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Comment by dotmanish | Hacker News Reader

Random theory: BB might have contracted app promotions to a number of marketing agencies (or just one), and the account manager tasked with promoting the Android app figured out there's Mechanical Turk and Fiverr.

Now if I talk to couple of friends at digital marketing agencies, they would tell me this is pretty common. The client doesn't need to know or decide how it's done. It's just done.

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I hope that they remain like this. The truly subversive marketing tactics are what I worry about. (i.e., there could be any number of astroturfers on HN that are good enough that they don't get noticed)

I would think established corporations would have strict guidelines on marketing tactics that are allowed.

Wasn't there an awful ad from Samsung or some big company recently, and they had to pull it and apologize for it, because it was very offensive, and they had no idea what the ad would be prior to being on TV? (or at least that's what they claimed).

Either way, I don't think it's that hard to imagine. These companies, especially mediocre companies who like to "outsource" stuff and not care as much about the result, pay millions of dollars at a time, and don't look into all the details of the advertising campaigns.

Samsung have just received a large fine in South Korea for this sort of behaviour. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/t/story/taiwan-body-fines-s...

They hired a small army of commentators to trash HTC and talk up Samsung in blog comments etc.

I once worked with a digital marketing manager that spent most of her day running scripts to spam Digg and Reddit, and using her budget to "outsource" these kind of things (probably using Mechanical Turk or something similar). She'd worked at marketing agencies before, on a number of large client accounts (including notable names in tech and consumer electronics), and I'm willing to bet that she did the same kind of stuff.

They may have guidelines in place, but I bet they don't check up on what external agencies do, otherwise this woman would have been found out a long time ago.

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