Wal-Marting Across America: The Fake Grassroots Blog

In September 2006 a blog appeared called Wal-Marting Across America. Jim and Laura, a couple with an RV, were driving across the United States and parking overnight in Wal-Mart car parks — which the company permits — and writing about the employees they met along the way.

The employees they met were, without exception, delighted with their jobs.

Jim was a professional photographer for the Washington Post. Laura was a freelance writer. Their RV had been paid for, their expenses covered, and Jim was being paid, by Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization created and funded by Wal-Mart and run by the public relations firm Edelman. None of this was disclosed on the blog.

It was traced by BusinessWeek in October 2006. Richard Edelman, the firm's chief executive, apologized publicly, stating that the failure of disclosure was his responsibility.

The mechanism is source substitution, and it is the most commercially significant technique in this part of the guide because it is now everywhere.

A claim from a corporate spokesperson is evaluated as a claim from an interested party, with all the discounting that implies. The identical claim from an apparent peer — an ordinary person with no stake, sharing an experience — is processed through the liking and similarity shortcuts of chapter 10, and the discounting does not occur, because the audience has not identified anything to discount.

The employees they met were, without exception, delighted with their jobs.

Disclosure restores the cue. That is precisely why it is omitted, and it is why disclosure rules exist.

The sleeper effect makes the omission durable. Hovland and Weiss found that where a message is accompanied by a discounting cue, the cue decays faster than the message, so that over weeks the content is retained and the reason to doubt it is not. A late disclosure therefore does not undo the effect; it arrives after the content has been assimilated.

The technique scales because authenticity is very cheap to simulate and very expensive to audit. A reader cannot investigate the funding of every enthusiastic account they encounter, and the cost of checking is borne entirely by them.

Which is the same asymmetry as chapter 219, arriving through a different door.

Astroturfing is now an industry: sponsored reviews, undisclosed influencer relationships, front organizations with citizen-sounding names, coordinated comment operations. The Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guidelines require disclosure of material connections, and enforcement is sporadic.