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Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 8:03 PM
A congressional candidate in an adjacent district to mine and I decided to pool resources in a "shared digital campaign," in order to both save money, and extend the reach of our messages. It was the first experience with digital advertising for both of us, and at first we felt we would surely be in good hands with the Sun Sentinel, which is after all a seemingly mature agency. Unfortunately, our experience did NOT warrant that confidence, and cost us much more than the loss of a few advertising dollars.
Because we paid separately, my complaint and request to reverse the transaction will of necessity detail just my own experience, and the other candidate may be seeking redress along a separate path.
From the first conversation with the sales agent, there were misrepresentations about the delivery of services.
On or about July 25, 2022 the agent said that the ad campaign could (would) be up and running within 3 days.
In fact, it took until Aug 5 for merchant to process payment, and until Aug 8 to begin the digital ad campaign, which was deployed with incorrect art on or about Aug 8 and art was not corrected until on or about Aug 12.
It was misrepresented that I would have access to a live actor dashboard to monitor the advertising campaign. There was never a live actor dashboard provided, only a dashboard that was updated every 24 hours. This complicated making critical and timely decisions.
When the campaign actually launched, I was closely monitoring my own website statistics, and was alarmed at results less than my lowest expectations, and indications that I was getting any response at all except from 5 cities in my district.
Although the marketer's dashboard features a tab to report geofenced areas of distribution, that tab was never enabled to display any data, and all I had to rely on were the salespersons assurances that the campaign was running as it should.
Another tremendous frustration, was that the salesman's job was to sell me the ad package. He proved over and over again that his expertise was NOT in the actual digital deployment of the campaign, and the Sun Sentinel company could have and should have assigned me to liaison directly with the "engineering" department personnel who actually handled that technical work.
On a tight schedule already, it would take me well over 24 hours to get answers to critical questions (and relate misgivings) about the progress of the campaign.
The salesman was already on to selling other packages to other clients, and his time was not focused on my campaign, nor could I speak to the critical key personnel who understand the technology, and who might have better counselled me as to better courses of action.
My original order for deployment was to distribute 1000 impressions in each of approx 20 cities in my congressional district, which the sales person accepted -- only to come back later to say that the campaign could not be deployed as ordered for reasons that were never explained satisfactorily to me.
Time was beginning to squeeze upon us, as election day Aug 23rd was now approaching fast.
The salesman assumed that I wanted an evened out deployment term running right up to election day, which was never a term I was consulted upon, nor would have agreed to. It was critical to get information to voters as soon as possible, especially as with all the delays on the part of Sun Sentinel, early voting (and mail-in voting) were already underway.
The salesman had told me that the 4 creatives (ads) to run in my district would run in "rotation," which most people would understand to mean a fairly even distribution -- but instead there was no similarity in the number of deployments of each ad.
My complaints are more numerous than I have briefed here -- but I do have documentation of my frustrations in over 270 SMS (text) exchanges, and dozens of emails that I will have to painstakingly organize to demonstrate the severity of the problems that plagued the campaign from the start to the finish.
Until last week, I had never heard of digital fraud. Now I know it is an ongoing and huge problem in the digital marketing industry, and while I am not at this time characterizing my experience as part of a fraudulent event -- the effects of poor management, incompetence, and lack of attention to important and critical details are certainly similar to what may have happened if there were a deliberate attempt to defraud.
Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 8:03 PM
A congressional candidate in an adjacent district to mine and I decided to pool resources in a "shared digital campaign," in order to both save money, and extend the reach of our messages. It was the first experience with digital advertising for both of us, and at first we felt we would surely be in good hands with the Sun Sentinel, which is after all a seemingly mature agency. Unfortunately, our experience did NOT warrant that confidence, and cost us much more than the loss of a few advertising dollars.
Because we paid separately, my complaint and request to reverse the transaction will of necessity detail just my own experience, and the other candidate may be seeking redress along a separate path.
From the first conversation with the sales agent, there were misrepresentations about the delivery of services.
On or about July 25, 2022 the agent said that the ad campaign could (would) be up and running within 3 days.
In fact, it took until Aug 5 for merchant to process payment, and until Aug 8 to begin the digital ad campaign, which was deployed with incorrect art on or about Aug 8 and art was not corrected until on or about Aug 12.
It was misrepresented that I would have access to a live actor dashboard to monitor the advertising campaign. There was never a live actor dashboard provided, only a dashboard that was updated every 24 hours. This complicated making critical and timely decisions.
When the campaign actually launched, I was closely monitoring my own website statistics, and was alarmed at results less than my lowest expectations, and indications that I was getting any response at all except from 5 cities in my district.
Although the marketer's dashboard features a tab to report geofenced areas of distribution, that tab was never enabled to display any data, and all I had to rely on were the salespersons assurances that the campaign was running as it should.
Another tremendous frustration, was that the salesman's job was to sell me the ad package. He proved over and over again that his expertise was NOT in the actual digital deployment of the campaign, and the Sun Sentinel company could have and should have assigned me to liaison directly with the "engineering" department personnel who actually handled that technical work.
On a tight schedule already, it would take me well over 24 hours to get answers to critical questions (and relate misgivings) about the progress of the campaign.
The salesman was already on to selling other packages to other clients, and his time was not focused on my campaign, nor could I speak to the critical key personnel who understand the technology, and who might have better counselled me as to better courses of action.
My original order for deployment was to distribute 1000 impressions in each of approx 20 cities in my congressional district, which the sales person accepted -- only to come back later to say that the campaign could not be deployed as ordered for reasons that were never explained satisfactorily to me.
Time was beginning to squeeze upon us, as election day Aug 23rd was now approaching fast.
The salesman assumed that I wanted an evened out deployment term running right up to election day, which was never a term I was consulted upon, nor would have agreed to. It was critical to get information to voters as soon as possible, especially as with all the delays on the part of Sun Sentinel, early voting (and mail-in voting) were already underway.
The salesman had told me that the 4 creatives (ads) to run in my district would run in "rotation," which most people would understand to mean a fairly even distribution -- but instead there was no similarity in the number of deployments of each ad.
My complaints are more numerous than I have briefed here -- but I do have documentation of my frustrations in over 270 SMS (text) exchanges, and dozens of emails that I will have to painstakingly organize to demonstrate the severity of the problems that plagued the campaign from the start to the finish.
Until last week, I had never heard of digital fraud. Now I know it is an ongoing and huge problem in the digital marketing industry, and while I am not at this time characterizing my experience as part of a fraudulent event -- the effects of poor management, incompetence, and lack of attention to important and critical details are certainly similar to what may have happened if there were a deliberate attempt to defraud.
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COPYLEFT NOTICE - ART BELOW IS ATTRIBUTED TO THE OWNERS CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE
The cat who choked on the canary. Debbie Wasserman Schultz" by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.