Thats not true, a majority of hype and interest is generated through bounty programs. The power of thousands of people all promoting the ICO through signatures (people who are actively looking for cryptos to buy in) and social media (people not interested in crypto but may be swayed) is a great starting point, as opposed to the ICOs spending hundreds of thousand of dollars on ads splattered randomly through the web.
The ICOs only release a small percentage of tokens on marketing to net them many more in sales, bounty hunters get rewards for their time and effort. its a win win situation.