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Comment by gpspake | Hacker News Reader

I read "Trust me I'm lying" and it reaffirmed a lot of my theories about how modern marketing works. (This isn't a sly paid plug for the book. Trust me ;)

Now I assume everything is marketing by default. A couple that come to mind:

the ugly sonic design when the movie came out. You get a whole wave of promotion from the outrage, then another when the design is fixed.

An innocuous "my girlfriend's shirt matched her coffee mug" post but there are some brand name cookies in the edge of the frame.

If I worked in marketing, these are the sorts of things I'd be trying to come up with. It gets even more fun when you apply these concepts to political propaganda.

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The thinking you’re speaking of, namely that marketers are the ones calling the shots and causing disaster in order to generate controversy and therefore attention, is indistinguishable from paranoid delusions and conspiracy thinking. It’s important to back up claims of conspiracy with hard evidence otherwise it’s just unnecessary slander. Everything could be a conspiracy, potentially.

I can’t think of any situation where a marketer would be given enough agency to manufacture disaster in order to sell something, except in politics. However, they certainly do have the ability to manipulate the media and narratives.

I seriously doubt the sonic thing was a conspiracy as they put a ton of effort into making sonic and animating it, which they would have avoided if they intended to withdraw it.

Honestly, I have a similar theory about the Sonic design incident. I think there's characteristics to that incident (the timing, mainly) that make it at least seem suspicious.

My theory is not that it was marketing, but that the horrifying design was an order from above, and the trailer was a maneuver to create blowback against the design.

This is baseless, of course.

you reminded me of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_clown_sightings

then suddenly, what comes out the next year? A long awaited remake of It

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(2017_film)

well, that's awfully curious.

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