Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you — the business buying advertising space — and Instant Authority LLC, doing business as Direct Marketing Monster, a North Carolina limited liability company. “We”, “us” and “Direct Marketing Monster” mean Instant Authority LLC. “You” means the business named on the order and the person accepting these terms on its behalf, who confirms they are authorised to do so.

You accept these terms when you complete checkout, submit artwork, or approve a proof — whichever happens first.

The card is a single oversized postcard carrying advertisements for a limited number of local businesses, printed and mailed together through the United States Postal Service Every Door Direct Mail programme to the carrier routes listed on the card page at the time you buy.

A standard slot includes:

• One advertisement measuring 3.8 by 2.5 inches. A double slot, where available, measures 3.8 by 5 inches in portrait orientation — the same width, twice the height.
• Design and typesetting of that advertisement from the details you supply.
• A tracked telephone number that forwards to your business line, subject to clause 8.
• A landing page at a permanent address, subject to clause 9.
• A results report covering the drop, drawn from call, text and page data.

Printing, postage and mailing are our responsibility and are included in the price. You are buying space on a card we produce; you are not buying a print run, a mailing list, or the postal permit.

We sell one business per category on any given card. If you buy the roofing slot, no other roofer appears on that card.

We define the boundaries of a category, and our decision on whether two businesses compete is final. We may decline any business, including one whose category is already taken, one whose work overlaps an existing advertiser closely enough to cause a conflict, or one we judge unsuitable for the card. Where we decline you after taking payment, clause 15 and the refund policy apply.

Prices are in US dollars and are the prices shown at checkout. A single drop is $595. A prepaid three-drop package is $1,650. An annual package of twelve drops is $5,950. A double slot, where available, adds $500.

Payment is due in full before the card goes to print. Payments are processed by Stripe; we never receive or store your card number. A slot is not reserved until payment clears, and a reservation held during checkout expires automatically.

No employee, contractor or sales representative of Direct Marketing Monster has authority to agree a price other than the published one, to promise a discount outside a code issued by us, or to accept payment outside Stripe. An arrangement made outside those bounds does not bind us.

You give us your business details, offer and any logo or photography through the intake form. We build the advertisement and send you a proof to approve.

If we do not have your approval by the deadline, we may, at our discretion:

• run the most recent advertisement you previously approved, if you have one; or
• move your slot to the next card, in which case your category remains held for you and the drop you paid for is not lost; or
• run the proof as last sent to you, if you have neither approved nor requested changes.

We do not commit to a mail date. The card page shows the date we are working towards, and we will tell you if it moves, but the actual delivery window depends on the printer and on which day the Postal Service accepts and distributes the drop. Postal delivery of an EDDM drop typically spans several days. A date shown anywhere on this site or in correspondence is an estimate, not a term of this agreement.

You are responsible for what your advertisement says. By submitting content you confirm that you own it or have permission to use it, that any offer, price, claim, guarantee, licence number or credential in it is true and lawful, and that it does not infringe anyone’s rights.

You grant us a non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt for print and web, and display that content on the card, on your landing page, and in our own portfolio and marketing examples. That licence continues for material already printed and mailed, since we cannot recall a postcard.

We may refuse or require changes to any content, and we may decline to print an advertisement whose claims we cannot support. We are not obliged to verify your claims, and reviewing a proof is not approval of your offer’s legality.

You agree that your advertising complies with applicable law, including advertising and consumer-protection rules, licensing and permit requirements for your trade, and rules on discriminatory advertising. You agree not to use a tracked number or landing page supplied by us for anything unlawful, and not to send unsolicited marketing text messages from a number we provide.

The tracked number is provisioned by us through our telecommunications provider and remains ours. It is not portable, you cannot take it with you, and it is not a substitute for your own business line. It forwards to the number you give us, and a short announcement plays to you before the call connects so you know the call came from the card.

If you stop advertising, we hold the number for 90 days after your last card mails, so that people holding a card in their kitchen still reach you, and then we may release it.

Your landing page lives at a permanent web address derived from your business name. We never reassign that address to another business, because cards stay on refrigerators for months and a scanned code must never lead to a competitor.

The page is generated from the same details as your advertisement and updates when they do. If you stop advertising, the page stays live and unchanged for 90 days after your last card mails; after that it becomes a short notice that the offer has ended, with a link to the current card. We do not delete it and we do not redirect it.

Insights is an optional monthly subscription at $97 per month that adds call recordings, missed-call text-back, two-way texting and instant alerts. It is billed monthly through Stripe and continues until you cancel.

You can cancel at any time from the portal. Access continues to the end of the month you have paid for and is not prorated. Cancelling does not extend the 90-day recording retention in clause 8 — recordings are deleted on schedule whether or not you subscribe.

At checkout you may choose to have your package renew automatically. If you do, we will:

• tell you at the point of purchase what will be charged, how often, and that it continues until cancelled;
• email you a reminder before each renewal charge, with the amount and the date; and
• give you a way to cancel in the portal that takes effect immediately and takes no longer than signing up did.

We are careful about this because the rest of the industry is not, and because a promise we cannot keep costs more than a sale is worth.

We report calls that lasted longer than sixty seconds rather than raw call counts, because a ringing phone is not a conversation. That is a deliberately conservative measure and it is the one we will stand behind.

We do not promise that the card will carry a full complement of advertisers, that any particular business will or will not appear alongside you beyond the category exclusivity in clause 3, or that any specific household will receive the card. Postal delivery is the Postal Service’s to perform.

We do not tell any advertiser what another advertiser paid, and we ask the same of you. What you paid, including any discount or introductory arrangement, is between us.

Calls, texts, form submissions and page visits generated by your advertisement are processed by us and made available to you. Both of us have obligations to the people behind that data. Our side is described in the privacy policy. Your side is that you use those details to respond to the enquiry and to run your own business honestly — you do not add them to a marketing text list, sell them, or pass them to anyone else.

The refund and cancellation policy forms part of these terms. In summary: a drop is fully refundable at any time before its artwork deadline, and final once the card goes to print.

You may stop advertising at any time by not renewing, or by cancelling under the refund policy. We may end this agreement, and remove or decline to print your advertisement, if payment fails, if your content breaches clause 6 or 7, or if continuing would put us in breach of the law or of the Postal Service’s rules. Where we end it for one of those reasons after a card has printed, no refund is due for that drop.

Clauses 8 and 9 — the parking of your number and page — survive the end of this agreement, as do clauses 6, 12, 13, 17, 18 and 19.

The service is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. We are not liable for lost profits, lost business, lost goodwill or any indirect or consequential loss, including loss caused by a printing error, a missed or delayed mail date, a fault in call forwarding, or an outage at a supplier we depend on.

Where a printing or production error is ours and materially misrepresents your business — a wrong phone number, a wrong price — our remedy is to reprint the correction on the next card at our cost, to refund that drop, or a combination of the two, at your choice. That is the whole of our obligation for such an error.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your advertisement, your offer, your use of a tracked number or landing page, or your breach of these terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of North Carolina, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts sitting in Craven County, North Carolina, and both of us consent to that venue.

Talk to us first. Before starting a chargeback or a claim, email support@directmarketingmonster.com. We are one person in New Bern and almost everything is faster to fix directly.

We may update these terms. The version in force for a drop is the version published when you paid for that drop, so a change never applies retroactively to a card you have already bought. Material changes will be emailed to current advertisers.