If you are reading this, you are probably already leary about Union News. You should be. My business partner and I were approached by their advertising sales rep, Sam Wizowsky (not sure about that spelling). I kindly let him know that we do not like to advertise as we never see a good return on investment and work 99% by referral.
After a long pitch about all the exposure we would get he also mentioned that if we do not get any business in 6 months, we would get a full refund. I decided to give the $700 price tag a risk free shot. After the first couple weeks we asked that the advertising promised be provided. They had us in the wrong cities and in subpar placement when we were promised prime placement. After a couple months of "my tech team is working on it" and "sorry, we'll get it fixed for you", I decided to give up and wait it out until the 6 months mark.
After 6 months passed we hadn't recieved a single call from the $700 we spent. Not a single call - much less something that turned into business. I called Union News only to get an empty voicemail for weeks. I emailed repeatedly with no response. Finally I got a response from Brandon Tyler.
I explained the entire situation and he informed me that Sam had moved on to greener pastures. He then apologized profusely for the advertising still not being set up correctly and promised to fix it. I denied his offer and just asked for my money back. He said that he couldn't do that and it was company policy not to refund anything. I again reminded him that their sales rep, Sam, had informed us of the risk free trial. Brandon then told me that the company has a policy and it doesn't perform on their reps promises.
That is where I started to boil over. How am I supposed to know their company policies better than one of their sales reps?! Secondly, how can a company operate without having sales reps that represent the company policies?! Brandon said he would "ask his manager (or maybe owners - whatever...it's the old used car line)". They refused to adhere to their sales reps promises and stuck to the company line of not abiding by what their sales reps promise.
He did make a couple of the promised corrections (not all) to the advertising but refused to give any refund whatsoever.
Long story short, you should absolutely NOT do business with any company like this. Dishonest and deceptive practices seem accepted and commonplace with the organization. Lastly, it has been a year or so since we have been on their site as advertisers and have not had even 1 single phone call.
Mike Roberts