When I think about it on the flipside for small business marketing it's really a tragic scenario of which ad mediums are not perceived as 'spammy'.
Should non-megacorp specialized services simply not exist? How should they get the word out? The approved channels you speak of are very expensive and highly competitive.
None. Marketing is an objective blight on human society.
Because you know, HN is a marketing site for companies in Y Combinator and Y Combinator itself.
Every landing page you have ever visited is marketing.
Every GitHub README.md is marketing.
There's not a single business in the history of mankind that have made money without marketing. Because they wouldn't be allowed to show or tell anyone they existed.
You know, the people directly responsible for making email suck... and the web... and search engines... phone calls... TV... the mail...
Huh. It's almost like the entire industry does a lot of making things suck.
Maybe if that wasn't the case I'd be amenable to considering some form of marketing as acceptable, but time and time again that industry has proven that being a good citizen is just not something they are willing to do.
Also, landing pages are definitely counted because in my experience you're lucky to even be able to tell what the fuck the product is from the landing page, so bullshit laden are they.
That README.md is often used for marketing in the landing-page sense is just evidence of what I said elsethread: That the psychological damage caused by marketing has embedded itself deeply in our culture and become self-perpetuating.