Recently, some of the more clever and effective ways I have seen a device/ product marketed is to have paired with a celebrity/ athlete that can make a personal connection. As Dr. Simon mentioned above, ads can now be blocked so companies are targeting the things people want to see on social media (their favorite athletes/ celebrities/ pages). For example, Lebron James has roughly 23.2 million twitter followers and companies are paying him on average $140,000 dollars ($1,000 per character) per product endorsement tweet. Now this figure may seem egregious, however, considering traditional T.V. advertisements would cost an estimated 5 times more to reach that target number of individuals, it suddenly seems like a very quick and efficient way to market. And that’s not even considering most of the T.V. viewers walk away/ fast forward through commercials anyways. With technology evolving so fast, advertising is struggling to keep up. But when done ‘correctly’ it can be just as efficient and even arguable more so than the more dated methods ever were.

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/13470682/lebron-james-sponsored-tweets-232-million-followers-cost-140k