The relationship between journals and advertisers has always been tricky, with many of them forced to say nice things, or at least avoid saying anything bad concerning major advertisers. In my day as an editor I was free to say what I liked, as no advertiser could afford to stop advertising because it was the best route to reaching potential customers before the Internet.
Times have certainly changed, and today marks a new low. We’ve intercepted several spammed messages offering to sell editorial in Process Engineering Control and Maintenance. Normally I wouldn’t draw attention to this, but they were sent to a spamming list and picked up by no less than six honeypots – addresses than no legitimate sender of bulk mail should be using. Therefore they’re fair game.
Dear Public Relations Manager
I deal with the editorial content for the Process Engineering Control & Maintenance publication, and are just putting together our editorial feature pages within our February edition, this is a very special edition as this will not only be distributed to our exclusive 100,000 named circulation but an extra 5,000 copies will also be distributed at MAINTEC, Sustainability Live & National Electronics Week to the wide range of purchasing professionals that attend.
I wanted to contact you to see if you would be able to provide some editorial content for this special edition.
The only cost to include a press release within this special edition would be a small editorial set up fee of just £85…
…As I am only able to offer this editorial opportunity to the first few companies to respond to this offer, please email me the editorial content that you would like to include, and please confirm that you would be happy to pay the £85 set up fee.
Please generate and paste your ad code here. If left empty, the ad location will be highlighted on your blog pages with a reminder to enter your code. Mid-PostKind Regards
******* ******** CIE
[name and telephone number deleted]
If you’re one of the 105,000 people “lucky” enough to get a copy of the magazine, you have been warned.