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September 13, 2006
Lesson(s) Learned
Recently, in this space, you would have found an article about a viral marketing campaign called "lonelygirl15."
The plot of this campaign and "Bree," the campaign's avitar, have been profiled in places like BusinessWeek (as the summer's best movie) and the Los Angeles Times.
My posting described the campaign, which has finally been exposed as a campaign, and its potential application in the recruiting space.
But that name--lonelygirl15--and the YouTube posting became the story.
The Bard opined, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, ii. 2.)
But the Bard didn't blog.
Not long after the posting went up, I started to get phone calls alerting me that "porn" had been posted to my sight.
I checked. (No porn, just Bree.)
I asked, "did you read the posting."
Initially, the answer was, "no, I just assumed it was porn." But eventually, it became clear that I was talking about a different kind of reading than most of us do these days. I was talking about reading words--that's what I'd written, after all--but the calls I was getting convinced me that whatever my intentions, the words I'd written were being overshadowed by the more powerful associations between the name "lonelygirl15" and the image.
C'est la vie. Lessons (re)learned:
1. It's the visuals: when a visual image presents a strong, potentially contradictory message, it's the visual message people are more inclined to trust;
2. Lesson one notwithstanding, powerful associations managed well can overwrite imbedded biases: when the lonelygirl15 campaign goes mainstream (my guess is, this will take place on opening night, October 6) and everyone's "in" on the campaign, the text (commentary) will be more interesting than the source video.
Check back in October?
Not for this one: I'm done.
Posted by davidkippen at September 13, 2006 08:40 PM