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Abstract: The article describes specificity of advertising practices in academic discourse that reflects itself in objectivity of linguistic research in the field. The coverage of recent research in the field of commercialized academic discourse allows for the following observations: a) research of the field is considered topical; b) research methods are traditional for cognitive linguistics; c) the prevailing aspect of research in the field is linguocultural; d) social context provided in some of the reviewed research is interpreted as public accountability of universities for providing misleading/false information. This publication focuses on 7 sites of Russian universities, non-accredited in 2016; the focus is narrowed down to texts, addressed to applicants. The research procedure comprises elements of discourse analysis, interpretation, description and parallel analysis. The study gives grounds to conclude, that advertising discourse practices for the group prevail over informing the addressee, the latter being done in a formalized way. The key advertising tactics are: modeling of the addresser-addressee relations, tactic of controlling the interpretation process, tactic of creating credibility of the message and tactic of situational planning of communication. To implement the given tactics the group of universities under discussion makes ample use of such devices as use of epithets, parallel constructions, specific ‘agent of the action/receiver of the action’ relations in syntactic structures, appeals and, above all, truisms. The prevailing marketing objects are: amenities, staff, model of future career success or higher education in general. The perspective for this research might be comparative study of low-status Russian universities and their analogues (diploma mills) abroad.