[vjk800]

> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.”

Here it is.

I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google.

I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).

[stemlord]

Idk, it seems like the marketing process on tiktok doesn't constitute trying to get people to go out of their way to interact/click with your content, tiktok users are just involuntarily fed content on some level (you don't know what the next autoplayed video will be)... how can it not be trival to manipulate that userbase with, in this case, a band whose music is just-good-enough for mass appeal?