Some of the promotional money probably ended up in their pockets after it was cleaned up a little bit.
Yeah, they could have literally gone to 250 local stores and offered them free water and some money on top of the free water to sell the water. They could have then PR'ed the water being in 250 stores and supplied shareholders with an incredible amount of information (stores, deliveries, water sales at stores, etc.) via their Twitter account. The avalanche of sales information they could have provided would have probably shored up the share price so that real company growth could have happened.
They didn't do this because they aren't interested in selling water, they are interested in selling shares.
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