The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return

I worked in community marketing for few rather large software companies. The struggle is real. Almost every CMO I worked for seemed to make it their mission to squeeze any life out of social conversation with actual users and replace it with bland, boring "on message" communication about synergies for leveraging pivots enabling disruption at enterprise scale.

For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".

Different ballpark. Original comment is about shadier methods of marketing not official stuff landing on the primary domain of Apple. I have 1st knowledge of a travel tech company laying off their entire marketing team during COVID that then got hired by a brand new company to find different and riskier approaches on how to keep the funnel alive despite the travel restrictions without direct risk of exposure for the brand.

Tbf comment you replied to never said they were direct hires. Outsourced workers sitting around is possible. You seem to have customized their more general statement

Can confirm though, being acquainted with PR people in the field for >20 years; everything on TV is scripted these days.

Chatted with some of my PR friends coworkers over the years at Christmas parties and the like. They claimed stunts during MTV specials, other "candid" moments from the last 20-25 well known to pop culture were actually organized by a PR company they worked at (never that they worked on that project; such work was reserved for whatever PR rockstar PR firm hired)

But all this too could be PR sales pitch to impress; society is full of hearsay to titillate

That only applies to tweets that are published on behalf of the company, not tweets from sockpuppet accounts that have no direct connection to the company and are made to look like a regular consumer.

It's Guerrilla Marketing. It comes from guerrilla warfare, not gorillas the large ape.

Yeah and why they outsource that? First is effectiveness of reach as you mention. Second is the ability to have a clean official record.

Wake me up when an extremely capitalistic company, in the past caught with dirty hands on numerous topics, will reject increasing massively a legal revenue stream with no strings attached. Right, exactly how to become a trillion dollar company and keep it.

I grok that specifically for apple their echo chambers do majority of certain work themselves, but claiming with 100% confidence thats all is a bit of a stretch. If I was a personal close friend with their head of marketing, I would maybe believe that. In any other case, hard logic prevails over anonymous online claims.

It is multiple layers of approval, but there is no reason to think they wouldn't approve this. At least not from the limited information I have. The approval is about covering themselves, so if they won't get sued (either because it is legal or they can cover their tracks) they will approve it. There is more than lawsuits they track, but the exact set of things is different for each company and I have no idea what Apple works on.

Thus this could be Apple marketing, or it could be someone independent.

Shit posting looks like natural use of social media so it's actually preferred

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

“I have worked over 100 of these kinds of campaigns and never had it come back on the client. I’ve been doing viral marketing and reputation management since 2005. =In the past year I’ve worked for a major entertainment network to magnify a rumor within sports entertainment, as well as damage control on a rumor that came out of an actor being hired on a film before the production company was ready to announce that casting.”

It’s not complicated psyops. It’s basic marketing.

”Oh wow our product is so amazing we can’t keep up with demand you better buy before we run out”

To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly.

And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it.

The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices.

At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.

> a complicated psyop

It's not a “complicated psy-op”, promoting viral stories is the basics of marketing in the age of social media…

Complicated psyop? It's called "Personas" and a few of my coworkers wrote a few of them just this morning.

You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to directly connect with them.

There's nothing masterful or careful about it. If it were, no one would notice it. This is as obvious and sloppy as it gets. No different to startup founders paying social media marketing companies $10-20k to promote their slop products all over X and Reddit with their army of AI generated blogs and news sites and social media accounts. This happens on the daily, and it is not a secret - every founder knows it, and most founders use it at some point. So to think this doesn't happen at larger scales with bigger companies is pure naivety.

It has nothing to do with "big-evil-corpo", it happens at all levels. For some reason you're trying to claim that "big-evil-corpo" are the rare exception, which is ridiculous.

Tbh, I won't be surprised that 1 is true; it does not look that far fetched. Organizing scarcity is already a well-established strategy in the marketing playbook; there are examples of other big organization playing a way longer game to conquer a market (see for instance how Japan became a coffee nation https://www.thetakeout.com/how-nestle-brought-coffee-to-japa...)

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There are usual Apple sheeps ... and then it's you.

WOW, this is some remarkable (would rather use different word starting with R) desperate attempt to somehow turn the reality upside-down,of Apple being overpriced unrepairable unupgrade-able junk sold through pure marketing of exploiting insecurities of losers by selling them something that makes them feel "elite".

Unsolicitated "send via iPhone" SMS footer is perfect example.

> Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos

>This is exactly the kind of paranoid conspiracy thinking I was talking about.

This sounds exactly like the kind thing that someone running a psyop for Apple would say.

I prefer the term "unwitting accomplice", others prefer the term "useful idiot".

I think it might have been a mix of the two to be fair, but probably a lower portion of devs. For example, I have a Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro but in about two more years once I've put aside money for a newer laptop I'll wait for the next "updated" models and buy another Mac just for the inference, the speed improvements and the unified RAM.

Paul Graham discusses this in his essay The Submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.

Why do you care so much that this is a totally realistic argument? You don't personally have to like it, it's not about how it makes you feel as a fan of Apple.

Or an agency on their behalf, but either way, there's really no way for us to really know, due to the stealthy nature of this sort of advertising.

He's in a competition with his friends on who gets the highest score.