pejasto

Agency of record. It's who runs the account. Grey New York is the ad agency that owns the Olive Garden AOR (has for years). And they don't do this shit.

The process to get this approved would be to come up with the idea. Then somehow get a deliberately fake story approved by a mid-level brand manager at Darden in known-for-its-risk-taking-atmosphere Orlando, Florida whose job would be at risk exposing the company to this much exposure. Then they'd have to start planning this ahead for months, all the whilepaying people for who knows how long to maintain sockpuppet accounts. These costs would likely be transferred to the client who would then have to report it somehow in some larger preapproved budget since there's likely not a "do nefarious and evil shit" byline in the scope of work. And all this for what? A top post on Reddit whose value can't be measured and can't be reported to senior management because it was done against the FTC's social media guidelines.

OP probably doesn't even know if there's a social media AOR or a digital AOR that could be running this too, but keeps spouting Grey, Grey, Grey because that's all you can find on Google. They make commercials and not much else.

OP is full of shit.

Edit: FTC, not FCC. I was on a call, typing angry and am an idiot.

Edit2: Comment from former Grey employee below says that they do, in fact, run Darden's digital/social. And then also says that there's no way this happens.

This guy's been slowly masturbating until he gets a response.

You basically can't do anything on social and present yourself as something else. Say you send something to a blogger, they have to fully disclose that it was given to them for free or whatever in the post or else it's subject to fines. Same goes for tweets (you'll notice any paid ones all start with Sponsored: or Ad:).

Nobody has been punished. It's money and whatever. The thing is, you still play by them. This kind of guerrilla shit is done by small fry bullshit businesses, not ones that manage tons of money. They have bigger fish to fry than having things that are wholly unmeasurable. And if you fuck with them, they'll watch you more closely on everything else you do.

Piss off the governing body of your whole industry for a Reddit post and costs a lot of money to maintain? No fucking way.

BUY-rani.

People do it though. Shitty, small-thinking people. Grey New York doesn't play small ball like this. Your crappy digital start-up marketing agency will pitch this constantly. It's bullshit.