Law Technology

Odd Marketing Call

I received a call from an advertising company. Normally, these are a rip-off. Even if you are a fan of advertising, for the same price that they charge, you can do two to three times more advertising on your own, than you can with these firms assistance.

The company was doing a national advertising buy and then parcelling out the pieces and parts to various markets. I do know that national advertising is much cheaper than buying local advertising, so I was willing to at least listen to the pitch, but with a hefty dose of skepticism.

First thing I want to know about any of these advertising / marketing schemes is what is their minimum contract length. If they want to lock you into a year of expensive advertising, but are not going to give any guarantees, or let you out of the contract if you're not getting results, it means to me that they don't really believe in their contract.

I met a vendor at the Southern Trial Lawyer's Convention, who was doing internet based advertising (more on that later), but he said he was more than willing to do a 3 month sign up and a month to month contract. That's someone that's confident in their product.

The approximate price for the advertising on the call was $2,500 a month, which is about $30,000 a year. The first thing they wanted to do was set up an appointment for a 45 minute sales pitch. Wow. I can't think of nearly anything that I would want to listen to for 45 minutes and an advertising sales pitch certainly wouldn't be near the top of the list. Just show me the numbers and I can make a decision in less than two minutes.

The next thing is that I wanted to know was how much they stood by their product (which was not very much). Guaranteed year contract for $30,000. According to them, they had ‘guarantee' that you would get double your money out of their advertising. I asked them ‘Okay. So what happens if after three months, I don't get much of a response, can I cancel?' No. ‘So how would I get double my money back, if I'm not getting much of a response?'  Well….we would just keep advertising longer until you got ‘your money's worth' out of it.

Then the guy on the phone took me to task for having a negative attitude and that this was never going to work, if I started off with a negative attitude and that I needed to be more positive about it. It was quite a lecture.

Let me get this straight. They want me to pay them $30,000 a year and I'm not even allowed to ask questions about their program? I'm not supposed to ask questions about what happens for the $30,000 that they want me to spend? That's when the conversation ended rather abruptly.

Full post as published by South Carolina Trial Law Blog on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).