Believing the Hype

We recently met with a client that markets a cool collection of brands. In doing our research prior to our initial meeting we came across this very clever application they developed that really impressed us. During the course of our praising the client for having come up with such a great idea, we learned that they made it all up and never actually created the product. Well, their plan worked. It certainly got our attention and they had already gotten a lot of press mentions which was how we found out about it in the first place. Is this dishonesty or one of the oldest PR tricks in the book? Technically anything you want to mention can be "in development". Of course, here at Firstborn we would never hype a project that we couldn't show since our portfolio of work is our most effective marketing tool. Nonetheless, just as impressed as we were about this client's idea, we came away even more impressed by their idea of hyping the idea.