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