I recently ranted about OEM’s lack of advertising for their mobile products. I am heavily involved in the Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) community and it’s seemed for a long time that the major OEMs have been happy to sit back and let the popular enthusiast sites do all their marketing for them. This is usually accomplished by supplying enthusiast sites with information about upcoming products that is shared with site visitors, providing advance press kits, and in some cases providing devices for reviews to be released simultaneously with the official product launch.

This has worked quite well, with potential customers getting early looks at products before they hit the market and the OEMs getting advance excitement generated for new devices. It’s they way the business works, or at least it did until recently.

HP contacted most of the major Pocket PC enthusiast sites last month and asked them to join their “evangelist” program. This invitation was accompanied by a legal agreement that had to be signed for inclusion in this program. Among other things this agreement bound the web site and all who volunteer for them by a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that normally would not be a problem. But as is often the case with things like this the devil is in the details.

A number of major Pocket PC enthusiast sites have gone public recently with explanations of why they can’t get any information from HP about upcoming Windows Mobile devices. It seems they refused to sign HP’s evangelist agreement and have been cut off from any information whatsoever concerning as yet announced products. At issue is one little clause in the agreement that I find amazing (taken from an article on Ipaq HQ).

“….Demonstrates good faith attempts to moderate and remove all unannounced HP product information, including postings made by participants in the website or forum within 48 hours of the posting.”

The potential impact for enthusiast sites is enormous. According to the agreement HP can take legal action against any site that is bound by this agreement in the likely event some forum member posts ANYTHING about an unannounced HP device. The web site administrators have 48 hours to remove any such post or face legal action. As a result of this ridiculous demand on HP’s part, most major sites have opted out of the agreement. A few of the sites actually did sign the agreement and can only sit back and watch the forums with an eagle eye, trying to make sure that if a post about an unannounced device is made by a visitor to the site, it gets deleted promptly. Free speech? Not here.

So who wins in this scenario? Not the consumer, who now gets little advance information about future products. Not the enthusiast sites, who now get no accurate information from HP, and certainly not HP who is getting very little word of mouth generating anticipation for the next whiz-bang product. The backlash on the very sites that HP is dependent on for all their advertising is enormous and it’s unbelievable to me that someone at HP has not stepped up to the plate and reversed their position. But they haven’t so not only does HP not advertise in the mainstream media they now are cutting off their main advertising outlet.