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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Marketing runs the world now, because we've reached a point where companies really, really have to convince people to spend their money on whatever useless product is being pushed.

Ever notice there isn't marketing for potatoes, bread, rice, etc. ? People buy those things anyway. The latest smartphone? gotta convince everyone to buy it.

At my last company engineering spent $10m installing fiber into some remote community. The marketing for that project was $15m.

So the marketing around "doing something" costs more than actually doing it.

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Quoted film budgets are usually about half the actual budget as a rule of thumb, because they don't mention the half spent on marketing.

That's why films are often known as flops even when they make their "budgets" back. You're not in the money until you double the budget.

edit: Also, considering the vast majority of that marketing money is spent before the film comes out these days, and all the sales are made within a month - as much is spent on convincing people that a film that nobody has seen is going to be good as is spent on the film.

15 million? How can local ads for a fiber network be so expensive? Just pay a bunch of kids to hand out flyers. Fiber is usually something people want.

If your numbers are correct it sounds like some kickback scam.

> Fiber is usually something people want

According to this survey[0], only 25% of people even know what "fiber-to-the-home" means. Not a perfect proxy for "fiber" itself, but I imagine most non-technical people are not aware of it.

[0]: http://www.bbpmag.com/Features/0714feature-ConsumerSurvey.ph...

Fiber might be something people want, but it's also something people have been falsely sold so many times. In the late 2000s, my cable company said they were putting in fiber, and i got a cable modem. AT&T called adsl2 (and sometimes simply rebranded adsl1) U-verse and sent people around neighborhoods saying it was fiber.

How are normal people supposed to know fiber to the home is actually fiber?

The marketing department is twice the size of engineering, and they just contract out all the work to external agencies anyway. So they are just a team of middle-men to agencies who charge WAY more per hour than the most experienced Engineer on the team of people who actually built and designed the thing.

Gotta pay all those salaries somehow.

There's plenty of marketing for potatoes (Idaho), pork, milk, pistachios, avocados, beef, chicken etc... Usually trade groups but still.

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