The Marketing Resource

Astroturfing and Marketing On YouTube

Anyone with a video blog is, potentially, just one irresistible offer away from becoming a corporate stooge, a sock puppet, a product placer, an astroturfer, a shill. An industry that once confined itself to Madison Avenue is now operating from your town, your street, your bedroom. It’s using your voice, your sex appeal, your mannerisms. If you can grab eyeballs, it’ll pay for them.As a result, Web 2.0 is set to become a hall of mirrors more confusing than the one Orson Welles — that magnificent caped pretender — set forth in his perplexingly great late “documentary,” F for Fake. What’s real, what’s make-believe? Who to trust, when it’s precisely those not yet suspected of advertising who attract advertisers?

source: wired