Complaint / Review
Icrossing
Sold our SEM Data To Competitors, Wrecked Our Brand

I used to work for one of the biggest banks in the US and icrossing was our search marketing firm. We paid them MILLIONS to do SEM and market research that was supposed to be for US ONLY. I recently was in PHX and met with one of their laid off employees who told me that they have been selling our analysis and reports under a different brand name. They are also selling conversion data, research, and analytics for everyone they have that uses omniture and
sycara through a backdoor hack since they developed some of the software. We paid a lot of money for semantic analysis of keywords that would drive traffic and I found out firsthand that they shopped the same words to 3 banks in
California last May WHILE WE STILL RETAINED THEM AS AN AGENCY. They rented a vacant office near the TPC golf course (Night Digital because they moonlight, ha ha) nearby as a front company (apparently this "office" is used for other stuff as well, but that is a different story) and paid their researchers as contractors to repackage our info, then
billed us for the hours! All they did was slap a different logo on the reports and sell them under the table. THIS IS TOTALLY ILLEGAL AND UNETHICAL.

If you go with icrossing you should ask your account manager who else she is working for, and how many outside jobs she has. Ask where else your custom research is going and who else gets to see your findings. A lot of us got canned because we lost our share of voice, and guess who was responsible. Icrossing told us they have a Chinese wall for information between competitors but I found out that was a lie, and they way they get results is to share information from competing companies, and the same person might be on 2 competing accounts at icrossing and then sell learnings from both to other agencies and brands. From what my contact said they also sold reports from bebe, Hundai, Ashley, Epson, and lego to interested parties. If you have done business with icrossing and wonder why your SEM got more expensive it is because a they have salespeople who copied ALL YOUR DATA on a jump drive and sold it to your competitors under a different name.