How MySpace Advertising Steals Your Ad Money [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:43:33 +0000

On the surface, advertising on MySpace would seem like a relatively basic and fruitful enterprise: create a 728x90 banner, setup the ad, get seen by millions of users, and reap the rewards – there’s no weird custom ad decisions to make, like with Facebook. MySpace even makes it easy by using a single form to setup CPM vs. CPC, ad rates, daily/lifetime budgets, and all the other details.

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.

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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.

Diamond Lane – MySpace Relaunch [Self]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:03:02 +0000

Tonight my company launched the redesign of Diamond Lane's MySpace page, the first step in a larger plan for them to "make it big".

Check it out.

[official announcement]

Kyle Brady: Blog » MySpace

How MySpace Advertising Steals Your Ad Money [Expose]

Diamond Lane – MySpace Relaunch [Self]