Nothing new in the ad game
Advertisers have been doing this for a very, very long time. Ever wonder why Darrin was the moral compass on Bewitched? It was part of the game of showing ad agencies as honest and was repeated in many shows from the 1950s on. I had a ad agency tell a fortune 500 company's web services department that their million dollar ad increased the hits to the web site by an insane amount but the web logs showed a much lower improvement. The million dollar ad was to put the domain name on the bottom of existing tv ads. I suspect they are still getting paid for that (likely based on their numbers) decades latter. There is an Aussie tv show called "Gruen Transfer" where two very good ad men honestly describe what goes on with real ads.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
