I assume he meant there were plenty of alternative manufacturers lining up for ad space. If manufacturer A storms off in anger, manufacturer B takes his place, and so on.
Exactly the case. When I joined Hi-Fi News magazine in 1976, the magazine's editor was John Crabbe, from whom I learned my craft. John passed away in December 2008 and in an essay for Stereophile in which I commended on his passing - see
https://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/communities/index.html - I wrote: "Soon after becoming
HFN's editor in 1964, John had written that a magazine's reviewers 'have a mandate to write what they think, even if some feelings are hurt.' John taught me that this is the ground on which a review-based magazine stands.
"It was John Crabbe who defined for me the relationship between a magazine's editorial integrity and the advertisers who financially support it (readers, sadly, are never a significant source of income, given the high costs of distribution): 'If you tell the truth about components you review, there will always be a small percentage of companies at any one time who are not advertising in your pages. But if you publish the truth, you will have a good magazine. And if you have a good magazine, you will have readers. And as long as you have readers, disgruntled advertisers will eventually return. But if you don't tell the truth, you won't have a good magazine. And if you don't have a good magazine, you won't have readers, at least not for long. And if you don't have readers, you won't have advertisers.'"
A philosophy that is as true now as it was a half-century ago.
John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile