The True Crime Podcast
The Fight of My Life is a multi-season, documentary-style true crime podcast produced by Cadence Productions (Rich Thompson) and Unheard (Lydia Bowden) — two organisations united by a conviction that storytelling, paired with purpose, can move people to action. Each season tells a different story of injustice, exploitation and survival. The show currently holds a Listen Score of 50 and ranks in the top 0.5% of podcasts globally on Listen Notes — a reflection of sustained download velocity and audience loyalty built across both seasons.
Finding Ruby, Season 1, told the story of a sixteen-year-old girl from the Philippines lured into an online sex trafficking operation — and the fight to rescue her. It won Best New Podcast at the 2023 Australian iHeart Awards, the Shorty Impact Award for Human Rights, and Gold in the Best Podcast category. NFL legend Mark Herzlich endorsed it in People Magazine. It was featured at the Singapore Fintech Festival in front of 64,000 attendees. And it was promoted across the extensive global network of IJM — the International Justice Mission — who had partnered with Cadence since 2016 and actively championed the show to their worldwide audience. Ruby went on to testify before the US Senate Hearing Committee. Finding Ruby grew to over 55,000 downloads on the strength of exceptional storytelling, award recognition, high-profile event placement, and institutional network reach.
Season 2 had none of those structural advantages. IJM was not a distribution partner. There was no awards cycle to ride, no celebrity endorsement in motion, no institutional network to activate. What it had was a story every bit as powerful — and a decision to build the audience systematically rather than wait for lightning to strike again.
Micah and his girlfriend Ava are young, broke and looking for opportunity when they see a job post on Facebook just before Christmas 2021. Customer service and marketing work in Cambodia. Good salary. Free housing. After two brutal years of pandemic lockdowns, it feels like hope.
Ava arrives first. There is no recruiter, no office, no welcome. She is taken to a walled compound ringed with barbed wire. Her passport is confiscated. Armed guards patrol the halls. In the seconds before her phone is seized, she makes one call. “Micah,” she says. “Don’t come. It’s a trap.”
He boards the next flight anyway.
What follows across six episodes is a true crime series about a $75 billion global scam industry powered by modern slavery — told from the inside, by two people who survived it. Hosted by Rich Thompson and featuring expert voices from Operation Shamrock, Acts of Mercy, and award-winning Cambodian investigative journalist Mech Dara, Escaping Scam City is a survival thriller, an investigative exposé, and a love story.
The Strategic Brief
The campaign brief was precise: build a verified listener base in specific English-speaking cities, at a cost per listener that an impact investor could evaluate, fund and replicate. Not impressions. Not reach. Listeners — people who clicked through, landed on the show page, and downloaded an episode.
City selection was driven by a single insight: true crime podcast consumption peaks during commute windows. The format — serialised, episodic, narrative-driven — suits the 30 to 60 minute transit journey better than almost any other content category. The campaign therefore targeted cities with strong commuter cultures and large English-speaking professional populations: Sydney, London and New York as the three primary markets, with Toronto added mid-campaign as a deliberate proof-of-concept test.
The available budget: $6,500 USD. This does not reach the entire English-speaking world, and attempting to do so would produce unreadable data and unmeasurable results. The approach was deliberately focused: three cities with strong commuter cultures, high podcast consumption, and large English-speaking professional populations. Concentration over coverage. A focused campaign produces results you can see, measure and act on. A spread campaign produces averages that tell you nothing.
The New Account Constraint
The Meta ad account was new. Meta applies spending limits to new accounts as a trust-building protocol—a standard mechanism designed to determine whether a new advertiser is a legitimate operation. For the first five to seven days of the campaign, the daily spend cap was $50. At that level, the algorithm had budget for approximately one hour of delivery per day, typically in the overnight window between midnight and 1 am.
In practice, the $50-a-Day Meta Cap helped this podcast campaign deliver the Highest-Performing Episode across 2 Award-Winning Seasons, producing an unexpectedly valuable outcome: a controlled, low-cost data-collection phase before any significant budget was committed. Each city’s targeting stack ran under identical conditions at minimal spend, generating granular performance data — CTR, CPM, CPC, content view rate — that informed every budget decision made once the cap lifted.
Then the bank intervened. Meta’s billing system charges in micro-increments — small charges of $2 to $3 each time the spend threshold is reached. The bank’s fraud detection flagged the pattern and blocked the charges mid-campaign. Another forced pause. Another data point. The payment method was restored manually, the campaign continued, and the interruption provided a natural before-and-after performance comparison that a deliberately planned campaign structure would never have generated.
By the time the full budget was live, every city and audience combination had already been tested at low spend. There was no guesswork about what was working. We scaled from the $50-a-Day Meta Cap without breaking the algorithmic learnings, reaching the optimal daily spend.
The Audience Architecture
The targeting was built in two mandatory layers — designed so that every impression reached someone who was simultaneously values-aligned, genre-familiar, and a confirmed audio content consumer.
Layer One — The Qualifying Pool
Anyone in the target audience needed to match at least one signal from three distinct groups.
- The socially conscious audience — people who had declared interest in human rights, international law, ethical consumerism, fair trade or sustainable fashion; people working for or following organisations like Amnesty International, UNICEF or Acts of Mercy; people studying or working in community and social services. This group already cares about exploitation and injustice as a cause. They arrive at the show with context, not just curiosity.
- The true crime audience — fans of Serial, Making a Murderer, American Crime Story, Unsolved Mysteries, and Investigation Discovery. People who have already demonstrated they consume this content category in depth.
- The fraud and cybersecurity professional — fraud investigators, fraud analysts, certified fraud examiners, cybersecurity analysts and specialists. People with direct professional relevance to the subject matter.
Running across all three groups was a subtler values signal: interest in U2, Bono, Coldplay, Mumford & Sons, and Alicia Keys — artists consistently associated with social conscience and humanitarian causes. A proxy for values alignment that doesn’t require an explicitly declared cause of interest to trigger.
Layer Two — The Mandatory Filter
Everyone in the qualifying pool had to additionally demonstrate confirmed podcast and audio consumption behaviour — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRadio, Podcast as a declared interest, and YouTube. This single filter ensures that every impression goes to someone who has already self-identified as an active audio content consumer.
The result: values-aligned, genre-familiar, and behaviourally qualified before a single dollar is spent on creative.
Age targeting was split by platform — Facebook campaigns targeted 30 to 65+ (the established commuter professional with ingrained podcast habits), Instagram campaigns targeted 18 to 34. Facebook and Instagram ran as entirely separate ad sets, ensuring clean platform-level performance data rather than algorithm-blended averages that obscure what’s actually working.
The Creative Approach — Let the Audience Tell You Who They Are
Each of the ten ad sets contained between 2 and 8 individual ads, with creatives built around three distinct angles on the same story.
- The anti-trafficking and humanitarian angle led with the human cost — forced criminality, modern slavery, two people trapped inside a system designed to exploit them.
- The true crime angle led with the thriller — the disappearance, the compound, the escape.
- The scambait and crypto angle led with the mechanics — pig butchering, digital fraud, the industrial architecture of the scam industry.
Each ad was built to feel like the opening of a podcast episode rather than a product advertisement. The hook was a story. The call to action was curiosity. The goal was not a click — it was a listener who arrived at the show already knowing exactly why they were there.
All three angles ran simultaneously at comparable initial spend, giving the algorithm equal opportunity to find the audience for each. The results were unambiguous — but the full picture is more nuanced than a simple winner-loser table suggests.
The humanitarian angle — specifically the ad “The Moment She Knew” — was the dominant performer across every market it ran in:
- London Facebook: 6,658 content views — 9.77% CTR — $0.05 CPC
- New York Facebook: 6,337 content views — 11.08% CTR — $0.08 CPC
- Toronto Facebook: 4,210 content views — 10.13% CTR — $0.05 CPC
- Sydney Facebook: 3,413 content views — 10.88% CTR — $0.05 CPC
Four cities. Exactly the same audience composition. CTRs between 9.77% and 11.08% — running at 370 to 420% of the Meta Arts and Entertainment industry benchmark of 2.64%. The algorithm found the signal, strongly backed it, and replicated the result without manual intervention.
The true crime angle delivered what would, in almost any other campaign, be considered outstanding results — CTRs of 4.2% to 6.8%, representing 159% to 258% of the industry benchmark. It only appears secondary because of the extraordinary standard set by the humanitarian creative running alongside it.
The scambait and crypto angle is the most instructive finding of the three. On Facebook in London and Sydney, it delivered CTRs of 2.32% and 2.38% — approaching the industry benchmark of 2.64% — results that would be considered solid for a standard entertainment campaign. The algorithm redistributed budget away from it, not because it was a poor ad in absolute terms, but because the bar set by the other angles was simply higher.
One ad in particular — “Scammers Are Victims Too” — underperformed across all markets, and especially on Instagram. The reason is worth understanding. The ad asked a cold audience to hold a counterintuitive idea before they had invested anything in the story: that the men and women executing the scripts in the elaborate playbooks — making the calls, sending the messages, grooming strangers online for financial exploitation — are often victims themselves. Lured across borders with false job offers, their passports confiscated, held inside compounds under threat of violence, and handed a script to follow or face the consequences.
That is not just one of the most important ideas in the series — it is the central truth the series unravels. And it is precisely that truth which makes it a difficult cold ad. The cognitive load is too high before trust has been established. It is the kind of revelation that earns its power ten minutes into Episode 1 — not in a three-second impression window. It may also explain why the message found less traction with the fraud and cybersecurity professional audience — a group whose training positions the scammer as adversary, not victim. That reframing is the heart of the series. It just needs more than three seconds to land.
The aggregate picture: the humanitarian angle accounted for 69% of total campaign spend and 73% of all content views. But the more important finding is what the performance hierarchy reveals about the audience itself.
The targeting architecture had been built to reach three overlapping groups — the socially conscious audience, the true crime consumer, and the fraud professional. All three were present in the qualifying pool. The testing showed which group self-identified most strongly when given the choice. It was not the crime that connected most powerfully. It was the victim. The people who stopped scrolling, clicked, and engaged were the ones for whom Micah and Ava’s story was first and foremost a human story — not a genre experience, not a professional case study, but a story about what happens to ordinary people when systems designed to exploit them operate without consequence.
That audience was always there. The testing confirmed it — and gave the algorithm exactly the signal it needed to find more of them.
When a story has multiple genuine entry points, test all of them at low spend and follow where the audience leads. The algorithm is not a media buyer. It is a mirror.
The Results
The campaign ran from 28 May to 15 June 2025 across ten ad sets in four cities.
Total spend: USD $6,501.
Campaign Totals
- 822,403 total impressions
- 48,996 website content views
- Blended CTR: 6.6%
- Blended CPC: $0.13 USD
- $0.76 USD cost per verified download
City-by-City Performance
- London was the most efficient primary city at scale. The Facebook campaign targeting adults 30 to 65 reached 94,327 people across 155,259 impressions, generating 9,229 content views at a CTR of 6.99% and a cost per click of $0.09 — under ten cents per qualified click at meaningful reach.
- New York received the largest single budget allocation at $2,363 across Facebook and Instagram combined. The Facebook campaign targeting 18 to 34 year olds delivered 9,638 content views at a 7.78% CTR and a $0.13 CPC — the campaign’s highest volume result, with strong efficiency in the world’s most competitive advertising market.
- Sydney delivered a Facebook CTR of 7.04% with a $0.10 CPC, confirming the targeting architecture performed comparably across both the Australian and UK markets.
- Toronto was the campaign’s most significant strategic finding. Added as a proof-of-concept test on a total budget of $479, the Facebook ad set achieved a 10.12% CTR and $0.05 CPC — the highest CTR and lowest cost per click of any ad set in the entire campaign. On $252 of spend, in a city that received no optimisation attention beyond the standard targeting stack.
Same architecture. New city. Stronger result.
The Retargeting Layer
Two dedicated retargeting ad sets ran alongside the cold city campaigns — one targeting all users who had engaged with video for 3+ seconds or visited the show website, and a second targeting that same audience, filtered to iOS devices only. Combined spend: $773. Combined content views: 7,149. Both ad sets maintained CTRs above 6.9%, confirming consistent performance across the full funnel.
The Outcome
The clearest result in this campaign requires no attribution modelling, no platform cross-referencing, and no directional inference. It is a direct, like-for-like comparison within the same show, measured on the same platform, against the same methodology.
Escaping Scam City Season 2 Episode 1, “I’m Coming For You,” achieved 2,019 downloads in its first 30 days. That is the highest first-month episode performance in the show’s entire history — across both seasons. Season 1 had People Magazine. It had IJM’s global network. It had the Singapore Fintech Festival. Season 2 had paid social.
Season 2 won. And then it kept winning.
At the time of writing, Escaping Scam City has surpassed 140,000 downloads — more than double the 55,000 downloads Finding Ruby accumulated across two full years, with every institutional advantage available to it. Pro-rated to the same two-year window. That is not a better result. It is a different category of result entirely.
Escaping Scam City launched into a listener base across 54 countries and 834 cities. The United States accounted for 45% of listeners, Australia 26%, Singapore 6%, Canada 5% and the United Kingdom 5%.
In September 2025, The Fight of My Life entered the Top 10 True Crime podcasts in the United States on Apple Podcasts — an editorial milestone that no budget can purchase directly. The paid work built the audience. The audience generated the behavioural data. The platforms responded.
It is worth being precise about the attribution picture. Meta, Squarespace and podcast platform data do not form a clean chain — a reality every podcast producer navigating multi-platform measurement already understands. What the data shows is directional correlation, not causal proof. The US received 35.5% of city-targeted clicks and accounts for 48.3% of downloads. Australia received 19.2% of city clicks and accounts for 27.5% of downloads. Both markets overperformed their click share — the signature of paid social doing its job: reaching the right people, who then tell others.
Singapore received zero paid media. The listener spike there was generated entirely by a live launch event on 27 May — the day before the Meta campaign launched. Paid social and live events are not competing acquisition channels. They compound.
In October 2025, Escaping Scam City was awarded a Gold Shorty Impact Award for Human Rights and a Silver Anthem Award — recognition that the show had not only found its audience but moved it to act. And act they did. Listeners donated funds to repatriate hundreds of scam survivors who, after being rescued from compounds on the Thai-Myanmar border, remained stranded without the means to return home. When the show’s protagonist Ava was found guilty of scamming by a Thai court — rather than correctly classified as a victim of forced criminality — the same community of listeners funded her bail and hired a defence attorney to appeal her conviction. That process remains ongoing.
A $6,500 paid social campaign found the audience. The audience found the story. The story moved people to act in ways that changed real lives.
The conversation the show started has since reached the highest levels of international policy. In 2025, co-producer Jacob Sims presented in the session Escaping Scam City: Untangling the Human and Economic Cost of Cybercrime at The Milken Institute Asia Summit alongside representatives from CNN International, Meta, the Washington Post, and Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency — unpacking the same cybercrime ecosystem that Micah and Ava survived from the inside. The story that paid social helped find an audience for is now informing the people with the power to dismantle the system it exposed.
That is not a marketing outcome. That is what happens when the right story reaches the right people — systematically, measurably, and at a cost that can be replicated in any city with a commuter culture and a podcast listener base.
The Investment Model
At the conversion rates this campaign demonstrated, $0.76 USD delivers one verified listener. $1,000 delivers approximately 1,300. $5,000 delivers meaningful reach in any target English-speaking city with a commuter culture — with real-time reporting, city-level performance data, and measurable listener acquisition that can be reviewed, adjusted and scaled.
The Toronto result directly answers the replicability question. A city added mid-campaign, with a total spend of $479, and without additional optimisation, outperformed every primary market on cost efficiency. The targeting architecture travels. The city is a variable, not a constraint.
Pick a city. Define the audience. Here is what the investment delivers.
Finding Ruby grew because it earned extraordinary institutional support, award recognition and high-profile placement — all real, all meaningful, none of it guaranteed, replicable or fundable in advance.
Escaping Scam City grew because a system was built to find the right audience in the right cities at a cost that could be measured, reported, and scaled. The highest-performing episode in the show’s history is the proof. The difference between the two seasons is paid social — applied with precision, not optimism.
