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R.I.P. Lonelygirl15
Sunday, September 10th, 2006
UPDATE: Okay, just to give an idea on some of the strange hints left in these videos, a photo on the wall in Bree’s room seems to depict famed English black magician Aleister “The Great Beast” Crowley (“The Wickedest Man In The World,” etc. etc). Besides starting the Thelemic religion, Crowley also had the good sense to spend his honeymoon inside a pyramid. Seems a little weird to spend your wedding night with your mummy, but whatever.
Anyway, during a recent Lonelygirl15 video in which Bree and Daniel bake cookies and rate them, some fans noticed that the first cookie got a rating of “10,” the second cookie got a rating of “12,” and the third cookie got a rating of “6.” The date 10/12/06 also happens to be Aleister Crowley’s birthday.
Am I the only one who would get a perversive pleasure in having this sweet teen quasidrama quickly devolve into horror movie?
Original Post: So, according to the L.A. Times, the dream has died. Well, okay, I’ve over exaggerating, but I am a little blue now it has been revealed that the YouTube-phenomenon around Lonelygirl15 is just a clever storytelling campaign by members of the Creative Artists Agency.
For those that missed the hype, Lonelygirl15 was a supposed home-schooled teenage girl named Bree who had been posting video diaries on YouTube about her problems with her parents, her friend/admirer/prospective love interest Daniel (who also posted some videos on YouTube) and other random teenage things. It sounds trite when I describe it, but, really, it was oddly hypnotic to watch and I fully encourage everyone to go back and watch the thing. It is by far the best example of viral marketing ever. And that’s not an exaggeration
And, of course, we all knew it was fake and that these were two characters. The list of reasons to be suspicious is long: the “unofficial” lonelygirl15.com domain name was registered a month before the videos began to be posted; it seemed odd that Bree and Daniel had nothing else happen in their lives and talked only about each other in their videos. But, still, it was a compelling story. Each of Bree’s videos attracted hundreds of thousands of views and it even received a mention in the New York Times.
The whole thing kinda smacked of William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition,” in which a “cool hunter” is hired by the head of a cutting-edge marketing agency to track down the anonymous authors of “The Footage,” a series of video clips released on the Internet that became hugely popular and the best use of viral marketing ever because of the mystery surrounding them. Internet communities were formed whose sole purpose was to apply collective intelligence to solving the mystery of the clips and the saga of Lonelygirl15 was no different.
So, anyway, let me just issue a rousing “Bravo!” to everyone involved both in producing the Lonelygirl15 videos and to those folks involved in solving the mystery. This was by far the best example of viral marketing to come out of modern technology. Congratulations, folks!
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September 11th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Color me sad that lonelygirl15 was made up…although it was all just a little *too* polished. But I agree – what a viral campaign!
September 11th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Ah ha! The prodigal intern returns! Hope you\’re having fun in the bayou. Or is it Dawson\’s Creek?
Yeah… well… I dunno… the lonelygirl15.com website has been down recently. Some folks are suggesting that maybe it was taken down because the message posted from \”the creators\” was fake. Eh… this is getting to complicated for me.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:16 am
Brilliant. I wish we could have seen it play out before it was unravelled.
I love Pattern Recognition…good analogy.
Thought the term “meme artist” works quite well in describing poor Bree.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
I find it hard to believe that anyone was really fooled in the biz – I’m not saying I knew what she was selling or who she was fronting but it was obviously too slick … but really, the bottom is – was it entertaining? And what was the ultimae harm? Was she pitching cigarettes? No – it was all just self promotion for everyone involved and if somehow that “ticks” anyone off – then you have to analyze why you were/are ticked – the over commercialization of You Tube or the web? Um, dude how naive are you? :-)
September 19th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Personally, I like “Jeff Berg, V.P, Naiveté,” but they tell me that would look bad on the business cards.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:30 am
You all raise a good point but the fact is, you are all talking about it and so these producers, these ‘creators’, are willing to ride out the backlash in order to get their content out in a very viral and risky channel. it’s that balance that we were talking about in the lab the other day, re the Chevy Tahoe ad campaign, they messed up but they also know they hit a note, and if their smart, they’ll learn and leverage the fire they started… That’s how you remain in control of these things, by being willing for it to ‘fail’ and then failure becomes learning and new information bares new opportunities.