This appears to be a 'people are paid to hype products by word-of-mouth' thing, on the lines of the outfit called Trans that Magda works for in Pattern Recognition. Except that in the novel I think it is suggested that she is paid as well as getting money to spend whilst e.g. going to pubs and hyping the products, and in this (real world?) case they appear to be doing it in return for freebies. Or is it a spoof? I assume not because of the article in the notoriously humour free NYT (via Gibson's blog - Gibson seems rightly unimpressed by the NYT article cited which describes him as 'paranoid' for writing about something slightly less bizarre than what appears to be happening 'in real life').
