Astroturfing
What is Astroturfing?
The term Astroturfing comes from the company Astre Turf, a pioneer in a marketing technique that is becoming increasingly popular, especially thanks to the impact that social networks can currently have through tags. It is a fairly controversial strategy, as it involves making an advertising campaign appear as an event of daily life and not always with the most transparent purposes.
Basically, this type of advertising strategy consists of posing a situation that seems real, and in which something is made visible that the company wants to make the audience aware of. Astroturfing requires that the origin of the advertising be hidden. In this way, people will make it viral on their own, thinking that they are sharing a real story that generates some kind of human interest.
Many companies have used astroturfing and have had to apologize later due to the controversy they have generated when it was discovered that it was an advertising campaign. In most cases, companies launch these campaigns so that, once they have gone viral, they can reveal the true origin of the story. But in many other campaigns it is not necessary. It all depends on the purpose pursued by using this strategy.
What is an Astroturfing campaign for?
In general, what a company seeks when using an astroturfing strategy is to make something they want to promote visible. The goals pursued are usually very varied, but there is always a common denominator: to make the brand that is being promoted visible, to publicize the advantage of a particular product, or, in some cases, to spread a negative image of a competitor.
When an audience discovers that a viral story was actually an advertisement of this type, controversy always arises. Depending on the legitimacy of the goals the company has pursued, the consequences that this discovery may have on the image of the company in question will be.
Examples of Astroturfing
Some companies like Walmart have used it. In this case, they hired people to start a travel blog where they told how they survived by stopping in the parking lots of the supermarket chain. That's how they managed to make the brand go viral until the campaign was finally discovered. In this case, there was much more impact.
In another case, the company that created the search engine Ask.com carried out a campaign that sought to undermine the popularity of its competitor, Google. When the true origin of this strategy was discovered, the company had to publicly apologize.
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