BrandStar Digital, Deerfield Beach FL

I am a small business owner that hired brand star digital to manage my marketing (specifically FB and Google ads). I had high hopes as I met the owner Seth in person and really trusted his marketing acumen. After a couple of zoom meetings with ‘the team’ and paying a significant setup fee, the day before launch of the ads that they presented to me (which took 6 weeks from when I paid them). I quickly learned they spent no time working on my account; they spelled the name of my company wrong, spelled the name of my celebrity endorser wrong in the actual ad copy, they used unappealing images from my assets that were old, untouched and not at all optimized. Then they cropped out the product I sell of one of the images completely. The other images they randomly chose out of MY assets were subpar. I could not believe that these ‘experienced’ marketers would even think about launching the ads that they presented. I was baffled. After my concerns I tried to reach out to the owner of the company, but he was on vacation and said would get back to me the following week. I also reached out to the Google ads manager and she was on vacation too but I was told the Facebook ads manager would be picking up the slack for both accounts. I was patient with that first week and had little communication other than damage control from their account manager assuring me the issues were a mistake and will be fixed. After they ‘fixed’ the ads, it became clear to me that no work or effort was done on my account and the people creating the ads were either incompetent or had no experience. More egregious mistakes were made, they did not even set up my pixel to my store and they wasted $500 of a Google ads coupon that they said they would utilize. The new ads were laughable. And through all this, terrible communication. When I never heard back from the owner I decided that I had no faith in the company and stopped all ads and sent an email to go our separate ways and bullet pointed mistake after mistake. They offered me a free month of ads management and assured me they would improve the ads. I declined and requested my setup fee payment back and a log or accounting of the time spent on my set up (they did no setup) and of course they never sent any time accounting of the setup and again they did not respond and finally a week later I had to send a nasty email letting them know that if they do not refund my money that I would have to take them to small claims court and I would give them a week to refund me or work something out. I was trying to be as reasonable as I could. I then finally heard back from Seth saying “sorry, I forgot to press send on my response to your last email” it was a joke and par the course dealing with that company. Anyway he would not refund my money and said all my communications will now be handled with legal… It’s been a nightmare and I hate to spend more wasted time on spreading the word about this unethical and inept company, but I do feel compelled to protect other companies from being scammed they way I was… I will keep you posted if I get refunded in small claims court…