I should have known that :-) I was curious, so I looked into this a bit more. Monsanto advertised Astroturf in 1971 with the slogan "The new grass-roots movemen

I should have known that :-) I was curious, so I looked into this a bit more. Monsanto advertised Astroturf in 1971 with the slogan "The new grass-roots movement. It's away from grass, to Astroturf." In the 1980s, grass-roots vs Astroturf started to be used as a political metaphor by people such as Bob Dole and Lloyd Bentsen, and then became a popular media expression in the 1990s. So ironically, the metaphorical use of "astroturf" was originally driven by advertising.