Ah... now I get it

A few days ago, I wrote about a sandwich that was being auctioned on eBay. I was amused at how high the bids were going and I was convinced that people were just being stupid, and bidding up the price with fake eBay user accounts or something. I mean seriously... who would pay thousands of dollars for a sandwich? Who would pay any amount of money for this sandwich? Well now I get it. In fact, I'll fill you in on the rest of the story. After being delisted and relisted a few times, the sandwich was finally sold for around US$28,000. You might be thinking... that's insane! Crazy! (I know I sure thought so.) But then I read the identity of the buyer: the internet casino site known as GoldenPalace(dot)com. And it finally all made sense to me. GoldenPalace didn't care about the sandwich at all. This was all about marketing. And I must say, it was rather ingenius thinking on their behalf. Where else could you pay a mere $28,000 for commercial time on thousands of TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, websites, magazines and more? GoldenPalace figured out how. They paid what seemed to be a large amount of money for a novelty item, when in fact they were actually paying a rather small amount of money for a ton of "free" advertising. So you see, buying that sandwich was not really so crazy after all.