Yellowpages Advertising

I have placed a lot of advertising orders through the years. Most of the time the sales people you deal with may be a little aggressive but not to the point where they annoy you. I have recently found the pushiest, yet most unresponsive, advertising company yet.

AT&T Yellowpages

I started dealing with them about 6 weeks ago. I was looking to purchase a print ad in the Kansas City edition as well as an online advertisement. For this I was working with two different ad reps. One for online and one for print (I later found out that the print ad rep was supposed to handle it all).

Online Ad Placement Experience

I was told it was going to take 4 - 6 weeks to get an online search ad up and running. This is horrible, everything else in the online world is nearly instantaneous. After filling out lots of forms, signing contracts and making several phone calls things appeared to be complete. 4 weeks went by. Then I started going through the chain of command to find out what was going on. Finally, one of them helped me out and got the ad up in 24 hours. Except it wasn't my ad. It was a crappy looking banner and listed under the wrong geographic area.

I then actually had quality control call me to ask how everything was going! I told them my troubles and I got a call from my ad rep within minutes. I was assured everything would be fixed. That is where it all stopped. It has been 3 days without her returning a call, email or sending me the form that she promised.

How can a place operate with such bad customer service! The worst part is this may be better than my print ad experience with them.

Print Ad Placement Experience

From the first time I called, I knew this was going to suck. The ad representative was pushy, full of sales cliches and wouldn't send me anything in writing. She called me EVERYDAY! "Josh, I just wanted to get an update..." What the hell, I told her I would call her with any updates.

I just wanted pricing. Instead I kept getting the run around and unclear answers about the cost. She wanted me to advertise in a special issue for extra money, I simply said "Mail me that issue and I will see what it looks like". The next week she calls back and asks for my order. I tell her I never received the issue. She was embarrassed and the next day I got a St. Louis phone book in the mail. The next day she called ask asked for my order. I explained that I live in Kansas City, not St. Louis and it wasn't the "special edition" that she was trying to sell me.

After finally having my calls screened so I wouldn't have to talk to this mega-pushy sales rep. I finally told her I wasn't going to spend my 11k dollars with her this year and told her not to call me. They should have my business, but instead because of how bad the experience was we opted not even to advertise with them.

I hope other people do not have this bad of an experience with them, but if they do I really hope you don't own AT&T stock because you cannot stay in business running this bad of an operation.

Hopefully, my online ad will get online someday :P