As you know, like many other agencies, we admitted in writing to having had a worse year in 2001 than in 2000, stemming principally from a client acquisition. Even so, by your own reckoning the CPA-certified net revenue figure we reported in and of itself would have ranked Equity Communications somewhere on this year's PROMO 100 list of agencies.

We understand, and have no quarrel with, your need for using other-than-financial criteria to achieve a qualitative balance between large agencies and small. Frankly, we were confident our work would measure up qualitatively if not quantitatively.

The bigger issue, however, is what useful purpose, editorial or otherwise, is served by publishing in your PROMO 100 issue our agency name under the heading “Missing in Action” — when we're still very much in business and haven't gone anywhere — along with the gratuitous notation of “Entered but did not qualify.”

Equity Communications' position in the PROMO 100 standings may only be of passing interest to our clients and industry colleagues. Nor would the industry likely be pondering why we didn't make the cut. But trumpeting to the world that we “entered but did not qualify” elevates the issue and calls into question the viability, if not the existence, of our agency.

Had we known there was the remotest possibility of being put in such an egregious category by the mere good-faith submission of information requested by your magazine, we would have given serious thought to staying out. Why? Because it has taken us too long to build a good name and reputation for either to be damaged by a careless editorial judgment.

Irrespective of your stated need for using undisclosed criteria, if there was a valid reason for disqualifying us, rather than announcing it with no explanation, wouldn't the decent thing have been to at least let us know what that reason was rather than publishing it for us to read along with our colleagues and clients?

For such disregard of the potential impact of such an oversight, I believe PROMO, at the very least, owes Equity Communications an apology and its readers an explanation.

Otherwise, as we are branded with your “Missing in Action” label this year, you can count on this small, but still very lively agency going all-out for the designation from this point on.