George A. Thompson writes:

>And here at HP Professional, I
>assure
>you that our mission is to honestly report on the IT market and provide
>information about HP technologies and strategies and at times provide
>information about HP's competitors as a matter of comparison and contrast.
>Our goal is to provide a balanced view. And if we find out we made a
>mistake, we're obligated to take responsibility for it and correct it.

If that is so, it is a change from your practice of some years ago. We
had direct experience with this, when a competitor and new HP
Professional advertiser received a glowing product review that disparaged
our product by name. No reporter ever called to check on the information
that was printed, which was wildly inaccurate. When we wrote to the
publisher to demand a retraction, we were told only that that a letter to
the editor would be considered for publication.

My response to this was to pull our own advertising from HP Professional,
since as Shawn Gordon discovered,

>... every
>single lead that ever came in this way had bogus information.  Some of
>these "companies" were near our office, so I drove by to check out the
>address, and guess what, no HP site, or even a person living at the house
>that knew anything about the HP.

so we were getting no measurable value from our HP Professional
advertising in any case.

Within two weeks of our cancellation, a pair of salespeople came out to
our office, asked us to reinstate our advertising, and noted that since
we were "very important to the HP community" (the salesperson's words)
the magazine wished to do a story on our company. I declined to reinstate
our advertising but accepted the story offer. Not surprisingly, I never
heard anything else about a story.

-- Bruce Toback


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