It’s unfortunate I feel compelled to leave a review for an agency that is for negative reasons rather than positive because that is typically not something I’d choose to do.
If this message can help someone pause and ask more questions before engaging this agency perhaps this review can do some good.
I’ve rarely seen such stark difference in words and actions than I’ve experienced from Eric Samson and his team at Group 8A.
Almost 9 months ago, we felt compelled to leave Group 8A and seek a new ad management team due to serious concerns with their performance in both creative assets and ad delivery management.
After discussing out desire to leave 8A at length with Eric, we agreed to move forward with a long (90-day) remediation period since we had just (quietly and unintentionally) entered into an automatic annual renewal on the contract, which was a main focus for Eric.
During this 90-day remediation period, we continued to have communication and performance issues with 8A. We evaluated their work at length directly with Facebook and Instagram teams at Meta as well as Google. Neither Google or Meta have anything to gain by pointing out Group 8A’s issues other than our success as an advertiser. We looked towards other ad management agencies for additional perspectives as well. We discovered egregious errors in Group 8A’s campaign structures, ad placements and data feed channels.
I wondered how such critical items could have been missed, so I took more time to look into the experience of our account team at Group 8A (comprised mostly of Caleb, Kristen, and Noam) and discovered each lacked any dedicated ad management or agency experience prior to Group 8A.
It’s been four months since this remediation period ended, and we continued with our decision to leave Group 8A. We've since been able to course correct these errors but it has taken quite some time and investment.
Despite this, Eric and his team are still sending new retainer invoices for services not rendered by Group 8A.
This whole experience is so ironic because the anchor message on Group 8A’s website, LinkedIn, sales pitch and other areas is their “client first”fee structure and commitment. More confounding still is the founding story and key message on Group 8A's website is Eric’s quote, “After working with several digital marketing agencies that nearly drove my business into the ground, I realized there needed to be a new kind of digital marketing agency – one that put their bottom dollar on the line with their client.”
Our partnership with Group 8A substantively injured our business while we were with them and their focus was most certainly on collecting retainer fees regardless.
Ultimately, we’re happy to have moved on from Group 8A and focused on the future of our business. In the meantime, I hope this serves as an additional piece of information in your agency discovery process.
