one industry like competitor fraud you know like the example i gave you at the beginning of this uh this podcast was um in a very specific industry it was it had to do with um believe it or not changing change of address forms um which didn't even think that was a business thought you just go down to the you know to the um Thank you. post office and you fill out a little card, you pay a buck and you're done. Well, people don't want to pay a buck. They'd rather have it done online. So they're willing to pay 40 bucks to have it done online. So we don't have to actually go to the... I mean, people are using DoorDash for their food and groceries and paying fortunes above what it would normally cost me. They just don't want to go in it. We're all lazy at this point. Punch it on your phone, let it come to you. So it's the same situation. And that was a weird industry. I've never thought that would be an industry, but it was. But yeah, so the fraud from what we've seen is across all verticals. It's not, we haven't come across a vertical. Don't get in this vertical because it's latent. We haven't seen that.

• Speaker #1

  So the people, the only person really, so there's two ways that someone that's initiating this is only, well, not two ways, but there's two people making perhaps money. It's the network like Facebook or Google that's making money off the fraud. And then they're not making the person. uh initiating this attack is not making direct money off of these clicks uh they're actually making money because they're costing you money or hoping to put you out of business or push you down in in rankings or something right no actually well let's split that up so google let's take google for example right

• Speaker #0

  so everybody knows google.com that's where you're buying traffic from what people don't realize is when you're setting your campaign up there's a little check box in your campaign settings that's hidden that's pre-checked that says partner networks include partner networks, right? And that includes 90% of their traffic that they sell comes from outside of google.com. So you might be on CNN or weather.com and their ads show up, like they got Google ads. So they've got the text ads that are showing up. So, but then there are tens of thousands of websites that you've never heard of before that I've never heard of before that basically have websites. They're called MFA made for ads. There are sites that have little blog content, then they have some text in there, and they're trying to attract legitimate people to come to the site, click on the ad so they can make money. But then there are people that drive cheap traffic, which is latent word fraud, to these sites that create the issue of fraud, and that's how it gets filtered back up through Google. So they're actually getting paid for this money.

• Speaker #1

  Is it paid for the click?

• Speaker #0

  They're getting paid on the click, yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Okay.

• Speaker #0

  So now Facebook is different, right? Facebook doesn't do that. But how many of us think Facebook have fake profiles? We all do, right? They know it. They talk about it. They're doing things to shut it down. But how is it? Why is there? Why do they have fake profiles? Well, have you ever gone to Fiverr to buy 10,000 likes for your website for like 100 bucks? It exists. And they don't do it with real profiles. They do it with fake profiles. So Google, I mean, Facebook is actively trying to shut these down because they want to keep their network clean. Right? And I believe in the big boys are doing what they're supposed to be doing. In fact, I was at a conference. I met the head of front of Google. He's got over 1,000 people working for him on fraud detection. Like they're investing money in it. The difference with Google is that they just see Google traffic. Right? A company like mine. We see access to every network. We have access to different traffic trends that they don't have access to. So we're able to pick up on stuff that they're not able to pick up on yet. So that's kind of how it works. So with Facebook, it's an indirect. They're not making money directly through Facebook, but to make it indirectly, maybe through a Fiverr or something like that.

• Speaker #1

  So is there anything that's working now that you don't think because of your efforts, it's going to, I mean, you do think it will stop working? Like if you've been able to go in there like, oh, this is a big problem. People on the secondary sites are doing this as a result of your efforts. That's basically shut them down. That has now not become a thing to do. And they've moved on to whatever the next scam is.

• Speaker #0

  We can actually see fraudsters testing our code, trying to hack our code, get around our code. We have all kinds of stuff in there for monitoring what people are doing with our code. And... It's kind of like there's an old ADT commercial that, you know, put the ADT sign in your yard because, you know, a burglar, when they see that, they don't even want to try to get around a system, just go to the next door, right? And that's kind of what we're seeing a lot with ours. When they see our name on their website, our code on their website, they know it's so hard to get around. They just go somewhere else. That's what we're hoping for. We do see that. We see them trying, hacking, trying, hacking. They can't get around it. Also, they just, they stop, they stop messing with our client. And that's kind of where we're trying to get to with our code as we grow as a company to have more and more of that protection for our clients so that, you know, when clients come to us, they come to us. 90% of our clients come to us because somebody they know in the industry said, you've got to use this company.

• Speaker #2

  Are any of these companies or these fraudsters accountable? Do they ever get arrested? Do they ever, can you pinpoint them?

• Speaker #0

  Well, yes and no. So no, because we have. privacy laws in this country that protect our privacy, right? Cookies are a problem because they're unleashing who you are. Well, you know what? We're going to now put privacy, you have to accept cookies now. So at the end of the day, people are protected through privacy laws and privacy technology, which is the same technology that protects the fraudsters. So it makes it really difficult to identify who these people are. However, one of my competitors, Um, They built their company name on finding and prosecuting these different individuals. But I was laughing because I was at a trade show last year and they were on stage speaking. So I went ahead and listened to them. They're a good company, good group of people. And they were like, they were talking up like, wow, we went in. We had, you know, Interpol come with us and we took down the server farms, shut them down. It was awesome. We stopped $5 million a year in ad fraud. And I'm like, I'm sorry, did you say 5 million? It's $140 billion borrowed with $5 million in print. It's not doing the job. So again, it's the smaller operations that don't have enough protection in place to protect themselves. But the bigger ones, you're not going to find them.

• Speaker #1

  How has AI affected this? I mean, the rise of AI, you said you've been doing this like 20 years. You went nine years ago with Lio and the tool. But, you know, when they said you take. came on the scene. AI has been around a long time, but when you came on the scene in 2022, late 2022, started changing everything and more awareness. Have you seen AI increase the amount of fraud and make it more difficult to actually fight? Or has it made it easier to fight because now you have better tools and better systems?

• Speaker #0

  Well, think of it this way. So from both sides have AI, right? So it's just another tool in our bag. They have AI, you know, to try to get around we have AI to prevent it. So it's just another tool that we have to use to help us identify fraudulent activity. But I'll give you an example. There was an AI-assisted bot that came out, I think it was beginning of Q3 or sometime in Q3 last year. And it got around everybody, including us. Nobody was safe. It was around. In fact, there is an affiliate world that took place in Bangkok in December of last year. And I had two of my, I wasn't able to go. but I had two of my staff out there and they were walking the floor and there was two companies out there selling fraudulent traffic that gets around all fraud solutions. They literally were selling it and they were proud of it. And it was funny because that same month we rolled out our update. which put an end to it and then gave us so much more data and insight that we'll be ahead of it for the next several years for sure. And of course, it's going to iterate over time. I mean, last week rolled out two more updates. I mean, there's constant updates going out, but that was a massive update. It took us three months to rebuild my teamwork day and night. Normally, we have a work-life balance philosophy here at the company where I expect everybody here We're ready to rock and roll at 8 o'clock. in the morning, kick your ass out, come five o'clock at night, you know, go spend time with the family. These guys work at night and day because they wanted to get this done. And they were just, they were upset that their code was getting beat. So they did it, took them a couple months to put it together. We rolled it out, tested it, had a few hiccups, got them fixed. And in January, did a big press release about, you know, we're the first and only company that we know of that solved this problem so far.

• Speaker #1

  Hey, Norm, you'll love this, man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50K a month. But when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me.

• Speaker #2

  Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded.

• Speaker #1

  Exactly, man. I told them, you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing COGS using FIFO.

• Speaker #2

  Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs too?

• Speaker #1

  Sure does. That way you can keep your quarter four chaos totally under control and know your numbers. Because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory, it sends review requests, and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon.

• Speaker #2

  Now that's like having a CFO in your back pocket.

• Speaker #1

  You know what? It's just $15 a month. But you got to go to sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. Sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. If you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial.

• Speaker #2

  So you want me to say go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your number straight before your accountant loses it?

• Speaker #1

  Exactly.

• Speaker #2

  All right.

• Speaker #1

  Why do you think a lot of marketers maybe accept this? Is it because they don't know about it? They don't know it's this rampant? They're not educated to how much is actually going on? Or do they like... I don't know. It just sounds too complicated to fight. It's like pop a mole. It's like, it's just, I don't know, knock one guy down, another one's going to pop back up.

• Speaker #0

  Well, I'll give you two reasons behind that. I think the older crowd of marketers are just used to it. So think of it this way.

• Speaker #1

  Just build it into their numbers.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, because back in the day, right, people would spend money on USA Today newspaper, and they would tell you, we have X number of millions of readers. And yet every time you stepped out of a hotel room, it'd be USA Today at your foot.

• Speaker #1

  The reader, yeah. I doubt it was one of those too. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  We're used to that, right? It was just accepted. Like when you do radio shows or when TiVo came out and you would zip through commercials, you were still counted as somebody watching that show. And it was just kind of the cost of doing business. So I think that mentality has affected some of the marketers today with... if there's some fraud in there, it's just acceptable. If it's 5% or 10%, I'll just deal with it. It's just part of doing business. But the ones that care about it, once they look under the hood and find out it's not 5% or 10%, it's 20%. What even if it's 10%? I was speaking to a client last week. They spent a million dollars a month in digital marketing, a decent-sized brand, and 10% of their buys were fraudulent. That's $100,000 a month. And because it's the brand, they care. Like I just updated my LinkedIn profile. It says, how much fraud are you willing to deal with? If you ask that to an ad network, as long as the client doesn't complain, nobody cares, right? Because you're paid based on spend. You ask a brand, it's zero. They're not going to deal with, they don't want to deal with any fraud at all. So how do we fix that? So you get into the stage of talking to them about solving that problem. And first off, identifying how much is coming in and then coming up with a game plan to eliminate it.

• Speaker #2

  So if there's a marketer listening right now and freaking out, the first thing they should do is check out the free audit. But next thing, what's the very first thing that marketers can do right now, this week?

• Speaker #0

  So what they can do right now, and this is for the smaller players, right? So let's say you're not at a point where you're spending enough, where it makes sense to use a company like us. I get it. You know, I was there. Multiple times, this is my fifth or sixth multimillion dollar bootstrap company that I built on the internet. So I get it. Again, when your campaign is small on Google, one of the things you can do is when you go into your campaign, dig into the settings and find partner networks and uncheck that. Stop buying from the partner networks because that's where the fraud emanates, right? You don't get a lot of fraud coming off of Google.com. A little bit. In fact, I have a client right now who is doing that. That's how they built their campaign and their Google fraud rate was like 1%. So it was like. that's something you can deal with, right? Cutting in half isn't going to make that much of a difference. But, you know, then I was looking at one of their other sources of traffic was 97% fraud.

• Speaker #3

  I mean,

• Speaker #0

  this was from a major seller of traffic. I'm not going to mention names, but it was a major seller of traffic. And I was shocked. I've never seen it that high from that network. So, again, knowing, you know, having the information at hand, knowing exactly what it is and where it's coming from, then it's an easy situation. Our recommendation is like, well, there's no saving that source. Either reset the source so we can get back down to where it normally is and then start working from there. Because whatever management you've done to this campaign has destroyed the campaign. Because again, a lot of fraudsters know where your KPIs are. And maybe it's just time on site. Maybe it's click-through ratio. Maybe it's filling out a form or something. And they'll do that. So then you're like, oh, wow, this source of traffic is converting really well for me. Let's buy more of that. And if you're not looking at the right data, you're making good decisions with bad data.

• Speaker #2

  So, Rich, you were just talking about unchecking that partner's network. What about anything else that they can do that they think they might be doing right right now?

• Speaker #0

  You really, unfortunately, anywhere else you go, you're going to be stuck with fraud. It's not every network out there. So, like I said, when you're first starting out. Google is like a go-to for, for like new companies and new marketers will start there, put your money there, but uncheck that box. But once your campaign gets so big, you're going to really need that box check to get the volume that you need to fulfill your budget. So it's a great thing for, for a new starting business is just getting started spending a couple thousand bucks a month, nothing crazy, you know, a couple hundred to a couple thousand bucks a month. Doesn't matter. You know, that's a, that's a, that's an easy fix. I used to have other fixes, but they don't work anymore. There's just no easy way. If you're going to be spending any kind of money in this market, you need to have a solution. And Anora is one of the top solutions in the marketplace. You have no choice.

• Speaker #2

  Right.

• Speaker #0

  It's back in the day, it used to be a selling advantage, right? You know, oh, I'm a network. I'm an ad network. And I have a fraud detection solution in place. Well, now it's become the standard. You need to have something. Otherwise, most markers aren't getting even considered using you.

• Speaker #1

  Are there certain countries where a lot of this comes from? Yeah. Is it like Bangladesh and India and Eastern Europe? And are there some or you don't want to?

• Speaker #0

  It's all over. We one year we did a study. Germany was the top source of fraud for one year, which I was shocked that Germany. Yeah, Germany of all places. We have a white paper on our website that a professor from University of Delaware wrote up. We in fact, I was just on with a group of students looking at our data. So what they do is we sell them a year's worth of data. Every request, everything, they start analyzing it and playing with it. And he did this report when Russia attacked Ukraine, and he read over this whole white paper on it. And what it was was four days after Russia attacked Ukraine, the amount of fraud coming from Russia almost disappeared overnight. So draw your own conclusion, but that's not what the data showed.

• Speaker #2

  No, that's crazy. And like you said, well... And for me anyways, a lot of times I'm thinking, oh, it's specific countries where it could be anywhere. Like Germany, you just blew my mind. I would never have thought Germany being one of the leaders.

• Speaker #0

  No, and that is just what our data showed. We just showed our data. I mean, I wish I could find the article, but there was a just to show you how this works, right?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  There was a gentleman. I think he was 35 years old.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  out of somewhere in the United States. So US-based company, a US-based individual, 35 years old, committed fraud and stole $40 million. And these numbers might be off, but the story is the same. Stole $40 million through ad fraud, got caught, and he ended up getting like 30 days or 60 days in local jail. with a $100,000 fine because there was no law that he broke. Because we don't have a law that says, this is ad fraud, you can't do this, and here's what it's punishable by. Again, if your moral compass doesn't point north, 60 days in a local jail and $100,000 fine to keep $40 million, there's a lot of people that would take that as an offer.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, not bad trade-off. But congratulations on that Ernst Young Award. Those are,

• Speaker #0

  that's,

• Speaker #2

  they don't hand those out to everybody.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, that was a good one. That was for this technology.

• Speaker #2

  Was it?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #2

  Oh, very good. Yeah. What year was that?

• Speaker #0

  That was 2010. So the technology was written initially in 2005 and we had taken off and we had, you know, my team said, Hey, we should apply for this. You know, the technology for the fraud detection that you're building is working amazing. We should really tout it up. So we put the whole thing together and then I won. And the funniest thing is when I went to the event, to the award event, My goal, because I said, we're really a small company at this point. We just broke 10 million in sales and it was a relatively small company. And I'm sitting around Chobani and these massive companies. And I'm like, all right, I want to find a company smaller than me at this event. I couldn't find anybody. I spoke to everybody. And I left. I said, I think we're the smallest company here.

• Speaker #2

  Wow. And I'm curious. When you got the award and it was announced, they're they're

• Speaker #0

  very they're highly perceived awards yeah did your business uh see a jump yeah yeah we got definitely got some influx of because we did a press release around it we did you know they do their press releases around it and we got you know a spike in interest i have hey i saw you won the ernst and you know tell me about the technology and then that would lead into because they knew what we did it was just they want to know more about the technology because now it was almost like validated by ernst young so we had Oh.

• Speaker #2

  Let's talk about marketing for a second. Do you do any unconventional marketing for your app?

• Speaker #0

  No, we're pretty straight-laced. We do a lot of trade shows. We do a lot of SEO, a lot of content marketing. We do a little Google Paid.

• Speaker #2

  The free audits, I guess that would work too.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  that's where we're selling. Click on all the ads of their competitors. You know, that's how they do the marketing.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I don't have time for that. That's all I need. The CEO of a foreign production company is caught doing fraud.

• Speaker #1

  You had me earlier when you said TiVo. I'm like, all right, that's a guy that's an older guy that's been around like us, Norm. When I said TiVo, I'm like, all right. Most of the audience probably is like, what the hell are you talking about?

• Speaker #2

  Is it not around anymore? No.

• Speaker #3

  No.

• Speaker #2

  Oh, I'm in Canada, so I don't know these things.

• Speaker #1

  I think the brand might still exist, but it's like Sling. Remember when you, the Slingbox. was the other one um where because i i used to be i'd travel and i want to watch like my football games my dallas cowboys or it's this before nfl sunday ticket or something and that uh the games wouldn't be on in la and so i had a sling box that you connected to your your compute to your uh cable and then i had it sitting in a closet and then it would sling that channel through the internet so i could watch it on my computer in in la it's like the technology is is crazy um you But so on, on what is something that if you had to tell brands like big advertisers are listening or not any advertisers listening to this, what are three things that they should do right now to see, to, to cut down on fraud and to see to what extent it's affecting them?

• Speaker #0

  Well, the first thing is run our traffic quality audit. You got to know, you know, that's, that's step one because, you know, you don't have a problem to solve unless you know what you're solving. So that's the first thing I recommend everybody. Like I said, we do it for free.

• Speaker #1

  And that's... That's at anura.co?

• Speaker #0

  Anura.io.

• Speaker #1

  Dot I-O. A-N-U-R-A dot I-O. Okay.

• Speaker #0

  Correct. Or .com. We own both.

• Speaker #2

  We'll have them in the show notes.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. It's there. So that's step one. If they want to learn more about it, if you go to anura.io, we've got a couple hundred blogs, white papers. We have the internet's only comprehensive guide on ad fraud. It's like 80 pages. All just teaching material. So if they want to learn more about it, we have some tips and tricks in some of those guides as well. I talk about, you know, what to look for, you know, before doing a traffic audit. What else can I do? You know, there's some tips and tricks in there as well. I mean, that's the first and foremost.

• Speaker #1

  We're a couple of those tips or tricks. Can you share a couple of those here?

• Speaker #0

  I gave you the one that I recall off the top of my head with Google and unchecking the partners. You know, if you're doing a small enough campaign, it makes sense to do that. If you start growing the campaign, you really need a solution.

• Speaker #1

  And that applies to Amazon too. Amazon has something where on the DSP networks, they actually will show some of your ads out across those. And so that's something that I've actually recommended people turn off in the past. So it's not, look, if you're selling on Amazon, you could have the same problem there.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So you mentioned DSP. So DSP is the average fraud rate of a DSP that we've tested, and we've tested dozens of them. Would you guess what the percentage is?

• Speaker #1

  It's probably super high.

• Speaker #0

  I don't even want to hear it.

• Speaker #2

  50%.

• Speaker #1

  50%. I got a question around that then, and maybe how your services could actually affect this. So back, you know, when you start typing something on Amazon, you get the autofill. you know, so you start typing, say you need a outdoor camping tent. You start, you type outdoor C A M and then it fills in the rest. And there's a bunch of choices that used to be able to affect that. But with top, what's called pop under networks, those are based on people clicking. so you could actually, there was a tool that was done by a Russian guy back in 2016. That was on one of the events that I did. One of the masterminds I did. And he's like, this will get you ranked. So we can get you ranked for your brand name. up there. So it's not just saying outdoor camping tent, but it'll actually say outdoor camping tent, your brand name, which makes it even more unique. And so when they click that, you get the extra traffic signals on Amazon. So you rank higher on that. It's this whole flywheel thing. It's all pop-unders. So they were doing pop-unders. So people didn't have the, not pop-ups, but pop-unders.

• Speaker #0

  Sure.

• Speaker #1

  You close your browsers, another browser sitting there or whatever. And that's how, and they were doing the clicks. But now... In today's world, Norm and I have a company called Dragonfish, and one of the things we do is intent-based marketing. So we have, if you're losing your hair and you want to shampoo to prevent hair loss, as soon as you type that into Google, we pretty much know about 70% of the time, especially if you click on it. It's all based on DSP networks and anonymous data that's collated together to de-anonymize it. And then we get the email, we get your email address, we get your LinkedIn address, we get all this big data that's put onto it. So we have this list and then we can take that and we could create Facebook audiences out of it. Or we can email those cold email those people. But what I'm finding, it almost correlates to exactly what you're saying. About half of those are no good. And they're giving me some what some some either in some cases, the information is outdated. You know, it's someone that filled out a survey. did one of those questions, you know, pop-up questions to answer about yourself. How smart are you? Check your IQ against everybody else, and they captured your data. Other ones are like an email address from 15 years ago, but a lot of them are like they go to a black hole. I claim the list, so we run it through, and, like, we take a bunch of stuff out. But I'm wondering if a tool like yours could actually be overlaid onto that. So if I gave you, for example, I have a list. I got a list from our source of 400. It's called 450,000 people who had been to Amazon Seller Central, which is the back end for Amazon sellers. So if you go into that site, you're probably selling some stuff on Amazon because you're logging in to check your stats and everything. I got out of that about 100,000 were missing data. So those got eliminated off the top. About 350,000 were left. And when I cleaned it, it got down to about 198,000, just knocking out spam emails and stuff. And when I started emailing them, some of those emails are great. and they're really dead on targeting, but some of them are going to like, you know, somebody's grandmother that doesn't even know that Amazon exists or something. Is there a way to actually apply your technology to that data to where you're like, we know that this email address, or we know that this IP address, or we know that this, and I can eliminate all the riffraff or not all, but a lot of the riffraff out of my data.

• Speaker #0

  We could look at, depending on what you have captured, If you have the IP address of the computer that filled out the form, we can run what's called a GIBT filter. It's a general...

• Speaker #1

  It's not the address of filling out the form. It's the address of the computer they're using to visit the site. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  that's the same thing.

• Speaker #1

  So they're not filling out a form. We're anonymously capturing them.

• Speaker #0

  Okay, so when they visit that page, if we know the IP address, we can tell you if it's a data center or a known IP address. We're not going to get the most sophisticated levels of fraud. But in generality, we can look at.

• Speaker #1

  We can probably clean our list with another layer of that on top of your service.

• Speaker #0

  We can basically cycle that through the data, come back and say, this is what we found is you don't want to be talked about.

• Speaker #1

  I bet a lot of that is exactly what we've been talking about. It's just fraudulent stuff and it's flagging as somebody that is not in. It goes back to your thinking about, you know, knowing your sources of traffic and how good is your traffic and how is that's basically traffic. So knowing how good that is or not. I'll have to reach out to you on that and see if there might be something we can do on that.

• Speaker #2

  And that was a. Shameless plug. What was the name of that company again?

• Speaker #1

  It's Dragon Bot Fish. If you go to Dragon Bot Fish, we can do that for you. And who knows, maybe with Rich's stuff, we're actually about to make it even way better than what it is already. There we go. That's cool.

• Speaker #2

  Cool. Just forming a strategic partnership on this podcast.

• Speaker #1

  Exactly. And hopefully we're about to sign up about 200 new clients on that norm. So we may really need this. And maybe we'll be able to give Rich some. Rich is like, yes, I know I need to go on this podcast for a reason. So where do you see this going? Do you see this $140 billion continuing to go to $180 to $250?

• Speaker #0

  We're already thinking.

• Speaker #1

  I think it's like you have a handle on it and it's going to kind of keep it at bay. Or what do you think?

• Speaker #0

  Smooth. the growth of the internet is happening faster than the adoption of ad fraud solutions. So we're expecting that number to be 200 billion by I think 2030, I think is our last prediction. It's continuing to grow now. The rate of growth, I believe, is slowing down because at some points it was jumping like 50%, 100%. The growth rate year over year was ridiculous. But now it's kind of slowed down a little bit more in line. Because again, if fraud got too big too fast, let's say it was 100% of the internet. Nobody's going to advertise, right?

• Speaker #1

  No. Everybody in the world is going to get that. Big boys will start paying attention when the bikes are moving wide.

• Speaker #0

  There is some number between where we are today and 100% that's going to cause havoc. I don't know what that number is, but there is a number. Maybe it's 40%. Maybe it's 50%. There's some number that's going to cause havoc on the whole system, and we'll have another 2000.com bubble burst. But the fraudsters know that. They want their gravy train to stay alive. The internet and digital marketing is growing. I think it's 10% or 15% year over year. So they can grow that rate and still not get shut down. They'll do it.

• Speaker #1

  Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, Thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

• Speaker #2

  Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

• Speaker #2

  I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another.

• Speaker #1

  Yikes.

• Speaker #2

  But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

• Speaker #4

  Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

• Speaker #0

  So if you look into the future, what are you worried about? If I look into the future, what I'm worried about most is somebody, some type of AI coming up with a way that can't be beat. It's possible. We haven't seen anything yet, but I mean, AI is really just starting to get going. That's a possibility.

• Speaker #2

  Right.

• Speaker #0

  But again, if that happens, they're going to decimate the digital marketing space and eventually it's just going to shut down the whole system and that'll be the end of it.

• Speaker #1

  And as always, there's AI, like you said earlier, there's AI fighting AI.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So I get it. We have the same tools they do.

• Speaker #1

  Stay in the step of the hat. It's basically how you do it because it's where there's a lot of money. It's like the old garbage business in New York from the Sopranos. Where there's a lot of money, there's always going to be a lot of fraud and crime.

• Speaker #2

  Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. Well, this has been very interesting. We've never talked about this, Kev. And I think there's a lot of people out there that, you know.

• Speaker #1

  It's going to be very valuable to a lot of people and open some eyes. Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  exactly. Awesome. Okay. So, Rich.

• Speaker #1

  Actually, where do they find, before Norma wraps up here, where do they, can you spell the name of the company again, how they reach out to you?

• Speaker #0

  Sure. It's Anura, A-N-U-R-A dot I-O. Nora, is that some ancient Greek word? What does that mean?

• Speaker #1

  Well, again, this is dating myself. I come from an industry where the domain names of websites were always nonsensical. Google, Yahoo, Bing. And in today's standard, it's like isalfraud.com or something like that. They all have names that kind of... And that's just not me. I'm old school, right? So when we're building this company, we try to come up with a name for it that would be something unique. And our last company, we had a mascot of a frog. So when we're building this and the software is built inside that company. So when we were building this company, my partner turned around and said, oh, what about Anora? I'm like, sounds nice. It's short. I like the name, but what does it mean? Well, in the animal kingdom, it's the classification for frogs. So it just, it was just a nice tie back to our previous company. And it's just, it's a short domain name. We actually, it took us a couple of years, but we ended up buying the.com. So we own Anora.com. And, uh. You know, funny story. I was actually in at a trade show in Vegas. Guy comes up and he's like, I'll never forget the name of this company. I go, why? He goes, the same as my wife. It's a female's name in India. And he goes, you know, and when we first started dating, I bought anora.com. I'm like, are you serious? He let it go. And it went to an engineering group who had it for 20 years before I was able to buy it.

• Speaker #2

  Oh,

• Speaker #1

  wow. And he goes, well, I'm going to check it out. He goes, I won't forget the name. I said, come to anora.com because we own the domain name also.

• Speaker #2

  That's cool.

• Speaker #0

  That's cool.

• Speaker #2

  All right. So, um, since it is the top of the hour, we always ask our misfit if they might know a misfit.

• Speaker #1

  I know a bunch of misfits, but I'll go with probably one of my, one of my, one of the ones that I, um, I'm just thinking of right now, his name is Travis Prouty. He owns a call center. Um, very successful in business. Um, an amazing guy. Um, one of my favorites and uh He owns a company called The Call Gurus.

• Speaker #2

  Very good. Well, we'll have Mary reach out to you to get that information. Sure. Rich, thanks for being on the show. Oh, we need your contact information.

• Speaker #1

  Sure. The best way to get me is through LinkedIn. That's the social network of choice for me because it's business and they keep politics off, which I like. So essentially, it's just Rich Kahn. And if you put Rich Kahn and probably a Knorr, I'll pop up. I'm all over the place. Um, that's the easiest way to get me there or rich at a Nora.io. My email is, is all my LinkedIn. It's easy to get to and, happy to talk to anybody who's got questions.

• Speaker #2

  Fantastic. All right, sir. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast today. And this was awesome.

• Speaker #0

  I appreciate it.

• Speaker #1

  I had a lot of fun.

• Speaker #0

  It's great to meet you, man. Appreciate it. You guys too.

• Speaker #2

  All right. And I bet there's going to be a lot of people. Yeah, you do it. Yeah. Okay.

• Speaker #0

  You talk over to me. You say something.

• Speaker #2

  Go ahead. I'll ignore it. Are you, we were just going to do a snare. Like I was going to say, there's going to be a lot of marketers that are out there right now going, what do I have to do? This is, this is a problem. I had no clue existed.

• Speaker #0

  I've known about it. I remember seeing something like he referenced, I think it was Facebook that said like, yeah, 10%, we know 10% of all of our clicks are fraudulent. Who cares? And that was just recent. I think it was Facebook. I remember seeing that in the last month or two. But I don't think a lot of people realize the extent of this problem. And if you're running a lot of ads, this is major, major money. And it's not just the money off your ads, but just like... apply this to some other stuff. I mean, what I said there of what we're doing with Dragonfish, if we can apply this to that to claim that out, because I know there's a bunch in there, there's probably tons of opportunities around this. So this was eye-opening and awesome. Other awesome stuff, though, is if we have something, a newsletter or something, don't we, Norm?

• Speaker #2

  Or Nspankin' New. It's only been out for, well, it's been probably about six weeks by the time this airs. Yeah. All you have to do to sign up, it's absolutely free, is just head over to misfits.news. And it's a completely different format than what I've seen in most newsletters. Very interesting. We've had a ton of people who have subscribed call us and contact us to tell us how much they like the newsletter. So check it out.

• Speaker #0

  It comes out every Wednesday at misfits.news. And we take the podcast episodes and we summarize some of that and add a little bit of additional flavor to it. But if you want to watch more podcast episodes, how do they do that, Norm?

• Speaker #2

  They can just head over to YouTube and go to Marketing Misfits Podcast. That's for the long form. And if you just want the nuggets, those three minute and under clips, then you just go to Marketing Misfits Clips. We also have a TikTok channel under Marketing Misfits.

• Speaker #0

  And you can just reach out. on All major podcast platforms as well. That's right. And we'll be back again next Tuesday with another episode of The Marketing Misfits. See you all then. See you later. See you later.