Online Advertising Rant

Do you advertise Yahoo, ??

We have done online advertising for 8 years with Yahoo. When our web site went down a couple months ago we changed hosting companies after encountering a multitude of problems. All my ads continued to run on Yahoo before I had a chance to update all the information and when a product was clicked on, it would go to “Page not Found” because of the old URL . I rebuilt our entire advertising campaign with all the relevant information and new URL’s for almost 1000 of our products, Yahoo started to deny all of our advertising because they said it was unacceptable content. After 2 months of arguing with them I got the most ridiculous response this morning. This is the short version and totally unbelievable.

"We wish to tell you that according to our editorial guidelines we do not allow ads that promote or use the terms related to Cigarettes, cigars, smokeless tobacco and other tobacco products. If you say that there is no sales or promotion of tobacco products on your web site, you can remove the Cigar section on your website, and also remove the word ‘Cigar’ form your business name to get it editorial approved.
"

We do not sell or promote tobacco products on our web site but because we have “Cigar” in our business name they have decided it was unacceptable content. I did a search for tobacco related products on Yahoo and there are more than I can count that are paying for advertising. I e-mailed Yahoo a list of web sites that promote tobacco products and asked for an explanation of how that is ok and we are denied because of our biz name, it makes no sense.
I have asked them for a full refund of the balance of my advertising dollars left in my account .

Nice - they will take the money for 8 years first…

Yep - they reserve the right to manually approve everything. One of the things I dislike about them. Cigars are legal - yet they act as police.

Carrie

Just absurd and emabarassing for them.

I would ask for the money back of the past year as well.

Todd Anderson was here, he says hello.

Wow. You are an important guy. The Todd flies across the country to tell you to say hello to someone that lives in the same county he does. Pretty impressive.

Bruce

I may fly to Orlando to punch you in the face and say hello to Mickey!

I think the lines for the first may be longer than the lines for the second.

It’s pretty ridiculous. Have you every tried to get reimbursed for money they’ve already spent from a company like that ?
I got another e-mail from them yesterday saying my case has been forward to a “specialized expert” to review. HAHA ! Yahoo has people like that, I doubt it. More like an expert moron.

One of the attendee’s sent me a note that he was also there with Todd, I told him to give him a hug but he said he hadn’t had enough wine to do that