User reviews: The best advertising money can buy?
The FTC launches an uphill battle against paid endorsements on the Web, charging a firm for fake game reviews on iTunes
Follow @infoworldShopping online offers many conveniences: more information about a product than you might get at a physical store, easy side-by-side comparison of products that might not be on the same storeroom floor. But perhaps the most important difference is being able to read what other customers have to say about their experience with a particular product before you buy. Finding out that an item breaks easily or doesn't come as pictured is valuable information, and I've often purchased products I had been on the fence about until I had read a consumer's rave review.
Those reviews, written by regular folks, are strong sales materials. I once saw a study that said they rank right up there with personal recommendations from friends -- trumping editorial reviews and advertising by quite a hefty margin when it comes to influencing our buying habits.
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You might think word-of-mouth recommendations are the best kind of advertising money can't buy, but you'd be wrong. As it turns out, advertisers have been buying it.
Cynics here would not be surprised to find that some percentage of the customer reviews we see on the Web are written by people who are paid to tout those goods. There are the obvious plants, like those lame attempts to "endorse" diet aids by people who are obviously trying to hawk it to you. And then there are institutionalized marketing efforts intended to disarm consumers and use the power of the user review against them. Here, the FTC is on the case.
The FTC recently issued a release that included the following statement:
A public relations agency hired by video game developers will settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising by having employees pose as ordinary consumers posting game reviews at the online iTunes store, and not disclosing that the reviews came from paid employees working on behalf of the developers.
The PR firm in question is Reverb Communications, and it represents some pretty big clients in this space.
According to MobileCrunch, which posted an excerpt of a memo (and did a fair amount of legwork tracking down the reviews on iTunes and connecting them to Reverb's clients) sent to prospective clients, the PR firm had a process in place where interns were instructed to write reviews "from the point of view" of various age groups and demographics as part of the company's efforts to promote games and mobile gaming apps. Reverb was apparently promising clients that positive but not over-the-top reviews "pre-written by in-house writers" would begin to go live when the company's games launched and would continue for 14 days after launch. One prospective client balked at the dishonesty and, instead of signing, sent the memo to MobileCrunch.
