Slate: Puma's Problem

But what if Puma didn't want these images to fade quickly? Gawker, Felix Salmon, and others have noted pretty much from the beginning the speculation that the whole episode was actually engineered by Pumaóa form of super-devious "subviral marketing"óand its denials and threats are all part of a scheme to keep the buzz going. This seems unlikely to me, but on the other hand it would answer the nagging question of why anyone would bother to satirize Puma.

Another plausible scenario: Perhaps the images were created as, say, an in-house joke at an ad agency that works with Puma and got out of control.

Trust me, it was done by one of their agencies…but not for a joke. Every major ad campaign in the world is independently researched, measuring factors such as brand awareness and equity. Deniable opps marketing is a great way for agencies to improve these results.

Another possibility is that some creative individual has got so pissed off with the client constantly interfering with the creative, that they decided to take matters into their own hands.