Hey there, Lonelygirl15? Thanks for a Lesson in Marketing 101

In every decade, there is the riddle that has become almost cliché:  Who shot J.R.?  Who killed Laura Palmer?  Who is Cartman’s father?  If you are a fan of YouTube.com, you’ll be interested to know the answer to, perhaps, the quintessential riddle of the new Web 2.0 generation:  Who is Lonelygirl15?

Lonelygirl15 first appeared in June on the video hosting conglomeration that has become a hodgepodge of viewer-contributed content.  Purporting to be a 16-year-old, home-schooled All-American girl named “Bree,” viewers are invited into her world through a series of video blog entries that track her adventures with her friend, Daniel (a.k.a. Danielbeast), her parents and the puppets that inhabit her bedroom.

But in actuality, the Associated Press on Wednesday confirmed what amateur Internet investigators and bloggers have suspected for weeks:  that Lonelygirl15’s video diaries are actually prefabricated “made-for-broadband” content. The creators were reportedly identified as Miles Beckett, 28, of Woodland Hills, California; Mesh Flinders, 26, of Petaluma, California; and Greg Goodfried, 27, of Los Angeles, who recently filed to trademark the “Lonelygirl15” name.

At a time when marketing professionals and agencies are coming up with the same old, stoic ideas claiming to be “new integrated campaigns,” the hoax perpetrated by the individuals involved Lonelygirl15 should actually be commended. Not since the Blair Witch Project of 1999 has the Internet witnessed such a buzz, providing further proof that truly interactive campaigns should harness the participation of viewers and fans in more ways than simply clicking on a button with a computer mouse.

Throughout the four-month videoblogged adventures of Bree and Daniel, intrepid Internet sleuths explored the authenticity of Lonelygirl15’s regular entries (examining every nuance of the videos from pronunciation to production quality) and subsequently solved the mystery before mainstream media caught on.

The actors portraying Daniel and the ever-photogenic Bree still aren’t confirmed but the Silicon Valley Watcher and Top of the Tube blogs on Tuesday identified the actress as Jessica Lee Rose, a immigrant that graduated from the New York Film Academy and now lives in Los Angeles. The New York Times subsequently followed up on the story.

But while intuition proved to be right at times, other conspiracy theorists apparently let their imaginations run wild, speculating that a major Hollywood studios was behind Lonelygirl15. Despite the rumors, the three creators stated publicly that no film is currently in the works. If only marketing professionals were really that sharp...

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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