Advertiser Blues

This was not a post I thought I’d be writing.

The last month, ever since the book came out, after the initial social bump it’s been pretty flat, so I decided it’s not time to kick in the advertising engine. Social’s nice and all, but not exactly too long-term sustainable without some significant inputs of time and creativity. Which is great to do, of course, but I also wanted to do a comparison with the quick boost that comes from the paid approach.

Well, little did I expect it to be this… problematic.

LinkedIn – need a minimum of Rs. 30K to start a campaign. Maybe not the first option to jump onto.
Google – whoops, policy violation. I should’ve thought the cover blurb through. Profanity may not be equally acceptable to everyone… guess I need to do a new ad design for covers & banners.
Facebook – bizarrely, absolutely refused to activate an ad account. Must have tried variations of device, network, credit card, and location across 30+ combos – no luck. Permanently looking at a ‘could not activate your payment option’ for weeks. Even took some prepaid amount via UPI, but is absolutely insistent on having a credit card on file before activating – and steadfastly refusing to accept any credit card. Finally stopped responding altogether to tickets raised.
Amazon – Even stranger. Similar to FB, they also had issues in activating a credit card, but for an even weirder reason – the page was blank except for a few icons and partial text. That got fixed when you change your language from UK to US, only from that page. Then we again ran into limits – Amazon was accepting nothing under 10K for CC and 25K for direct deposit. A very nice customer service agent promised this could be immediately fixed to a limit I wanted, but as soon as they did it… poof. Amazon itself vanished. Site cannot be opened. Have a feeling this got firewalled or something, but will check later from a different network.

This leaves… X, I suppose. Dread to think what awaits me there.

Meanwhile, NotionPress is going all out to sell me an Amazon advertising package. Last resort.

Every day a new adventure in Digital Marketing, as always.