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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

What a creative marketing campaign

What makes you think a 2 week old social media account with an obscure name and no other matching social accounts would be used to advertise an LG Smart Refrigerator?

A comment that points out a possible marketing campaign followed by a response that questions the comment while casually dropping the brand name and model of a product. That response seems marketing campaign.

Preposterous! While the LG Smart Refrigerator, powered by SmartThinQ® technology, is certainly a premium product at an excellent price, I don’t think there’s any evidence here to show that the upstanding employees of the LG Corporation are behind any of these tweets.

The fabulous people at LG would never engage in such a thinly veiled attempt at marketing through the Guardian's exceptionally high editorial standards just to promote their amazing ThinQ display tech. #FreeDorothy

I think this is a r/hailcorporate joke and not really from an LG employee.

On a more serious note, how does this work? Do they pay for followers, influencers to promote it, directly for articles like this?

I’m really starting to think we need updated legislation for labelling ads.

We do in the UK at least, although compliance is problematic: https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/influencers-guide.html for some info

I've read of would-be influencers who endorse products while not being paid for it (since they didn't find anyone willing to pay) still using the labelling because otherwise they would have to admit that nobody finds them important enough to pay them for advertising.

There are services that sell upvotes - such as [1]. Presumably while also maintaining a large enough set of plausible-looking profiles, IP addresses, browser fingerprints etc to bypass upvote ring detection.

So you don't have to pay high-profile influencers, who might be expensive or give away that it's a paid campaign.

A marketing company comes up with an adequate post, posts it on one site and gets it upvoted, and with a bit of luck there you have it, it gets reposted onto other sites and maybe even ends up in conventional media.

I strongly suspect the "we get it, you vape" meme was brought-and-paid-for by the cigarette industry by these means.

You can hire ad agencies to make fake terrorist videos and promote racial division [2] so it's not like advertisers are too ethical to do this type of stuff.

[1] https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bell_Pottinger&ol...

Fascinating service offering.

"We get it, you vape sounds" like that god awful made up tabloid speak that no real person ever uses.

Very much appears to be a native ad to me.

Well done, LG.

I kinda doubt LG would pay for this publicity (unless they actually think a twitter client on a fridge that serves no purpose other than being non-confiscatable is a selling point to parents).

Maybe a competitor did it?

Also, the mom says she’ll be disabling accounts in one of the tweets. Maybe Dorthy’s original account was recently closed.

Why would you doubt that? Of course they would. And we're talking about it.

They've been trying to shovel their stupid smart fridges forever. Lots of people probably don't know they exist, and after this astroturfing, now they do.

I can't think of a place that I want internet less than standing in the kitchen.

I bet it has a camera/mic, and sells my fridge usage data to the highest bidder also. And to top it all off, it's just another attackable device when it stops getting updates in a couple of years.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en

Twitter account "Joined July 2019", indeed...

I like to give things like this benefit of the doubt (mainly because it makes internet more fun) but in this case I must agree.

And in the unlikely case this is genuine, what's with all the people telling the mother how to parent her kid.

hahaha agreed

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