We here at A3 Media are always looking for and researching the newest, most up-to-date technologies, especially when it is in our field of Advertising. We always want to be on the cutting edge. In fact, all of us here at A3 Media are expected to stay current and we spend time each week reading, taking webinars, and researching everything we can find regarding media. We occasionally come across a new vendor that we think could be another great tool to add to our toolbox. But what happens when you have used a vendor in the past and let’s just say, it didn’t go quite as planned. Will you circle back after some time to see what changes were made in that company? Or will you just move on and not look back?
Pre-Covid days, one of our buyers came across a new digital company. They were vetted and it was decided that they would be a good fit for an upcoming campaign. We were cautiously optimistic and if they could deliver and meet our goals as well as their reporting capabilities were very impressive and far better than any other digital vendors we have used to date. Well, whoever coined the phrase “too good to be true”?
The campaign started and we had scheduled a conference call/dashboard tutorial with our account executive a few days after the start. This meeting was to show us in real-time how our campaign was performing on their dashboard. The meeting starts and they start showing us our live buy. However, the dashboard analyst is moving very quickly through different areas and after only 2 minutes we already start to see problems. We let the analyst go through different areas of their dashboard as we took notes.
The meeting ends and the instructor opens the floor for questions. This is where it starts to go south. We had asked them to go back and show us the data they were pulling. It was here that we immediately could see that our impressions were not only being served in our contracted areas but in areas that we did not purchase throughout the country. Upon more research, we were able to see that our contracted demo was also altered, and they were delivering impressions outside our contracted demo. It doesn’t end here; the pacing of these impressions is very important to us and we clearly could see that our delivery caps were removed. We had a delivery cap per day and that was removed resulting in a large amount of over delivery. These were just the hits and we shut the buy down before the end of the meeting.
Expectations were not met. They failed to deliver what was contracted for and even worse, using their own platform we were finding flaws in their own reporting capabilities. This resulted in a full refund, and we moved on. We will shake it off and move on.
It has been a few years since this mishap and our paths crossed again. We are again cautiously optimistic and have made plans to be re-introduced to this vendor and see how much progress has been made since our last go round. For it was our campaign that helped them shape and refine their platform. We here at A3 Media are open-minded and always know that change is always around the corner. Stay tuned for the results of our next meeting.