Recently, we sat down with Rommel Francis Bato, the new addition to our Spyke Media team. We wanted to get to know him better, learn something about his position as Fraud Detection Manager at Spyke and his experience with fraud in the industry.
Tell us something about you and your background.
I was born in the Philippines but grew up in Indonesia. After having graduated from high school there, I moved back to the Philippines to go to college. I spent five years at the University of Asia and the Pacific, graduating with a Master of Arts in Communication. I majored in Integrated Marketing Communications. During my final year at college, I spent nine months interning at Lowe Philippines, a creative ad agency, as a Resident Trainee in Account Management.
How did you finally come to Spyke?
After my graduation, I started working at Zed Philippines which is a content provider offering mobile value-added services. There, I started as a Digital Marketing Expert and later obtained additional responsibilities handling products. After six years in this company, I thought it was time to move on, which is why I joined Spyke via a friend.
What is your job at Spyke and what are your tasks in that position?
At Spyke, I am a Fraud Detection Manager. In that position, my main task is to use fraud detection tools to support our Account Managers. Based on my analysis, I prepare reports that indicate suspicious activities so that our Account Managers can remedy the issue and prevent transactions from fraudulent sources. This way, we guarantee high-quality traffic for all clients in our Spyke Media network.
What does a typical work day look like?
I usually start the day off using a platform by AdCumulus to generate a report that allows us to see the overall performance of all our running campaigns. Then, I jump into the fraud report. I use a fraud detection tool to give me a list of campaigns that show possible fraudulent activities based on the data we receive about the clicks. I sift the false positives and then report my findings to the Account Managers. If requested, I provide more detailed reports for specific campaigns. When I have time left, I try to submit an AffiliTest report to check if any campaigns have stopped working.
Regarding your experience, how much of a problem is fraud in Performance Marketing?
As Performance Marketing matures, so does the problem of fraud as criminals find new ways to cheat the system. It has become a problem indeed. Since there is a lot that could potentially be earned through fraudulent activities, there are many interested in participating and finding more and more creative ways to cheat. However, with fraudsters becoming more cunning, anti-fraud tools improve as well. There are many tools on the market which are really helpful, and combined with my experience, we reduce fraud at Spyke to the absolute minimum.
What are your top 3 tips to prevent fraud?
1. Always collect data and analyze it.
2. Keep track of both the good and bad partners.
3. Try to think like a fraudster.
We at Spyke Media take fighting fraud seriously. Every day, we do our very best to provide the safest and best quality traffic for all partners and clients in our network. If you want to learn more about fraud and what we do to stop fraudsters harming our industry, get in touch with us at dmexco. You can book a meeting with one of our team members here or here.
