


I have been doing research sparked by the great signage and cohesive message of protesters in non-English speaking countries from around the world. I have a background in graphics and message and I thought that, say in Indonesia, the protesters had a better "branding" of message than many US companies. I've shown a few examples here.In politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public
relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a
spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the "AstroTurf"
(artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate "fake grassroots" support.
The goal of such campaign is to disguise the agenda of a political client as an
independent public reaction to some political entity —a politician, political
group, product, service, event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions
of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt
("outreach," "awareness," etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing
may be undertaken by anything from an individual pushing their own personal
agenda through to highly organised professional groups with financial backing
from large corporations.