Lonelygirl15 fouls the watering hole
September 11th, 2006Author: DialogueMedia
The viral online campaign for The Blair Witch Project was both an outstanding success as well as the worst thing to ever happen to the marketing profession. The good was that it created a popular groundswell of interest in a movie that no one had heard of on a then nascient medium, the internet. The bad is that ever since then everyone has tried to replicate it, with very few of these repeats going well. Most simply involve company-paid trolls who post glowing reviews on message boards or sites that are supposed to be “fan created” but, unless that fan as a $50,000 marketing budget, just doesn’t pass the smell test.
So too, now the saga of LonelyGirl15 has salted the once-fertile earth of consumer generated content. If the reports are true – and they seem to be – that the teenaged cutie who’s the embodiment of every teenaged guy’s fantasies (which should have been a tipoff right there) and she is someone’s viral marketing project – then marketers everywhere are screwed. Moreso than merely paying bloggers for covertly mentioning brands and products, the abuse of legitimate consumer-generated content is something that simply can’t be recovered from. This isn’t just the killing of your own reputation, as is the case with accepting money for blog mentions. This is casting consumer suspicion over an entire media format. Whenever a video blogger now mentions a product or becomes a grassroots sensation the way LonelyGirl15 did the audience will now be wondering if it’s real or part of a corporate strategy.
You can never unring a bell and it’s hard to earn back trust once it’s broken. While the people who created LonelyGirl15 should be commended for doing such a fantastic job of reaching such a large audience and waiting so long before tipping their hand, we also need to hold them responsible for changing the climate for the rest of us. It’s yet another thing the rest of the online marketing community will need to overcome when trying to bring authentic messages to the audience there.
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