Recently I met with the co-founder of a Boston-based company called ClickFacts. They're jumping into the red-hot click-fraud space with a product that actually teaches itself how to spot ad-click patterns generated either by people or 'bots,' which are computer-generated programs that automatically do this kind of dirty work.
For the uninitiated, "click-fraud" is the practice of clicking sponsored ads on Web sites for the purpose of running down an advertiser's marketing budget. For instance, some businesses like law firms pay search engines as much as $100 per click regardless of whether or not the click generates any business. When it comes time to pay the advertising bill, these companies have no way to prove which clicks were legit vs. which were fraudulent. You can imagine the problems this causes.
Anyhow, ClickFacts is getting into a hot search market and the fraud space is starting to mature, so the founders have their work cut out for them. What's neat about this company is that the three guys running it are all just out of college. The co-founder I met with is also ClickFact's biz-dev guy, a 20 year-old PR major from Boston University named Mikhail Ledvich.
During our talk we covered a lot of ground about marketing, PR and the search market. But what surprised both of us when the discussion turned to the aspects of PR he'd been studying at BU was a complete lack of subject matter in Mikhail's PR classes devoted to analyst relations. When I gave him the 30,000-foot view of what analysts mean to the technology industry he got visibly disturbed that such an important audience would be left off of the curriculum.
Which is interesting to any firm hiring folks right out of school; we probably take it for granted that these subjects are being covered, but that may not be the reality.
Mikhail is doing a pretty good job himself of churning up publicity for ClickFacts. You can find a recent article here and a NICE national hit here
- JR
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