Ford smokes the competition.

Sales of gas-guzzling pickup trucks are softening due to high gasoline prices, so PR Week reports that the Ford Motor Company has launched a series of PR stunts aimed at pumping up sales to country folk, including sponsoring a monster truck rally, NASCAR races, and a marketing arrangement with country singer Toby Keith to have a video play at the beginning of Keith's concerts, showing him driving an F-series pickup. Meanwhile Toyota, "one of the few automakers currently doing very well," is holding seminars to talk up the fuel efficiency of its hybrid pickups. Which strategy is working? Ford's CEO has talked big about being an environmentalist for years, but has repeatedly reneged on its promises to build more fuel-efficient vehicles while his company loses money and market share. "Had Mr. Ford produced more fuel-efficient vehicles like hybrids sooner," observes the New York Times, "he not only would have found his company keeping pace with nimble foreign competitors like Toyota when oil prices spiked, but he also would have been able to illustrate the bottom-line merit of his environmental values. Instead, Ford, is again in the all-too-familiar spot of playing corporate catch-up."

The logo of the anti-astroturfing campaign

Two Australian PR bloggers, Trevor Cook from the Sydney-based PR firm Jackson Wells Morris and Paull Young from the sports PR agency BAM Media, have launched an anti-astroturfing campaign. Cook bluntly states that "Astroturfing is evil. Astroturfing is always unethical and usually illegal. It corrodes democracy which relies on transparency." Cook and Young want PR companies to publicly state their opposition to using front groups. The catalyst for the campaign was an article by Melbourne journalist Katherine Wilson, who documented the role of the Public Relations Institute of Australia in hosting events by Canadian PR adviser, Ross Irvine. Irvine's tour of Australia was sponsored by the conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs. More recently, the PRIA dismissed without explanation an ethics complaint over the Tasmanians for a Better Future front group, which was run by a Porter-Novelli affiliate.