The Federal Trade Commission has started enforcing false advertising rules against “astroturfing.” On Friday, the agency announced a settlement with a public-relations firm that had been posting fake, favorable online reviews for a client. The settlement is the first enforcement under new FTC guidelines.
Astroturfing is a term used to described apparent grassroots efforts that are, in fact, part of an advertising or political campaign.
The marketing and public-relations agency, Reverb Communications, used employees posing as regular consumers to post fake game reviews at the iTunes Store. Mary Engle, director of the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices, said “advertisers should not pass themselves off as ordinary consumers touting a product, and endorsers should make it clear when they have financial connections to sellers.”
Whac-A-Mole
The settlement requires Reverb and its owner, Tracie Snitker, to remove any fake endorsement posts that pretend to be ordinary consumers. The agreement also prohibits the company and Snitker from repeating this kind of fake endorsement in the future.
It’s not known how widespread the practice is. Andrew Frank, research director for media and marketing at Gartner, said it’s “more common than people think.” He compared the FTC’s enforcement to Whac-A-Mole, the game where a player can use a toy hammer to whack down a toy mole, only to find that other moles have popped up.
Frank also compared the enforcement to antispam efforts in that the larger perpetrators are targeted, even though the practice continues to be widespread. “In theory,” he said, “the honest public should outnumber” the imitation consumers, but Frank said this kind of fraud will continue, especially given the availability of cheap labor around the world.
eBay deals with this problem, Frank noted, through a reputation system, where other people’s opinions of your reliability are taken into consideration, but this isn’t foolproof and cannot be applied to every…