Expose:
How MySpace Advertising Steals Your Ad Money
October 16, 2009 by Kyle BradyTags: Advertising, Corporate Lies, Lies, MySpace, Theft
As required by the FTC, a Full Disclosure is available - this piece adheres to the Code of Ethics
However, they like to steal your money.
When I was setting up an ad for my company’s graphic design services that cater to artists/bands, I discovered the first stick in the mud: there’s a minimum daily rate, no matter what. We wanted to spend $100.00 stretched out over two months, letting the advertising system figure out when to display it, and this would not have been a problem with Google AdWords, but it’s MySpace, so you have to deal with their crap. After some tweaking, I found that they wanted a $5.00/day minimum, which would only net us 20 days – not quite the exposure we wanted. Deciding that spending a little more for longer exposure was acceptable, I setup $5.00/day for 25 days. It came back with an error message, giving complaining about the daily budget, so I clicked on “Lifetime Budget” and set it to $125.00, assuming that it would distribute the $125.00 over the 25 day campaign period.
Save. Billing. Confirm. Activate. Emails came saying it was pending, then approved, and finally active.
Imagine my surprise when I wake up to an email early the next morning saying that our account had been charged $100.35 for less than a day of activity. But instead of questioning it, I naively assumed that they were precharging our account for some reason, and let it go. Fast forward another day, and an email comes saying we’ve been charged $53.65 – now I’m pissed. I pause the campaign, fire off an email to Ad Support, and investigate on my own.
When I viewed the campaign’s settings… surprise! We had a $125.00/day budget, despite what my initial settings which were twice verified after activating the campaign. And there’s another $15.00 that they want me to pay for activity not-yet-billed, since the campaign’s been paused.
It took a few hours, but I received a vanilla response that treated me like a halfway literate child, stating the obvious: the daily budget was set to $125.00/day, and we were being charged according to our ad behaviors and settings. Naturally, I was even more pissed, and responded to let them know that I believed it was a technical error or glitch and that we wanted a refund.
Well, if you’ve ever dealt with a company’s billing or sales department before, you should recognize their response: it wasn’t a technical error, it was my fault, and they won’t give us a refund, but they’ll give us a $50.00 campaign credit. My reply was less than friendly, because, at this point, I feel like I’m dealing with mob bosses, and demand a larger campaign credit. This time they take a full 16 hours to respond, only to say that $50.00 was all they can offer, and then attempt to end the conversation. There has been no credit to the account.
For a small company with a very small advertising budget, these events are detrimental – we decided, for the first time, to advertise our services in a grand fashion, and MySpace spent more money than we had ever intended… in the first two days. A total of $169.00 has been billed to us by MySpace Advertising - $44.00 more than what we had set as a Lifetime Budget. And it’s been wasted over a brief <48 hours exposure that netted zero results.
Even with a $50 credit, which is only a few days’ worth of advertising, we’ve lost $119.00 to corporate theft and customer support evasion. No more advertising for us.
Thanks, MySpace. You’ve been an entertaining asshole for the last few days – would you like my lunch money? Or maybe the keys to my car? Actually, I don’t even need my girlfriend, so why don’t you go out with her?
I hope you die in a fire.
--- --- ---
Update (10/18/2009 4:20pm PST): I've been working with Steve Wilcox, MySpace's Marketing Director, since within an hour of posting this on Friday, and we've reached a solution after a few rounds of phone- and email-tag.
We received a full apology and a credit for the full amount charged, in addition to receiving a "good faith credit" for the amount we wanted to spend on advertising in the first place. The end result is that our advertising budget has now essentially doubled, and we're going to give it another try - hopefully with better results.
As of right now, we're very happy with the way this has been handled, as well as the outcome.
--- --- ---
Correspondence
From: Me
To: MySpace Advertising
Date: 10/15/2009
We set up the campaign very carefully to be $5/day, lifetime budget of $125 for 25 days.
How did this get changed to $125/day?
We've now been charged, in two days, more than we had ever intended to spend. Not only is this illegal, it's outrageous, since I have emails showing the setup of our campaign as such.
Please refund our money and fix this ASAP.
From: MySpace Advertising
To: Me
Date: 10/15/2009 12:20pm PST
Hello,
Whenever you create a new campaign, you will be asked to set a daily or lifetime spending limit for your campaign. You cannot have both a daily & lifetime budget at the same time. It's either a daily budget or a lifetime budget.
When the campaign was created it was setup with a Daily Budget of $125.00 which is why your campaign spent $125 in 1 day.
If your goal is to only spend $5 per day then you want to create a Daily budget of $5.
If your goal is to only spend $125 throughout the entire campaign then you want to create a Lifetime budget of $125.
Thank you for contacting MySpace MyAds.
Thank you,
MySpace.com
From: Me
To: MySpace Advertising
Date: 10/15/2009 2:10pm PST
It most certainly was not. I selected "Lifetime Budget", and input $125.00.
Your code-level error is not my responsibility, and I demand a refund, or at least gratis advertising for the remainder and parameters of what should have been our campaign.
From: MySpace Advertising
To: Me
Date: 10/15/2009 3:23pm PST
Our records show this was not a technical error. When creating the campaign you choose a daily budget of $125 instead of a lifetime budget.
MySpace MyAds is a Self Service platform and you are responsible for managing your campaigns.
We can offer you’re a $50 credit towards your campaigns however MySpace will not refund the $125 charge.
Thank you for contacting MySpace MyAds
From: Me
To: MySpace Advertising
Date: 10/15/2009 3:39pm PST
It was an error. You're honestly going to tell a customer of yours, one that just unexpectedly paid you over a hundred dollars, that they're wrong?
Do you really think I'd be bringing this issue up if I wasn't surprised at the situation results? And, given the nature of the company and what we do, do you really think I'm technically incompetent enough to have made such a dumb human error? The answer is no.
A $50 credit is a good start, but $100 would be more palatable, given how that is approximately how much we spent on the first day of our campaign, rather than almost the entire 25 day set.
From: MySpace Advertising
To: Me
Date: 10/16/2009 9:53am PST
Unfortunately a $50 credit is all we can offer.
Thank you for contacting MySpace MyAds.
From: Me
To: MySpace Advertising
Date: 10/16/2009 2:40pm PST
And where is this credit?
You guys fail once again.
Kyle can be found on Twitter and MySpace, or reached via email.
