I’m sure most visitors to the BonBlogs have already seen this news (or figured it out before the official word came down today), but the latest attempt at cyber-marketing (ala The Blair Witch Project or even Snakes on a Plane) has been exposed just a month before the film was to be released (if you believe the coded messages that 10, 12, and 06 mean anything).
The latest confession to stun the entertainment world is an unusual one: “We are filmmakers.” The team behind the lonelygirl15 YouTube mystery has come forward, claiming that lonelygirl15 is part of their “show” and thanking their fans effusively for tuning in to “the birth of a new art form.” They are not, they insisted, “a big corporation.”
Article in today’s LA Times with the admission of involvement as high up as CAA here.
Lonelygirl15 appears to be an innocent, home-schooled 16-year-old, pouring her heart out for her video camera in the privacy of her bedroom. But since May, her brief posts on the video-sharing site YouTube and the social networking hub MySpace have launched a Web mystery eagerly followed by her million-plus viewers: Who is this sheltered ingenue who calls herself “Bree,” and is she in some sort of danger — or, worse, the tool of some giant marketing machine?
Yesterday’s piece here.
Honestly, I think it’s brilliant. And while I totally understand the emotional turmoil of those who got suckered in (it happened to me two years ago while watching The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan and I have not forgiven the marketing geniuses (and yes, they’re geniuses and I respect them) behind that, despite having befriended one of them in the time since I got punk’d), I think it’s brilliant and wonderful and it just reminds me why I taught Media Literacy at Athens Academy nearly a decade ago. Kids (and adults too) need to learn that media is all about manipulation. That’s the only way they’ll ever harness its power for themselves (which is the goal).
Make media work for you. Don’t get pissed when it suckers you. Learn from it, build on it, let it propel you to greatness.