[lynngc]

yes. you know the one,
the phone rings, they say i'm from the fire brigade, police, ambulance, would you like to advertise in............bla bla.

i have been bombarded with these all week.

would'nt mind so much if they turned up in uniform selling.......But i can still dream....

but to say they are from these vital services, when they are infact are from advertising services, should not be allowed.


have any of you guys taken out calender, poster, diray, booklet advertising.


lynn

[blacksheep]

i agreed to pay ,i think £239 for a box advert on a wall chart thingy for children in distress somethink like that,dont get me wrong i like helping a good cause but when the wall chart arrive , i was expecting a bigger box then i got

[Ian Gourlay]

What anoysme is they say they are The Company they are supplying a booklet etc for.

In the First Instant  you think you are dealing withThe Estate Agent, Tesco or Fire Brigade

Somtimes when selling Estate AgentsMaps etc they say they will put work your way.

As they are not The Estate Agent but a Advertising Company they have no authority to say that.

[Tim Downer]

I paid around £300 for a small advert in a booklet that was supposed to have information regarding the local council, and was to be distributed to around 60,000 homes in the area. Paid the money....which was a year before printing.....never recived anything, nor my neighbours at the time, nor any friends.....and the telephone number stopped working too!!!

The other one was (and am i really that gullible??) to sponser some books for a local school on safety etc.....chose the kids school. Cannot remember how much it cost, but the school recieved the books, had my company name on the inside cover, and as far as i remember, the stupid books stayed in the boxes!!!

Oh well, life is a learning curve.......i suppose

Kind Regards

Tim

[AJCleaningServices]

We got a phone call.  They asked whether we would like to advertise on hospital appointment cards, about £170-00 for one year, cheap isn’t.  We asked to put their offer on writing, but never heard from them since…

[John Rimmer Marshall & Rimmer Ltd]

Avoid like the plaig a complete wast of money, like most of us i must get at least
2 or 3 phone calls a week, its more anoying than anything especialy if you are busy at the time.

                                  Take Care John

[mxg]

I would put all this down as part of the learning process when growing your business.

In the period between our startup and listing in the first of the directories we tried a variety of these schemes with pretty much the same return on investment as experienced by previous posters ie p poor.

So now I have developed a little portfolio of "answers"  which tends to make them go away without too much hassle

- if they purport to support some charity, I tell them that we have now adopted a new policy which is when we do advertising, we do advertising and when we do charity, we do charity and never the twain shall meet and unfortunately your charity is not one of our nominated charities [and we DO actually have nominated charities!]

- if its something else that I know or think won't work or I'm not interested in I say that we have just finalised our advertising budget for the next 12 months and that we have made no funding for this type of advertising as we have tried it in the past and not found it to be cost effective

It has cost me a good few hundred quid to come up with these answers! but I find that by having a ready made answer I am much less likely to leave myself open to somebody with a good sales patter

If they are from ufindus or one of that ilk, I'm afraid my reponses tend to be much more direct!

Mick

[Ged]

i was stupid enough to advertise on the stamp despenser at tesco through an agency that supplies your business cards in a dispenser for people to take. cost approx 600 quid for two years , response so far zero.

Prat!

Ged