Ad fraud is growing at a rapid rate and is expected to cost advertisers over $100 Billion in the next year or two. Taking this dilemma into consideration, an ad fraud solution company, Anura Solutions, LLC, was formed to improve campaign performance by accurately exposing bots, malware, and human fraud. Its vision is to solve that issue for clients in real time, with the analytics to give them the proof they need.
Let’s find out how Anura is helping businesses prevent fraudsters from accessing marketing dollars by innovating game-changing technologies, in an interview conducted between CIO Look and Rich Kahn, the CEO and Co-founder of the company.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Give us a brief overview of the Anura Solutions, its vision, and its journey since inception.
My wife, Beth Kahn, and I, were digital marketers in the early 2000’s. We were buying traffic and driving it to a series of campaigns. We started noticing the ROI was not where it should be and started combing through log files and uncovered a problem with fraud. Ihad dealt with ad fraud in the late 90’s so had an idea of where to start, but for efficiency, I decided to sign up for an ad fraud solution. To my surprise, one did not exist. So, as a developer, I wrote my own.
The first version was simple, it took a few weeks to put together and the ROI jumped! I continued to develop the solution and it became better and better. Before I realized it, it was 2010 and we had already invested over $5 Million in R&D into the solution, with still so much more to do. As time went on ad fraud solutions became a thing. By 2015, clients started asking about using our solution for their own campaigns. Later that year, we performed a year-long study in ad fraud and realized the Anura solution outperformed everything on the market.
So, in 2016 the engineering team overhauled the dashboard, did some beta testing and launched Anura’s first standalone version in 2017. Shortly after that, Anura put out a whitepaper reporting the largest fraud find in history…estimated at over $3 Billion a year in fraud in Google’s Play Store. From that point on, Anura began to grow.
Please list the popular solutions/services that make your company standout from the competition. Anura offers one product, an ad fraud solution.
What sets us apart from other solutions is our accuracy, thoroughness, and analytics.
Anura’s accuracy doesn’t rely on numerical probabilities or confidence scores that leave you guessing what to do and can lead to false positives. Anura gives you a definitive answer. If we mark the visitor as BAD, we are 100% confident it is not a real visitor. Our clients report that they cannot find false positives. We call this our “better than 5, 9’s accuracy” (99.999%).
Anura is so thorough, our clients are reporting that we find 200% – 300% more fraud than any other solution they have tested.
Analytics is the proof of fraud. Anura gives the most detailed analytical dashboard in the industry. We don’t hide behind “a black box”, we give a huge amount of data, so our clients know exactly where the fraud is coming from.
What is your opinion on the necessity for businesses to align their offerings with newer technological developments, especially when it comes to Security and Intelligence?
Businesses need to align themselves with the latest technologies in order to keep up with constant security threats that are continually being developed. Doing this, this will help them protect themselves and their clients as well as help them grow.
At Anura, we solve the cybersecurity issue of advertising fraud. We help our clients grow by accurately identifying fraud. This in turn produces better ROI for their campaigns, which leads to overall growth.
As an established business leader, what would be your advice to the budding entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the Cybersecurity industry?
For cybersecurity, ad fraud, or anything that deals with hackers and fraudsters my advice is ABL…Always Be Learning. This industry is evolving every day and new attacks are constantly being developed around the globe. If you are entering this industry, you will need to continually be learning from others, as well as your own data. The more you learn, the better you will be in this industry and the better you can serve your clients. It’s important to work closely with our competitors, at least the ones that want to share and collaborate. I would introduce yourself to a few industry leaders and strike up a relationship with them to have a sounding board about the industry. You don’t need to share secret sauce, but it’s good to have that relationship.
How do you envision on sustaining your company’s competency in a cutthroat and volatile world of business? Where do you see your company in the next five years?
Fraud is not going away, and it is growing exponentially. It is expected to be more than a $100 billion problem by 2023. Ad fraud is the largest growing form of organized crime, second to narcotics, so in five years it is going to be erupting at an enormous rate if it isn’t mitigated. With one out of every four marketing dollars being lost to fraud, businesses need to realize that fraud is here and coming directly for them. With a problem that big, there will always be competition.
Our goal to keep our competency against our competitors, and the fraudsters, is to focus on the problem…fraud. Keep our eye on the ball and make sure we continue to do it better than anyone in the market. That is not easy, but we have a plan and the will to execute it to the best of our abilities.
Over the next 5 years Anura plans to continue dominating the market with the best-in-class solution. We plan on growing our market share and helping more and more clients. Most of our clients have used other solutions before but are now raving fans of Anura. We are building our solution to become a gold standard in the industry and with enough clients using Anura, plan to start “flattening the curve” when it comes to fraud as a whole.
