Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
081 - Fighting online scams and Ad fraud, with Nandini Jammi (Check My Ads)
Ever wondered how to protect yourself from online scams while keeping advertisers honest? This episode is a must-listen as we welcome Nandini Jammi from Check My Ads, back on the podcast, after almost four years since her first appearance. Check My Ads is the pioneering agency fighting against fraudulent advertisers, right-wing disinformation and tackling online scams.
We promise you'll walk away with a deep understanding of how business ethics and company values can shape the future of social media marketing schemes.
Don't buy anything off Twitter/X. Pinky promise?
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Hello everybody, Alex from Life on Mars, here and in this episode we bring you Nandini Jammi, who is a familiar face to many because, if you follow me on social media, that's one of the accounts and personalities I retweet the most and I'm in awe of her work and her agency's work. Check my ads, which is a company I deeply admire because they are doing a great kickass job at dismantling and disfunding I don't know if that's even a word right-wing advertisers and people who pretend to be other brands, basically companies impersonating other companies and deceiving people and trying to rip off money from not-so-tech-savvy people, or, you know, all these other giant scammy schemes on the internet. And so in this episode we discuss how to do that from the perspective of a small agency. When they were on the podcast, when she was on the podcast a couple of years back, she was just starting this venture. This time around, she's almost 20 people in the company. This venture this time around, she's almost 20 people in the company. We talk about business ethics, we talk about principles, company values, we talk about the exposure and social media. We talk about the future of these social media and marketing schemes. And how can we avoid and how can we prevent these kind of scams.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And so, without further ado, let me introduce you to Nandini Jammi. Let's go! Nice. All right, Good morning over there. How are you doing?
Nandini Jammi:Good morning to you, alex, it is morning.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:You're making an exception for us because it's early morning in the US and it's not for us. Yeah, thank you for that.
Nandini Jammi:I don't like to talk to people before 10 am, but here we are.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't like to talk to people. I'm also making an exception, so we're even.
Nandini Jammi:Oh yeah, no, we're totally even.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:How about this podcast thing? I mean you promised to bring on the Check my Ads podcast, but it seems like it's a project that you keep postponing, and that would be a podcast I'd definitely like to check out and listen to actively, because you know you produce so much great stuff that probably you've got lots of content every week. Tell me more about that.
Nandini Jammi:Oh gosh, starting off with the hardball. Okay, well, it's true. A few years ago, we intended to start a podcast. In fact, starting a podcast was the impetus for us to start Check my Ads. But things got in the way right. Life got in the way around 10, 12 people and I have some of the smartest people that I get to call my coworkers now, and the time has never been better to get these ladies on a call. We're a lot of ladies at this company. So it's coming. We're going to be doing it. In fact, we are starting off small and easy with a LinkedIn live. We're doing our first LinkedIn live this week, in two days. No, today's Wednesday in one day. And, yeah, I think people should be excited to hear what we have to say about a lot of things that are going on in ad tech. I think people are hungry for a real, independent, honest, raw voice on the issues that we talk about, that a lot of people are thinking about, so I'm excited to get that started.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't know if we actually, to my recollection, we didn't talk about the podcast on the episode we recorded in early 2021. You started TechMads in 2020, if I'm not mistaken, I think those were the early days of the company, when we had the conversation with our friend, Josh Feldberg on this podcast, and I remember that you had some ideas hey, how do we break into this overcrowded world? Ad talk is so vast. The majority of people in this sector are marketers, Therefore, everything is so growth hack. It's not even funny. It's really hard to get into this business, right. Luckily, you had prior experience in this and, of course, you know how to do it. So that brings me to my sort of first question, which is we like small independent companies.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We often struggle to get our voices heard right, and that's something you shared in social media. Sometimes you know you share something and people might congratulate you on, or they don't believe it's really you, right, it's? Oh, I did this Like wait, you and who else right you and how many people more? And did you partner with a bigger company? How did you accomplish this alone, right? And so that's something that I particularly share with you, and by creating a podcast. Maybe that's the best way to create a voice or like a bigger channel for you. So I don't know if that's along the lines of the things that you were thinking.
Nandini Jammi:Yes, it is. In fact, there's just so much that happens in any given week that I feel like writing has always been my medium for expressing myself just personally. But there's so much more to be said and I think people need to hear our voices, so podcasting is a great way to do that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Exactly. I mean, there are so many big things that you have accomplished lately. One of the things I remember exchanging on Twitter about was that issue that, for instance, mark Cuban and Shark Tank had with some of their items being counterfeited or sold with their image illegally online. That's one of the many things you do, but it's interesting to see how a company that eats only 10 people and you probably had big clients from the get-go because of previous experiences and I will be digging deeper on that, but if I were in your position, I would be having difficulties explaining that. Oh yeah, we work for Mark Cuban and only 10 people, like he's probably have 10 people in his own house. You know doing stuff for him. So how did you usually come across this kind of deal flow and it's a recommendation, it's already branding.
Nandini Jammi:Well, so I need to just clarify that we're not a for-profit company, so we don't work for anybody. We don't have any clients.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Okay, good point.
Nandini Jammi:So Check my Ads is a nonprofit. We're the digital advertising watchdog. We are an independent organization. We don't take any money from any of the big tech companies, or just tech companies in general, because those are the folks that we are watching and whose lives we are working hard to make health. So the reason we're a nonprofit is because we we will for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is to allow us to pull in the public and to to do true public interest work that benefit everybody.
Nandini Jammi:So the way that Mark Cuban, like Mark Cuban, reaching out to us was just like an interesting and random thing. It came at an interesting time for me personally, because so here's what happened In November of this past year um, he reached out to me over dms to say that he was dealing with an issue on, particularly on google, with uh, with with essentially shark, like fake shark Tank keto gummies. So basically, these weight loss gummies all over the internet that were claiming to be affiliated with or endorsed by Shark Tank and or Mark Cuban personally. And this was a problem because Shark Tank viewers, especially older viewers, believe what they see online and were falling for the scam and essentially being roped into making monthly payments for some, you know, garbage product that doesn't work or just never comes. So he said he'd reached out to Google many times and had not made any progress with them. So he was contacting us to see if there was something that we could do. Now this actually falls outside of the purview of what Check my Ads was. Last year we were working on. Our tagline on our website was cutting disinformation off at the source. So this isn't disinformation. This is somebody having a problem with scammers. It's like a copyright issue.
Nandini Jammi:But when that issue came to me, came to my attention, I started thinking about how well I started to pay. First of all, I started to pay more attention to these small scale scams, like in the days after I received that message and one, uh one ad that I came across while I was on YouTube looking at a you know some kind of a recipe, I got an ad for a Kelly Clarkson endorsed keto gummy. So I clicked on that and it took me to a website that looked exactly like a news site, like a CBS news site, and it claimed that Kelly Clarkson had gone on, I think the Today Show, and said she lost a ton of weight because of keto gummies, and here is your link to buy them yourself and that got me thinking. It made me realize that these small-scale scams are using the same tools that anybody can use to scam people or trick people or manipulate people into believing anything, and so that kind of helped me realize that we're working on, even like the scope of our work needs to be bigger. But at that time I saw an opportunity.
Nandini Jammi:When Mark reached out, I saw an opportunity to try something new, and so what we did at that time was we agreed to help them out. We, uh, we got together, uh, um, we, we, we wrote a couple, we wrote an article bringing attention to the issue. We will actually, even before we did that, we actually reached out to. We used Google's own mechanisms for reporting fake ads and scam ads and did not hear back. So using their normal designated method didn't work for us, even though this was an open and shut case.
Nandini Jammi:So after that, we decided to escalate. The way we did that was by writing a piece on it. We made a TikTok on it. We said that this is very clearly a scam and that if they're not going to take their regular mechanism seriously, we're going to have to escalate by reaching out to the global VP of ads at Google, a man named Dan Taylor, and we published an email address and asked our followers to email him and make this a problem for him.
Nandini Jammi:Google ads updated their policy specifically to to uh, I don't have the language in front of me, but it is to ban scammers who impersonate people or businesses to sell a fake thing Like it was.
Nandini Jammi:It was the exact thing that we were asking them to do. Now one could argue and that person would be me that these policies don't really matter, and what matters is enforcement, because policies like this already exist under Google's current or previous iteration of their, of their policy. But it matters because these people listened to us. It was clear that we caused them some distress or some level of stress, and that I mean I don't know what Mark was able to do on his end with the work that we were doing, how he might have been leveraging it, but we were able to get that result and those Shark Tank gummy ads are gone Not all of them, as it turns out, just the ones that we specifically highlighted in our article. So there's a lot more work to be done, but that was a very key move for us and for Google, a way for us to sort of exercise our power and get something big done.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I remember the case.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't remember the specifics and I don't remember whether the content of those speeches was only text and image, but one would think that nowadays it's getting even more sophisticated to impersonate somebody else because they can use fake video, fake ai, right, so the um like deep fakes to generate somebody like kelly clarkson, somebody else saying, yeah, I actually did that, generate the video, it looks fucking real.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Right, you can have like whoever you wanted to to say some things that never happen and it's more sophisticated and and look without video. I think I read an article the other day that 97% of the news that are shared on Facebook by elderly people are complete fake and utter garbage. Right, so that's without video. That's usually that kind of you know, super dodgy news site that is super clickbaity and claims false theories and conspiranoia and stuff like that. So it's already so easy to trick elderly and some other demographics of people to do the wrong thing. One can only imagine what is the power behind video. So how are you envisioning this is going to affect the industry even farther, because video just makes it all the more complicated to detect nowadays.
Nandini Jammi:Well, I think the proliferation of fake and falsely AI-generated junk is really turbocharging the supply of crap out there. But I think what's important is to focus on policy and enforcement, the technology that is. There's always going to be new technology and new ways to take advantage of an old problem, but it is up to the companies to enforce that, and that's what we stay focused on. This enforcement is not just to protect users, who might be duped into reading or buying certain things, but it is also to protect advertisers, because not only do their ads end up on some of this junk supply that could be run by God knows who, but also, when you have scammers running ads alongside a reputable company, then the value of the company's ad goes down as well, because now people don't know what's real, and that matters. I mean, I, just before Mark contacted me, I had my own run in with a scam. I was trying to buy a pair of hokas, which is a pair of sneakers that you know. I did a Google search online.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I really needed a new pair of sneakers because mine were falling apart.
Nandini Jammi:So I was kind of in a rush and I was doing this really late at night when I was sleepy and I I, you know I typed in hokas into Google and Google search suggestions suggested hokas, official website, which I clicked. And then I clicked on the first link that I saw, assuming that that would be the HOKA's website. It was hokasuscom. So I clicked on that and I was like whoa, there's a crazy deal going on today. It was like two for 60, two for 70 or something, and these shoes are normally 140 bucks or more. And I was like, boy, I better take advantage of this deal before it goes away. I mean, like I had this script going on in my head like, of course, of course, this is the real thing.
Nandini Jammi:So I went through a very odd checkout process that I should have flagged, but I was so tired and I ended up buying you know, buying a pair of shoes. But I was so tired and I ended up buying you know, buying a pair of shoes. And and then I got an invoice from like some random company in my PayPal and I was like, oh boy, I've been scammed.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I should have known but I didn't.
Nandini Jammi:That's the thing, and if it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody. Um, so I I, you know. I immediately went in and got a refund. I reported it. I got a refund from PayPal. I put my story online and someone actually went ahead and reported them to the domain registrar, who killed off the site and I was able to kind of address my problem. But this is rampant online and this is what we have to address, because what we're seeing here is a decline of trust online, because I never went and bought a pair of hokas after all this happened. I just went to the store and I bought a pair of shoes because it felt like too much trouble. And if we cannot have trust online, then what are we doing? Who does that benefit?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:not have trust online. Then what are we doing? Who does that benefit? You know and that happened to you that you're tech savvy and I've also fallen for certain scams online. I'm like as tech savvy as anybody else, but the thing is like sometimes they're so legit or they are, you know, you can receive them over SMS, like right now, as we were talking, I just received an SMS from the local post service saying like, oh, I've got a package I didn't pay for because it was some kind of like extra fee and somewhere else that was unpaid. And I was like, yeah, but why is the link not HTTPS and why then, when I hover on it, then it actually redirects me to somewhere else, somewhere else. So I know I've got the, I've got the, the let's say the theory, and I've got also the practice, because I've fallen for certain of these things in the past. But, like most people don't, most people will fall for this again and again and again.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I find interesting this, this idea of like we are losing trust in the web, but then again, I think that's something that Google got coming because, you know, essentially Google served you as this official page on like on the first, you know, first result, or maybe the first page of results, and it was a totally scammy site. But, like, then again, it's a company that allows you to advertise for the name of somebody else, like somebody else's company. Like I say, I wanted to promote my conference. I would write you know Web Summit better than Web Summit? Or you look for Web Summit, then my conference appears there. How is that even legal, you know? So that's something that just buckles my mind all the time.
Nandini Jammi:I remember when I ran a google ads campaign for my company and we had a google ads rep, like someone who was teaching me how to use google, google ads, and he was, like you're gonna have to put your company name as one of the keywords that you run ads on. I was like, why would I do that? He's like well, because other people will take it if you don't. I was like, so I'm paying to have my company come up on my search, like when specifically someone looks up my company, I still have to pay you. And that's one of many things that never made sense to me.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So you pay for your domain, by the way, which is a way to get your presence online, but then you have, on top of that, to pay for the ads.
Nandini Jammi:Oh, it's just a couple cents. It's not very expensive. Blah, blah, blah. I mean I shouldn't be paying anything.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That doesn't guarantee anything, because even if you pay for it, somebody outbids you. They will win the placement, right. I don't know if that's how it works exactly, but I think they can outbid you. Yeah, they can outbid you.
Nandini Jammi:I think the thing that is illegal is that you can't put the name of your competitor in the ad, or something like that. There's like one rule that you can't break something like that. There's like one rule that you can't read.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:No, that one isn't. Because I remember like we, for a client or two, we're using Monday or ClickUp, one of these companies. I think it was Monday and I was researching something I said I wanted to go on and download it and the first thing I got or I wanted to download no that now. I remember I wanted to download Basecamp because that was the tool that we were using and off the sudden, I got served all of these ads on Monday, and not only was Monday on top of the results, but they had articles promoted saying Monday is better than Basecamp. I'm like I'm sure this shouldn't be illegal.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So I spoke on Twitter, I remember, and I got like I think they removed the content as well. Twitter, I remember, and I got like I think they removed the content as well. I'm like, well, they had to wait until somebody made a thing out of it to remove it. But why would Google allow that? They don't give a flying fact, I assume like they're too busy with other things, but then again they are allowing these things to happen. So I don't know if they're too busy or they're just like stiffening off money into the economy just because they're allowing this and it's just too profitable.
Nandini Jammi:And if nobody complains, I don't know. I mean, that's what I would be doing if I was an evil Google.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:VP why?
Nandini Jammi:would I do anything else?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Exactly do anything else, exactly, then then my, my, the next thing is like so these, these things are happening and I, I really like the, the idea of the social justice that you are implementing at check my ads, because for me it is a way to compensate the, the, the, the, the exaggerated power these companies have, that, unless you do a really good campaign on PR and then something goes viral, they don't fucking do anything about some of the injustices, right? I just heard today my sister went on the honeymoon flight and I don't know, maybe I should have said somebody else I'm going to blip this out, probably, but anyway. So somebody got into a plane and they bought the seats together with a kid in the middle, and all of that because they wanted to be together, a family going on honeymoon and whatnot. And so it turns out, the company, they downsized the plane for whatever reason, and they just put people the three of them in separate seats, notwithstanding the fact that one of them is a toddler, right, right and so, and they did know it was a toddler because they previously they had relocated them somewhere else because they couldn't see it in an emergency seat because, uh, there is a toddler.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So they knew that and in spite of that, they just relocated him in line 27, maybe, right? So something like that. And they're like well, you can file a complaint, but nothing, nobody's going to move a finger for that, unless you do something that goes viral on TikTok or Instagram or social media, right? So most people don't have this power. So all the more important that people like you exist to do like that. So how can people reach out to you in case they find this kind of illicit practices or downright illegal things?
Nandini Jammi:Well, you can find us at checkmyadsorg. We have just rebranded so you can enjoy our beautiful new colors and website. And we are active on all the socials. And I'm the most active now on LinkedIn, believe it or not, where I've had to sort of run off to after Twitter went down. So still on Twitter or X, but the audience that I'm most interested in lives on LinkedIn, so therefore, so do I.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But how do you deal with the selection of projects? Because I assume that tons of people are contacting you. There's tons of interesting projects you can share a peek from. So if they're kind of like a waiting list, or how do you usually operate with the deal flow that you get?
Nandini Jammi:We have a roadmap, we have a strategy and a playbook and we have a vision of what we would like to achieve. And so we we, at this time of our organization we are growing the way we are expanding the way that we look at the problem. So in the last year particularly, we saw that. We saw that talking about disinformation, that focusing on disinformation as our window into the world of ad tech was not adequate, because there is so much that is happening in the world of digital advertising that we want to address that is not directly related to disinformation but that feeds into that world. So issues like ad fraud, or even the word ad fraud, is so big. You know, um, but just you know we.
Nandini Jammi:We follow the work of a company called analytics and, uh, that company came out with all these really big stories last year about how YouTube was defrauding its customers out of billions of dollars through um, you know, informing them, reporting that they had paid for premium ads but actually they were garbage ads and they were running in the corners of people's browsers or they weren't being seen or they were being autoplayed. This is all a form of fraud for advertisers because they paid more money to ensure that their ads ended up on youtubecom and ran in front of people, ensure that their ads ended up on YouTubecom and ran in front of people. But one of the sort of side issues that came up with this was that YouTube was running ads on, more ads on something called search partner network, which is third party websites off of YouTube properties, so off of YouTubecom, off of the YouTube app, third party websites that are supposed to be carefully vetted and brand safe, and what we found was that search partner network included things like um, rumble video, which hosts all of the banned characters uh, you know all the peanut gallery of hate, hate merchants and and disinfo, disinfo people and, um, some iranian sanctioned websites I think I might be getting this confused with a different report but like just a bunch of stuff that we should not be advertising, shouldn't be running their ads on, and so this ad fraud issue and this disinfo issue kind of merge here. But if we want to talk about this in an effective way, we need to. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture, and so one of the things that we did this year is our.
Nandini Jammi:We changed our tagline. So our tagline now and the focus of our work has shifted. It hasn't changed, it has shifted. We're simply moving back back a step.
Nandini Jammi:So we're now talking about the internet that we deserve, free from scams, lies and manipulation, because, as I said earlier with the Mark Cuban example, that set of tools that the scammers were using to misinform people about Shark Tank, keto gummies are the same tools that propagandists can use to throw an election, and so the problem really comes back down to the tools, to the products, to the digital advertising industry, and so we need to talk about it in a much bigger way, and if we want to be effective, we need to look at the full picture, address the full picture, and that means not just doing the work that I have been you know that I began doing in 2016, which is calling out advertisers, calling out ad tech companies, but we're also looking at research, our own, developing our own research to better understand and uncover issues and conflicts of interest in the industry.
Nandini Jammi:But we're also looking at policy, and so now we've grown to a point where we are pursuing policy, like actual laws that we can put in place to help ensure regulation in this industry. So to us, this is sort of a three-prong or three-pillar project now and we are setting our sights on fixing the system rather than just fixing small issues that come up.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:No, and that's super interesting because there's so many angles. You know cybersecurity can go we could talk about, you know the B2C aspect of how people are being ripped off and scammed by these kind of companies. But B2B, when it comes to like, you know cybersecurity can go we could talk about. You know the B2C aspect of how people are being ripped off and scammed by these kinds of companies. But B2B, when it comes to like. You know the image of your company's advertising, supposedly on YouTube or on Twitter for that matter, because I think that's something that we see every day. And then the ad appears after you know a white nationalist tweet, or on the account of, or being promoted next to people like Andrew Tate or something like that. So it's like you really don't want to be there.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But as a company, ultimately you don't have the control. I think on Google you have got more control, but on Twitter not as much. And then again, most of the times there are intermediaries in this, like there are agencies who manage this for you. So therefore, they delegate all of the risk. The brands delegate all of the risk. They're like oh, I hired somebody and so they can always put the blame on that. So do usually brands own up to their own mistakes, or do they just blame it on the agency doing that work for them?
Nandini Jammi:uh, do brands own up to their own mistakes? I mean, I mean a lot of them run it in-house, right.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But I guess somebody couldn't say like, oh, that was the company I hired to to run my ads, for instance, right, yeah I mean.
Nandini Jammi:A lot of times it comes down to the third party. Obviously nobody wants to take blame um but yeah we, we know that.
Nandini Jammi:You know, a couple ago I was looking at ads on Steve Bannon's War Room and I was coming up with Volvo and Audi and Etsy and Procter Gamble brands and those guys are not running their own ads, they've handed that stuff over to agencies to do it for them, that stuff over to agencies to do it for them, and I don't know about taking the blame, but certainly they looked into it and they tried to, I think, do their best to remove the ads from that channel.
Nandini Jammi:The fact is that advertisers still don't know, as you just just said, they don't have insight or visibility into where their ads are running, and often this is because not often this is always because ad tech vendors that they rely on to run their ads refuse to or decline or gaslight even them into not seeing them, into not seeing true, raw reports on their own ad placements.
Nandini Jammi:They actively work to keep them from seeing that information, and so the problem really here is this relationship. It's not necessarily the tech, it's not necessarily anything outside of just a pure power play, and so that power play is what we need to address, and we also need advertisers to step up and know that it is part of their responsibility as stewards of their brand to insist that they know where their ads are running, because they spend a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of effort making sure that they're building brands that people trust, that people are loyal to, and the way that you get that is by showing up in the right places and in the right way yeah, and exactly one of the things that like pissed me off.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:A few months ago I remember I was on Twitter and I had received this kind of scam of buy this crypto coin, like this meme coin or something buy a local kindergarten from here in Barcelona. I'm like, wait, wait a minute. And it was an advertise, right, so it was an ad. So, technically, somebody either hacked the kindergarten Twitter account and posted this buy Solana or something like that advertisement, or that was just Twitter basically making app ads. I don't know, because actually I went into the. I remember screenshotting this because I went into the account and they had legit posts and they had legit content. So I don't know if it was. Maybe it was something built into the system that they could just impersonate somebody else to make up fake accounts or fake advertisements.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't know what happened there, but the account didn't look compromised and that looked like dodgy as fuck. In this case, how do you, in this case, like how do you actually go about it? How do you, how do you tell like the entire not only the entire platform is rigged, but like the company cannot see I'm pretty sure they couldn't see this ad because the account was not compromised. How do you tell them look, you're actually publishing this or somebody is publishing it in your name. It's got to be Twitter, because nobody else has got access to your account, right? So I don't know, probably Twitter operates differently, but I think that was a really extreme and obscene usage of these shady techniques. So that's something that, as a brand, you can never know who else is taking care, sorry, is taking over your information and just using your image in some place that you actually don't control. They were active on Twitter.
Nandini Jammi:That's pretty illegal. Yeah, you can't just impersonate other brands. Well, I mean, I'm certainly. I don't think there's any point reporting it to X, because they don't really give a shit it to X because they don't really give a shit. But but I'll tell you who we can target and who we are targeting. Who are the companies and organizations that have enabled X to appear to be brand safe?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Okay.
Nandini Jammi:Those are the organizations that we need to be paying attention to, because those are the, those are the suits that show up and and come in and say, oh yeah, x has a 99.99 percent brand safety score from us.
Nandini Jammi:Double verify or tag the trustworthy accountability group which is supposed to be an accountability body in our one of the primary accountability bodies in our industry who had awarded AXA brand safety certified seal and they renewed it in the last year, in fact, without telling anybody.
Nandini Jammi:I mean, it was quietly done, and the only reason that I found out about it was because I was Googling something and it came up. So these are the kinds of things that enable X to go into boardrooms, into meetings with advertisers and convince them to join their platform, because these more serious organizations have greenlighted that. So if those serious organizations were supposed to have done their job uh, have have are saying it's it's okay to do, then sure we'll give it a shot. So yeah, mean we can't hold someone like Elon Musk accountable at this point. We can't hold. In my opinion, it's very difficult to hold Facebook and Zuckerberg and Google and all these companies accountable, but we can go after this sort of mafia, as I see it, of organizations that are supporting them and that are selling them into the industry as solutions to be trusted.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:One could say that there are two strategies to doing this kind of activism, which is being behind the scenes, completely unknown person, not public face and all that, or being all out like you're doing, like having a strong social media presence and doing a lot of PR and all of that. Do you think it's paying dividends to actually be a publicly known face? I assume that this strengthens your relationship deeper with the ones that you get along well, but you create a lot of enemies, right? So is it? How are you dealing with it? Especially, you know the public exposure. You receive threats all the time. Really famous people have targeted you on their, you know, on their channels and podcasts and publications and whatnot. So how are you dealing with all of these? Personally, it must be really rough implications and whatnot.
Nandini Jammi:So how are you dealing with all of these personally? It must be really rough. For me personally, it rolls off my back. I have received a lot of threats in the past, but to me it's just a sign that I'm being effective and efficient. Obviously it's not pleasant, but I don't really care. So, yeah, that's my answer. I don't really care. So, yeah, that's my answer.
Nandini Jammi:I don't really care, but it is really good to be public because it allows me to connect with people directly, and I am now somebody who has been in this industry. Well, I hesitate to say I'm part of this industry. I am an accountability person in this industry, reluctantly so for the last eight years, and I like to think that that's a fact that helps people trust me and to trust my organization and trust the people that we work with my organization and trust the people that we work with, because, you know, there's not a lot of people who have stuck it out to this point. I'm kind of looking around and I see that, you know, a lot of the landscape has changed, a lot of the players have moved on, but we're just kind of still here with the same drumbeat Like we can't fix this problem that we started eight years ago. So I would like to think that being public is ultimately a positive, so that people can put a face or now I'm happy to say, multiple faces to this effort.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That leads us to segue into this, because usually when you are the public face of a company, the company ends up suffering from associating and some everybody else associates the company with a face, right, but usually there's a team behind it. I always say I've got two co-founders, I've got 20 employees, they do amazing work. I don't do shit, I just do the podcast. It's just like I'm the spokesperson of the company, obviously the public face of the company, because nobody else wants to talk to people because they're developers, right. But, jokes aside, that leaves a deep feeling of frustration of me because it's like I'm not, I'm taking all the credit. They are not.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I do all the work. I think it's a small part of it and that only fuels my imposter syndrome all the time. Like you know, far from reducing it, it's like no, it's fueling it even more because I actually get the credit I don't deserve. Of course, somebody has to do this. There's a value in providing the like, the phase and being and being actually like the communicator and the, the sort of spiritual leader of the cult, but at the same time I don't know if you're also getting these is there. How are you dealing with the, the, this idea of like oh, maybe I'm just taking credit, I shouldn't? You know, jokes aside, I work hard, as as you do, probably, and so, but you know there's credit that you want to pass on to the team. How do you do it? How do you make sure that they are? They get this retribution as well oh well, we just say it.
Nandini Jammi:I mean we, our team actually was behind.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Mention on Twitter right At the name and that's it. No, how do you do it?
Nandini Jammi:Yeah, we, I mean we were, we were private until just this year, when we launched our new website. We, I guess, like had a grand surprise for everybody, like oh, there's 12 people working here.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Nice.
Nandini Jammi:And so, yeah, we didn't really give credit in the way that we should have in the last year because of that fact, but we're obviously, claire and I, are we sort of see ourselves as very I'm not going to say lucky, because we did put in a lot of work to get to this point, but we are very grateful for what we have achieved and we have, uh, we're so lucky to have a great team that is extremely talented and competent and awesome, and are we see our our role as elevating our team members and helping them to achieve their best work. That is something that I think is quite, uh, you know, not something to be taken for granted in a lot of companies. So we really do focus on getting out of the way of our very talented team members and letting them do their work, and then, of course, we're happy to give them the credit that they deserve.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:How can we make sure there's a checkmate in every country? Is there something that you have thought about? You're permanently battling the tech giants in the US because they're from there, right, and some of the biggest disinformation networks and sites and podcasts and whatnot they are from the US, and so, but how? Like this happens everywhere in all different languages, and I remember back in the day with Sleeping Giants, you had like local representations or like different representations for different languages as well. So is this something that you think you can replicate, or somebody else ought to do it independently in every country, like, for instance, if they wanted to do it in countries that they desperately so needed it?
Nandini Jammi:Well, absolutely, we have no secrets here.
Nandini Jammi:We have no company secrets as far as our methods and our playbook and our strategies, and we're happy to share and collaborate and we do. We work with a lot of uh, we work with a lot of organizations here in the us, as well as internationally, um, in you know, you name it. We're working with a lot of countries, either directly or indirectly, and what we kind of see ourselves as is a hub of knowledge that we are willing to, and hoping to, amplify through partnerships. So we do hope to expand our footprint through the work of other organizations and individuals in other countries, and we see ourselves as a resource to them. So the way to do that is just to, I guess, reach out to us if you have an organization that is doing this type of work or would like to get involved and see if there's some way for us to help out.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:How about running a nonprofit? You mentioned that you're a nonprofit, which basically makes one of the good things about running a nonprofit is it makes you uncorruptible, right. So, and because companies, you know they can be bought, then they get a board of directors, they get investment and whatnot, and so maybe their direction and strategy can be influenced by these people, by external people right, and the interest, but whereas a nonprofit cannot. What are the other things that you didn't expect from a nonprofit that you found along the way and like, okay, yeah, this is actually good, or was there some surprise you didn't expect or something that, oh, I cannot do that. I want to do that, but I cannot because I'm a nonprofit.
Nandini Jammi:A nonprofit is really just a business. It's just a business structure.
Nandini Jammi:It's absolutely capable of being influenced and uh and abused, so I wouldn't say that that is um necessarily uh something that a nonprofit is immune immune from. However, I'm happy to say that we don't expect to get rich off of a nonprofit, and we don't expect to. I think Claire and I are the founders and we are very committed to our mission. I mean, this is all we want to really do. We want to make a difference in the world and we we both established that with each other, and we also uh are held to that standard by our, our board, who is also made up of people who are committed to to holding this industry accountable and bettering it. Uh, we've really worked hard to surround ourselves with really good people with a strong sense of a vision of what the future looks like. Our funders share our vision. We have a universe of people who support us and who are looking for ways to help us bolster our effect and impact in the world.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Okay, so last question is how we can help you now. Is there any way we can possibly help from this, from our community Life on Mars?
Nandini Jammi:Thank you for asking. So the easiest way to help us is to follow us on social media and or sign up for our emails on our website and to follow along with us, because what we do is every time you like one of our posts, or comment on one of our posts, it shows up to a bigger audience. Or comment on one of our posts, it shows up to a bigger audience. So if all you ever do is follow us and just hit the like button or, uh you know, leave us a little message or a note, that is immensely helpful, because what check my ads does is not possible without the power of our community. So that is the number one way to help us. The number two way to help us is to give us money we are not promised.
Nandini Jammi:You might be wondering how we get money if we're not a business and we don't have clients.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:It takes 45 minutes to get to this point, but yeah, let's talk about money.
Nandini Jammi:Yeah, so we have something that we call checkmates. It's our membership for people who would like to support us through small donations from anywhere from $5, $10, 20, 50, and so on, on a monthly basis, and that that is one of our sort of we, those folks, our inner circle, and that really makes a big difference for us. So those are two ways to get involved. But, as I like to say, and the thing that I'm most proud of of our organization, is that you don't need to have money to help our work. Um, just have a social media account, talk about us to your friends and family, get the word out about the work that we do and the stories that we tell, because the more folks who know, the more we can mobilize them to help us make the change that we need.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Right, so you heard this everybody. Just follow Nandini on social media and go to the website newly fresh website, redesigned and then check who the people working at CheckMyAds are, follow them on social media, spread the word and also report fucking Nazis on the social. So let's do it. Any parting words, 30 seconds to share what's coming up next for you at CheckMyAds or anything interesting you you want to disclose.
Nandini Jammi:Or we can wrap it up here Don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn, where I have moved all of the drama from Twitter over to this much more boring platform, but it's actually working and I think people are enjoying seeing the bizarro stories that I once housed over on Twitter. Yeah, we plan to do a lot more with LinkedIn, so come join us for that alone.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:It can be hard, because LinkedIn people don't disclose whether they are fascists or not. Usually people don't speak about politics, but I don't know. I'm going to keep an eye out. I'm going to see how these things play out, because LinkedIn is starting to have more personal content. In the last years I've seen a shift like people are not using Facebook anymore. Now it seems like they're being more open on LinkedIn, because I don't know if that creates a better branding image or just LinkedIn used to be too cold and too distant and now they want to be more personal and intimate and they're sharing things on LinkedIn. But I don't know, that's a strange combination. I don't know how this is going to play out, but definitely your people is there, and so wishing you continued success and thank you for sharing your time with us and your experience as we learn a ton today.
Nandini Jammi:Hey, thanks so much for having me on today, Alex.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Thank you.