Okay so one thing people mistake often is that advertising and marketing are not the same thing. Marketing is everything about a product and everything about the people around the product. If you can see it publicly, then it's marketing.

That brand that's "not like the others" because they have open hardware or are privacy-focused with their software? That's marketing. The whole ethos and mission of a company is marketing. That does not mean that it's empty and just to sell a product.

Everything I do on the atmosphere is marketing. I run blogs because I like to yap, but I choose the platforms on which I blog because they are built on ATProto. Does that mean I don't care about blogging? No. Does that mean I don't care about ATProto? Also no. It's just that the decisions I made with which platform I was going to host my blogs was because I care about the Atmosphere.

My online personality isn't an act, it's not necessarily my 100% real self, but it's parts of me that I want to show to the internet. That's also marketing. I'm marketing myself as a kinda goofy, fun developer who likes to try out different ideas and see what works. I'm not about shipping the most polished software, I'm about shipping things that solve problems and serve as explorations on what we can do with the protocol.

So when you think about the products that you care about, and the products builders care about, remember that this all plays into marketing. It's subtle, and it's natural, but it affects how you perceive the products. And that's really what marketing is.