WeddingWire's False Advertising

In the wedding marketplace, WeddingWire, who recently merged with The Knot, is the equivalent of Google. Their couples' choice award is sought after by professionals and brides, and I happen to be one of the professionals who has earned it this year. The Knot offers similar awards. Unlike the Knot though, WeddingWire offers a free listing to vendors but will cold call you until you pay them. At best, it’s pushy. The problem with their cold calls is that they frequently say a year of advertising pays off with one sale. As a business major, I think this should be considered false advertising, and here’s why.

Yes, a single wedding is about the cost of the bottom-tier advertising, but a single wedding is never all profit. When the WeddingWire rep is making the previously mentioned statement, they are giving you a break-even analysis. In business, a break-even analysis is conducted by first calculating profit margin, then dividing the advertising cost by the profit amount.

Here's an example:

Profit Margin ($) = Total Cost ($) - Expenses ($)

Breakeven point (# of sales) = Advertising Cost ($)/Profit Margin ($)

With a scenario, you see that Weddingwire's advertising statement is next to impossible to achieve realistically. The product of the break-even analysis would have to equal one, meaning one sale, to make their statement true. As previously mentioned, a wedding is never entirely profit, so the number would never be one.

But I will go one step further here. In the case of me DJ'ing a wedding, let's use some actual numbers. Here's the scenario: My current basic package is $1000 and the cheapest ads WeddingWire offers are about $1200 per year. My profit margin on a wedding after subtracting labor for me, my help, overhead, and the cost of the equipment (most of it I have made the money back on, but that's a separate topic), my margin is $200. For the sake of keeping this simple, I am ignoring additional advertising expenses like wedding expo's and removing any discounts that might be offered.

Here's the equation:

$1200/$200=6

As I previously mentioned, this six means that I would make my money back after six sales. Also, I have watered things down here a lot to keep it simple; realistically, there are many other factors that push the profit number lower, meaning in reality that six may be closer to ten. An additional bit of fine print I should add is that for people just starting to do weddings, they may not even be making a profit. From experience with DJs, I can tell you that a majority of DJs do not understand how to determine if they are, in fact, making a profit. This extends to other things like depreciation, but now I am getting off-topic. These past few sentences should give you the main theme that this topic is not "black and white," it is truly only the tip of the iceberg.

To conclude, when WeddingWire reps say you make your money back (break even) after one wedding, they are assuming each wedding is 100% profit, which is beyond unrealistic. This is only one unethical practice of the many WeddingWire has.

Thanks for reading my first story on Vocal! I hope to write more interesting content like this. You can also find DJ-related content on my YouTube channel.

If you would like to learn more about my company, you can visit the website below.

You may also be interested to know that in addition to owning a company, I am a student of business administration at Johnson & Wales University, which is where some of my finance and business knowledge comes from.