THAT is slick.
However, it is also quite.. evil.
Do the math -- figure he paid the girls 20 bucks and hour. Plus the price of three drinks an hour is something under 100 bucks an hour for a team. In four hours they can hit four saloons and talk to maybe a half dozen guys in each, not including the bartender. Round the figure out to $500 a night per team. And he was sending out a dozen or more teams per night. For under $100,000 he reached a whole lot of people who would remember his product.
Online marketing is more insidious. A team of half a dozen can reached thousands of people an hour by working two or three chatrooms at a time. Every wonder how the new video games blow out of the stores?