Complaint Review: Hearst Media Group

Avoid doing any business with Hearst Media. They were supposed to do a media campaign for a new website we built. They gave us all the metrics they would use and things we could expect. Meanwhile every presentation they gave us had errors and typos in it. I guess we just weren't a big enough company for them to care. Against our better judgement we decided to go with them any way because we thought they would cross promote our company with the companies they are involved in. That obviously didn't happen. After paying them over $20,000 we saw zero results. We asked to see the metrics i.e. traffic being driven to the site, impressions, clicks, conversions etc. and each time it took them over a week to deliver the results. The results are monitored by Facebook, Google Adwords, Twitter and don't take a week to produce. You could literally pull data in real time and send to us. Every time they sent us a report, there were mathematical errors on it. Which means two things. One they weren't pulled directly from those sites, and two they were trying to back into the numbers they originally showed us but failed because they couldn't do arithmetic. WHen I called them out on the results, they said "you're right those numbers don't add up. let me look into it and get back to you". That took another week to hear back and more errors on the new reports. What a nightmare. We eventually disputed the charge on our credit card because they didn't live up to their end of the deal and refused to make it right. Now they are suing us...a multimillion dollar company is suing a start up. Bad people. Not the way you want to do business. Look elsewhere if you find yourself looking for a media company.