GlobalTravel.com and DirectAdSolutions.com Are Crooks
A lot of people who work for or run websites get emails from media buyers wanting to place ads on their sites. Most of them are honest and work for reputable companies. Some of them are looking to make money by scamming people into giving them free media because most sites on the web deal in Net 15 or 30 terms which means the advertiser doesn’t have to pay until 15-30 days after the campaign is over. I’m not sure why it works this way but it just does.
I’m writing this post to shame them and since I rank well in Google this will invariably come up on the front page in case any sites do their due diligence.
A few months ago I got an inquiry from DirectAdSolutions to place some ads on my company’s site for a client, GlobalTravel.com.
The ad’s creative was to aimed at people wanting to earn money at home by becoming travel agents. While the idea of a travel agent in this day and age is silly, a company selling such a license might not do too bad in this economy.
Anyhow, I should have looked at their site more closely, but it seemed like a very vanilla ad buy and I went ahead and ran it.
The ad looked like this:
It was a flash ad and had a few more frames but you get the gist. After running about 3 million impressions (about $6,000 worth) I contacted the agency to see how it was shaping up for them.
Radio silence.
The media buyer’s name was Tom Marrow which now that I think of it sounds a lot like “Tomorrow”. Anyhow I tried a few more times and no luck.
I ended up reaching out to the marketing director of GlobalTravel.com, Anthony Barbera, to explain my situation and see if DirectAdSolution’s comissions could be credited to my company. GlobalTravel is based in Florida which sends up red flags right away since all shady businesses are based in Florida.
Anthony and I spoke and he said that he would help sort it out and make it good. I followed up the following week to see how it was going.
Radio silence.
This seemed familiar.
As of yet I have not heard from the “agency” (their whois listing says their office is at 10 Downing Street in London (meaning they share space with the Prime Minister of London) and their office address is a federal court in Philadelphia. Nor have I heard from Anthony Barbera who runs the marketing for GlobalTravel.com.
My guess is that this is a scam and DirectAdSolutions is in fact GlobalTravel.com.
What bothers me about this (besides the loss of revenue for my company) is that it further weakens the web payment system which is based on the pay cycles of the agencies: the agencies take a long time to pay so the networks don’t like to pay until they’ve been paid. This system, as flawed as it can be, seems to work.
Even on small scale deals Net 30 or Net15 payment terms are commonplace since the advertiser wants to make sure that the publisher can deliver on the impressions sold: you pay when you get the full product.
I talked to a colleague and he said that he has experienced a situation like this before and always demands 50% up front which usually means smaller media buys but he always gets paid.
A good rule of thumb is to do your due diligence before running an ad campaign.
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Hey Andy.
I work for NetProphets.com, a freelance ad trafficking shop in Canada.
One of our clients was approached by a Mr. Tom Marrow about delivering a campaign on their website.
DirectAd Solutions
841 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Tom Marrow
Advertising Manager
267-940-7785 (office)
267-284-7678 (fax)
tom@directadsolutions.com
Our spidey sense started tingling when we realized they weren’t going to give us flash creative or a 3rd party tag from a reputable ad server, but instead wanted the flash to be delivered directly from pages on their own webserver. That would give them a pretty simple route to installing some kind of malware/virus on our users.
When their webserver crashed the first day the campaign was to go live I started to worry that somethign was up. Google found me your article above.
I also found Google’s safe browsing advisory had flagged the network his ad serving domain (npsmotion.com) as having sites on it that were responsible for malware:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=AS:28753
Lastly, I called the website he was supposedly representing and they said they’d never heard of him.
And so it doesn’t look to me like he was placing ads legitimately and simply stiffing the publishers of the payment. It’s more likely he was just pretending in order to place code that installed malware/viruses.
I thought I’d tack my info onto your warning.
Of course I suspect he’ll have a new identity already but the process and warning signs should help people avoid this evil in the future.
Hey Ben, glad I could help verify this for you. I disagree that the advertiser doesn’t know whats going on. They might not be in on it but they are implicit.
Affiliate Marketing or Selling Leads is a pretty good business. The end advertiser doesn’t care where the leads came from or why.
As a matter of fact dealing with someone disreputable probably only helps them because at some point they can just pull the rug from under them (after 1000 free leads) and say “sorry, we’ve heard that you’re ripping off publishers”. Or renegotiate the CPA terms, saying that the leads aren’t good. Instead of $10 we’ll give you $2. Since DirectAdSolutions pays nothing to the publishers it’s all profit.
If you ran any quantity of impressions i’d contact the advertiser and demand some sort of payment. They should be accountable for knowing where their leads come from.
I emailed the guy and told him that i’d be writing this blog post and that he might as well start a new site.
That’s certainly possible and likely, we’re probably both right and it varies from case to case.
In this case the ads actually stopped working the first day into the campaign, if they were actually trying to get advertising for free I think they’d have tried to keep the ads live and string the site along for as long as possible.
Whereas if they just wanted to install some malware, they’d get as many people infected as they could before complaints came rolling in and suspicion was raised and then bolt.
Hello, I represent a significantly large publisher who was also contacted by Direct Ad Solutions, however this time they were representing “SpaFinder.com.”
After some suspicious malware warnings from DoubleClick, we double checked our references and then found your blog post! Thank you.
Indeed we were working with Tom Marrow and almost fell for it. I can’t thank you enough!
D-
I’d contact spafinder and let them know whats going on. This post comes up #2 for “DirectAdSolutions” in google search so I think they’ll definitely have to change their name soon.
Glad I could help.
I AM a large publisher who signed up to serve ads for Tom Marrow and SpaFinder.com… The ad code was a link and we noticed it would infrequently create a javascript error code. This proved that the code was not always being delivered the same way… sure enough, we were able to prove that users were being infrequently site to a malware site, securedantivirusonlinescanner.com <- do not go there