 Welcome back folks, Dao. Dao Industries right now, up to 219, you get the Nasdaq down 30, S&Ps are up three and a half. Our guest today folks is Bill Letera. Bill is the chairman and CEO of iSocrates. Now check this out, this is pretty cool. Bill's a former Wall Street head of research and portfolio manager. In the 1990s folks, bottom line, billstartedart.com. When Jeff Bezos was out there with Amazon and the bottom line, Getty Images bought it. Bill's got a new company, it's iSocrates. Bill, welcome to TFNN. Thank you very much, how are you doing? I'm doing great, man, yourself? Good, a little bit hot and humid here in Florida, but we're doing okay. And we're glad you're in St. Pete, man. We're definitely glad you're in St. Pete. So hey, so tell us exactly what this company is. Yeah, you bet, happy to do so. So iSocrates began life a little over six years ago. We work in the digital media and marketing industry, started out doing some pretty high-end consulting work around strategy and operations. And all about 90 minutes into our first major consulting assignment became pretty clear that companies were having difficulty executing with all these literally thousands of platforms that they have to work with and didn't take long for us to figure out, actually, there's an opportunity here. In addition to the consulting, maybe we should be doing hands-on execution, letting them outsource to us and where we can run mission-critical applications for them in media and marketing. Publishers, marketers, agencies, different data and tech companies. And we're headquartered in St. Pete, but it's a global business today and we've got clients around the world. We've taken those services that we've been providing and learned where the gaps are in the technology. And so like many companies, we are evolving a SaaS solution to go with our services. So like if a large company wants to advertise, would they basically hire in you so that you could figure out what these different platforms are doing and just what type of return on investment they could get? Is that what we're talking? Yeah, and we're hands-on keyboard, actually planning and buying or in the case of media companies selling, doing the monetization for them. Okay. Reporting in analytics, data science, all that. Runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week in our operations. Yeah, you know, this business has come so far. It's really intriguing and large companies, you'd be really surprised folks, large companies spending a huge amount of money that they really don't understand it kind of how this works. And the advertising companies have everything to gain and zero to lose by just saying, okay, you got this many hits. I mean, years ago, Bill, I used to own radio stations and Abitran used to drive me crazy because I'd be saying to myself, this is amazing that a large company would just buy this buy based on a certain amount. But I've seen it and where we are right now. I still see it. I actually got a spreadsheet because we do a lot with a couple of big advertising firms and they sent me a spreadsheet one day that they never should have sent me and it was like, I thought I was seeing things, man. I mean, and what it was, it was supposedly the number of hits that these large companies were getting. But if anyone ever drilled down to it, they'd realize that this is not what they need and more than likely that's what you're digging into. Yeah, I mean, the reality is that not only is there a lot of waste in the system, but increasingly, particularly in this economy, it's hard to find the staff that sophisticated understands that's affordable and available. Yes. We've been able to fill that hole fortunately. So businesses has been very good and it has allowed us to be able to reinvest in building our own technology. So after having been a professional services company for so long, we have begun to build Madtech BI, which is our SaaS platform and very fortunately for us, all of our services clients have taken the platform and now other new clients who've never been services clients are taking it. So we're benefiting from a lot of learning here and on our way to building a nice growth company. It's a great name, man, Madtech. That's definitely a great name. So what level company-wise, like with gross numbers, would be your clients? Is it 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, 1 million? Where are we at in that? Typically when they're on the buy side, it's gonna be companies that have over a million dollars a year or over $100,000 a month to spend on digital media and marketing. But since you're from the radio business, you might remember Enercom. Oh yeah. Enercom, CBS News, they are a long-time customer for us. Gosh, probably going on almost five years already. Yeah. Do work for them and a lot of other big businesses that you know. But it can be a smaller company. I think the big thing is if you're looking for full transparency, lower costs, very significant accountability, we're the right people to go with. If you're looking for a full service agency and you really don't wanna know more about what's going on, we're probably not the right fit. All right. Where do you feel the most amount of advertising fraud is in the business? That's it. I know. I'm not putting you on the spot because I know it's not close to what you do, okay? But we both know that it's like, oh my God, it's like sometimes I'm trying to figure it out myself. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. So first of all, there's fraud in many ways. I'm a graduate school professor in this subject matter and I definitely share this with my students every semester. I love it. This is definitely a business where caveat emptor. You wanna trust but verify every step along the way throughout the ecosystem because there's plenty of fraud. I think that probably the biggest fraud from a dollar standpoint is gonna be in the ad inventory itself. What advertisers believe they're buying but actually what is not being delivered. But it can also happen where the publishers are getting short change themselves. Overall, what I would suggest is I'm not familiar with another commodity industry where fraud is a bigger factor. And I'm gonna call it flat out. This is a commodity industry. These are companies that are being bought and sold and increasingly in auction-based transactions just like financial services evolve to basically from May 1st of 1975 with the onset of the negotiated commissions of the New York Stock Exchange. And that was really the beginning of loosening up of the market. In the same way, electronic real-time auctions have come to advertising inventory and we're seeing the same kinds of challenges but in a very short, much more compressed period of time. And in that activity, with hundreds of billions of dollars being transacted in auctions going forward, there's plenty of fraud. So this is not a place for the timid and it requires constant observation and clients, they need to know what's going on. And you know what's so cool when clients do know what's going on, folks, okay? It's awesome because if they're educated, I can tell you from me trying to sell them advertising it's much easier. When they're not, it's a real problem, man. I mean, because they can say to me, I've got this many, what I can't say to them, hey, man, you better go check it again because I know you don't have this many. Meaning, and that conversation is very hard when I'm on the selling end of it, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I don't think just so it's what it's worth, I don't think it's just that it's gonna be the unification of all those things because there's a lot of platforms as well. This is a complex industry. No, there's no doubt. Well, listen, this has been a pleasure. Appreciate the update, appreciate the education. I'd love to have you on again, Bill. Great, thanks so much. Thank you. Have a great one, have a safe one. Yeah, good place. Stay right there, folks, come right back.