The shadow war: How ‘dark ads’ are rewriting the rules of marketing

A 102-second video began moving quietly through WhatsApp groups before surfacing on Instagram in early May. It showed an emulsion paint failing a stain-resistance test and went on to describe the product as "fraud". No brand claimed the clip, no sponsor was disclosed, and no mainstream channel carried it. To a casual viewer, it could easily have passed for an independent consumer test or an organic social media post. It was neither.

When Asian Paints approached the Bombay High Court alleging the video disparaged its flagship product while indirectly promoting a rival, Justice Arif Doctor issued an interim order restraining further circulation of the advertisement titled Drishyam Series – Episode 1. The court observed that the material was being circulated through proxy accounts and private messaging networks rather than through any identifiable, accountable medium. 

The case may ultimately prove far larger than a dispute between two paint companies. At its centre lies a question the global advertising industry has been reluctant to confront: are unattributed smear campaigns and covert influence operations becoming a routine instrument of competitive marketing?

The anatomy of a dark campaign

For decades, comparative advertising occupied a relatively settled legal and ethical space. Brands positioned themselves as superior to rivals through humour, exaggeration or direct comparison. Courts and regulators generally tolerated such strategies so long as they stopped short of outright falsehood or malicious slander. The advertiser was visible; accountability, however imperfect, was built in. 

Industry terms for dark advertising vary—shadow marketing, astroturfing, surrogate vilification—but the objective is the same: damage a competitor’s credibility while preserving plausible deniability. A WhatsApp forward from an apparently ordinary user, a viral reel from an obscure account, or synchronised negative reviews on an e-commerce platform carry greater persuasive force than conventional advertising because audiences read them as authentic peer opinion rather than paid communication.

These operations do not execute themselves. Behind most under-the-radar offensives sits a supply chain: performance marketing agencies specialising in ‘reputation management’, freelance content networks available for hire, influencer intermediaries seeding narratives through micro-accounts, and consultancies that offer ‘negative PR’ as a billable service. The commissioning brand spreads tasks across intermediaries who can plausibly claim they merely produced content, making direct attribution extraordinarily difficult—intentionally so.

A global pattern

Corporations have repeatedly faced such allegations internationally. In Taiwan, authorities fined Samsung after investigators found anonymous commentators had allegedly been paid to post fabricated criticism of rival smartphones while praising Samsung devices. In Europe, investigative reporting exposed Alp Services, a Swiss-based firm allegedly involved in surreptitious reputation-destruction campaigns using fake profiles and defamatory material, illustrating how clandestine PR has matured into an organised, cross-border industry.

Consumer goods and technology sectors have seen comparable patterns, with smaller brands periodically reporting coordinated waves of negative reviews designed to suppress algorithmic visibility and undermine consumer confidence almost overnight.

India's particular vulnerability

India is not insulated from this phenomenon. Several trade disparagement cases before the courts have already revolved around advertisements that never explicitly named competitors but used unmistakable visual cues or packaging associations to attack rival brands. The rise of e-commerce has intensified the problem. Multiple Indian direct-to-consumer brands have reported coordinated anonymous review attacks on Amazon and Flipkart, where thousands of suspicious one-star ratings can devastate search rankings and consumer confidence before any legal remedy is available.

Traditional mass-media advertising is expensive, regulated and publicly attributable. A targeted ‘dirty tricks’ blitz, by contrast, can be executed for a fraction of the cost, deployed with precision, and structured in a way that no single actor holds conclusive evidence of overall intent.

The deeper stakes

The consequences of normalising such practices extend beyond corporate rivalry. Surrogate attacks corrode consumer trust at a systemic level. Advertising functions because audiences broadly understand who is speaking and with what interest. Once veiled influence operations become routine, consumers begin doubting all digital information, including genuine reviews, independent commentary and authentic user experiences. The damage is not contained to the targeted brand; it radiates outward across the entire information environment.

Such campaigns also distort competition in ways that disproportionately harm smaller players, which lack the public relations infrastructure to respond effectively. The result is not competition through quality, innovation or pricing; it is competition through invisible sabotage.

What should change

India’s existing advertising law was designed for a different era. The Advertising Standards Council of India’s (ASCI) guidelines, the Consumer Protection Act 2019 and the Information Technology Act’s provisions on harmful content all presuppose identifiability—an advertiser, a medium, a traceable chain of publication. Shadow offensives are designed to defeat each of those assumptions. The European Union's Digital Services Act, by contrast, has introduced disclosure obligations for commercial advertising and imposes due diligence requirements on large platforms to detect organised inauthentic behaviour—a framework India has yet to replicate.

Platform liability remains the unresolved fault line. Meta Platforms, WhatsApp and Google profit from the networks through which dark campaigns travel, yet their intermediary safe-harbour protections under India’s Information Technology Act create limited incentive to detect coordinated fraudulent commercial activity—unlike political disinformation, which attracts far greater regulatory scrutiny. Platforms must face either regulatory compulsion or genuine liability exposure to ensure they invest in the detection and mitigation of organised reputational attacks.

Courts, too, will need to evolve new approaches to establish accountability in defamatory campaigns, where responsibility is intentionally fragmented. The Bombay High Court’s willingness to name unidentified proxy entities is a tentative but meaningful step. ASCI, meanwhile, needs to extend its reach beyond identified advertisers to the agencies and intermediaries who execute such drives—developing tools capable of unmasking operations specifically constructed to be untraceable.

Finally, the brands themselves will need to recognise that the short-term competitive advantage of a successful unethical campaign is increasingly offset by the reputational risk of exposure in an environment where audiences are acutely sensitive to manipulation.

The advertising industry built its legitimacy on a simple compact with audiences: “We are trying to persuade you, and you know it.” Dark advertising breaks that compact, destroying the very trust on which branding ultimately depends. And once broken, it is not easily rebuilt.

(The author is a certified independent director who has held senior leadership positions across print, broadcast and digital platforms)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.