I recently put text-link-ads on my homepage and was surprised to find an industry giant buy one. Granted, it was for the UK-based site (.co.uk), and it's the .com that everyone knows. But even the .co.uk is alexa 7,000, and they are indeed the same company (I thought it might be a spam-scraper/TM infringer I was linking to, so I checked it out) as the .com (1,000 alexa). I thought buying links was black-hat and frowned upon, and something that would never be done by an established brand. I guess it's only frowned upon if you're not an established brand.
Industry giants are some of the most black hat sites you can get. One of the UK mobile phone networks just pointed 3.6 million Coop links at a page on their site to get top rankings and there are companies who advertise on TV doing the same. The companies with big money can buy as many links as they want to get to the top.