Financial Times reporter calls out corporate communicator over ‘threat’
A Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s marketing communications executive was taken to task for threatening to pull advertising campaigns after receiving negative coverage. Here’s how the spat played out.
There are times when calling out a journalist can serve you or your brand well.
Factual errors come to mind, or unwarranted attacks on one’s character. Those are instances where some back-and-forth with the writer in question is a wise PR move and could help to clear up some points.
Then there are times that it’s probably best to leave it alone—as Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s head of marketing, Henry Gomez, recently learned.
Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway disagreed with something that HPE’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, said during a speech in Davos, Switzerland: “You can always go faster than you think you can.”
Kellaway wrote fairly simply that she disagreed with the remark and used some contextual evidence to support her stance. Kellaway described what happened next when Gomez reached out via email:
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