[rzzzt]

An advertisement that entices you to buy a submarine.

Actually, it's a reference to Paul Graham's observation that when news articles start to appear about anything almost simultaneously, it might be the result of a deliberate effort on someone's part to sell something along with all the generated talk: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[godelski]

Isn't this just native advertising?

[justinpombrio]

Close but not quite.

A native advertisement is an ad, dressed up to look like news.

A submarine ad is news. It's true, it's newsworthy (though that seems to be a low bar), it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be published as news. It just... happened not to be discovered by a journalist. Instead it was discovered by a company who hunted for possible news stories that would make them look good or would mention their product, found one, and presented it to a journalist. All nicely researched and ready to go; an easy story. (If this doesn't make sense, Paul Graham explains it better.)

That's my understanding, at least. I'm sure there are tons of shades of grey and no clear boundaries between these things.

[godelski]

Thank you for the clarification. I can see this being a pretty blurry boundary between the two but I think the distinction does make sense. In one sense I wouldn't really call native advertising lazy, but it seems like that is a defining feature of submarine ads (if we use "lazy" in this specific way).