When I worked in marketing, I was on teams that advertised via many ways including collegiate sporting tournaments, non-sporting collegiate events, and yes, scholarships.
One way to discern the blatant marketing ploy from the actual intent to help students is to ask how many scholarships the company is paying out.
If a company is paying out 100 scholarships of $1,000 each, that is worth distributing to a larger audience. If the company is paying out a single $500 scholarship, they don’t need your help for that. They can contact guidance counselors at high schools within a 20-mile radius of their headquarters and find many suitable students.
Even the 100x$1,000 offer may be a blatant marketing ploy, but at least that offers some advantages of scale to the applicants. A company awarding a single $500 scholarship by trying to reach and encourage 100,000 student applicants is much more interested in generating a low-cost marketing grift than actually helping college students.
One man’s opinion.