I recently had the occasion to need to run a mobile ad campaign on AdMob. I had been there before, worked through all of the tutorials and felt reasonably comfortable with the process. I am working in a group of people who are supposedly advertising there on a regular basis. Wow, I think that they are likely to be in need of some serious help from a mental health professional! I had my ad constructed and the only thing that I had left to do was to upload my banner ad. I did that and clicked the button to save and complete the ad. I received an error message saying that my banner had to comply with their guidlines which said that it had to be 320 x 48. I check, re-checked, created new banners, re-checked and tried again repeatedly. Nothing good happened!
I decided to solicit help from support. I pushed the button leading me to FAQ's. Does anyone ever really get anything from FAQ's? I mean, they are kind of like pointing out the obvious. What about all of the gray areas and instances that just defy logic? Isn't that when you call someone? Oh, that's right, you can't call because that would mean that someone would be giving you customer service that is valuable. How would that look?
Upon reflection, I'm thinking about all of the Guru's that I hear from on a daily basis. You know, they give away free stuff every day! Some of it might not be worth a lot and they may have "borrowed it" from someone else but hey, the original owner would have given it away too! By the way, I did look for a phone number here in the United States on the AdMob website but there wasn't any. Now, if I was in London or any number of other places on the globe I could have picked up the phone and called them because they have published phone numbers. No, that doesn't mean they would have answered but I do take some satisfaction in knowing I could have called them. Hmmm,.....what to do? You would think that Google wouldn't have paid $750 million for an outfit that gives such poor service would you?
I know, I'll run a mobile campaign on Mobile AdWords! So, I spent several hours doing that , getting that ready to run this morning starting at 7 a.m. Everything looked great and ready to go.
I couldn't help but peak at the campaign about 10 a.m. to see how things were going. Wait a minute! Now it says that it is under review!! A quick review yielded nothing but in navigating around the AdWords site it became obvious that you weren't going to see that "Under Review" sign unless you were in just the right place at the right time! Not very damn likely.
So, maybe we'll all get lucky and these two will decide to outsource all of their support and customer service functions to the top 6 internet gurus. At least we would get some service and things would work! Of course we might get cross sold and up-sold every time we turned around but I think I prefer that to being ignored when I have a need or an emergency.
I think I need to go see my old buddy (at least he says I am) Howie Schwartz about doing some ads on his mobile platform. I bet he'll get it done and probably today!
I'm thinking very seriously about attaching an auto responder to my e-mail accounts that sends everyone some boiler plate information. You know what I mean, something like" If you are trying to sell me a product or service I'm fine with that." But, "If you can only offer me a return e-mail on in 48 to 72 hours, don't bother!" Maybe you will too and we can change the world!!
Mark Thomas
