Bloomberg News has an article, fascinating to me at least, about the food company Hampton Creek and its "undercover project" to "to buy back its own mayo, which made the product appear more popular than it really was."
A similar sort of stealth marketing is common in the book business, where wealthy authors sometimes pay contractors to purchase books in bookstores, pushing titles onto bestseller lists and conveying the impression of sales momentum.
What interested me about this one, however, was that Bloomberg managed to write it without mentioning that the company's founder and CEO, Josh Tetrick, is an outspoken critic of Donald Trump who last month bought two full-page newspaper ads denouncing Mr. Trump's campaign as "wrong" and "un-American." If Mr. Tetrick was a prominent Trump backer rather than a prominent Trump critic, I wonder whether that would have made it into the Bloomberg story.