Available to every person is the Apple App Store where iPad, iPhone and iPod touch applications are accessible. Some think that Apple’s annual profit is around $ 400 million at the very least. But evidently that money has done little to motivate Steve Jobs and business to make the App Store an honest place for techies to shop. Makers spend a ton of time making their products look better with fake reviews so they’ll sell more. This strategy is called Astroturf marketing and seems often. Knowing which applications are worth your time is much harder. This means it is even more difficult to pick applications. The Federal Trade Commission has to come in and change things, says the New York Times.
FTC hopes Reverb Communications will settle Astroturfing case soon
Any fake apps placed within the store by Tracie Snitker will be removed. She is the California marketing business Reverb Communications key executive. Reverb faced charges of deceptive advertising as a direct result of the company’s policy of encouraging its employees to write and post good reviews of its clients’ games from November 2008 to May 2009. Reviewers of Astroturf paid for these reviews. Reverb had about 60 clients in game production during that time. These contain Digital Leisure, Harmonix and MTV Games as part of it. The Times reports that Reverb and Snitker are forbidden from “making similar endorsements of any product or service without disclosing any relevant connections,” because of the FTC.
Snitker denies Reverb did anything illegal
Reverb agreed with the FTC, but then Snitker said that Reverb didn’t do anything wrong but just wanted to stop the legal fight and get it over with. The App Store Reviews were under the exact same ruling as the FTC new rules that the FTC was not yet enforcing. These rules say that bloggers can’t participate in product endorsement for pay.
Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the FTC’s move will promote truth in advertising online. “This case sort of shows that what they have in mind is not the individual blogger or Twitterer, but rather a professional endorser. When a client says ‘Where are my good reviews?’ you can say, ‘We can’t do it because it is illegal.’”
Additional reading
NY Times
nytimes.com/2010/08/27/technology/27ftc.html?_r=5
