5 ms·

What's a submarine ad?

rzzzt 6y ago
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 http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- godelski 6y ago
  Isn't this just native advertising?
  - justinpombrio 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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).
ohyeshedid 6y ago
Sponsored content.
the_af 6y ago
It comes from an essay by Paul Graham as far as I know: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html > "One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms." I see nothing that would indicate this is an ad, covert or otherwise. It was posted by Jason Scott -- whose reputation should be familiar to readers of HN -- on the Internet Archive, and has a legitimate reason for being posted there. This is as good as it gets for "not for profit" and "not an adverticle".
- prvc 6y ago
  >"not for profit" and "not an adverticle" Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.
  - the_af 6y ago
    Well, this is a post by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I trust him. And he posted the source code and online playable game. (In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).
    - textfiles 6y ago
      Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that. But. The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it. The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it). Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it? (It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.) There you go. Thanks for the trust.

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 http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

godelski 6y ago
Isn't this just native advertising?
- justinpombrio 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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).

ohyeshedid 6y ago

Sponsored content.

the_af 6y ago

It comes from an essay by Paul Graham as far as I know: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html > "One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms." I see nothing that would indicate this is an ad, covert or otherwise. It was posted by Jason Scott -- whose reputation should be familiar to readers of HN -- on the Internet Archive, and has a legitimate reason for being posted there. This is as good as it gets for "not for profit" and "not an adverticle".

prvc 6y ago
>"not for profit" and "not an adverticle" Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.
- the_af 6y ago
  Well, this is a post by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I trust him. And he posted the source code and online playable game. (In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).
  - textfiles 6y ago
    Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that. But. The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it. The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it). Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it? (It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.) There you go. Thanks for the trust.