Stealth marketing

Stealth marketing is the practice of seeding recommendations that look organic but are not: a founder “asking for recommendations” and answering themselves from another account, undisclosed affiliates praising a product, or agencies paid to drop brand mentions into community threads. The FTC’s endorsement guides require disclosing material connections, and platform rules ban the inauthenticity outright.

Beyond the rules, it is a detection problem you will eventually lose. Communities are adversarial readers — they check post histories, notice one-domain link patterns, and flag accounts whose only activity is praise for one product. Reddit’s Contributor Quality Score automates that skepticism at platform scale, filtering low-trust accounts before their content renders.

The alternative is not silence — it is disclosure. “I built this, so I’m biased” consistently outperforms concealment in communities, because the disclosure itself signals confidence, and it converts moderators from a risk into an audience. Keep promotion inside the 90/10 rule, check drafts with the pre-flight tool, and note that marketinque’s own policy engine structurally blocks fake reviews, vote manipulation, and undisclosed automation.