I think it's high time projects know that they cannot rely solely on bounty and airdrop as a means of promotion. A lot of projects launch and they rely on their bounty campaigns and airdrop to help bring in investors and therefore fail to reach their softcap.
I never said bounties are not effective but it should only be used to create and reward their community not to bring in investors. If a project wants to promote it crowdsale then the team should deploy real promotional means like paying top influencers, attending conferences, advertisements on top sites like coinmarketcap, etc. Because no matter how good the project is, if it can't market properly then it won't reach its goals and if a project is mediocre but have a top notch marketing program, it will succeed beyond expectations.
Using bounty hunters or airdrops to promote a project is very economical, cost effective and perfect. There are other means of marketing a project besides using bounty hunters. There are means of advertising on Twitter, YouTube and even this signature campaign.
Organising conference are good but that will be expensive to pull up especially for new projects. It is not even rational to leave a cost effective means of marketing for those ones that will gulp money from you when infact, the owner of the project is actually still praying hard to reach his soft cap