Assessing the Ethics of LonelyGirl15

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> BACKGROUND: Posing as a teenager making an amateur video while
confined to her room by overly religious parents, Jessica Rose Lee burst out
of YouTube's daily flow of consumer-generated slush to become a
cultlike national celebrity known as LonelyGirl15. The YouTube videos were
designed to appear as if a gently rebellious and quite precocious young
girl was secretly talking to the entire world through her computer,
while, just a door away, her strict parents sat smugly in the belief that
their daughter had been firmly grounded. It seemed a dramatic and
compelling real-life story that ultimate drew a large viral audience of
teenagers. But professionals soon noted that, despite its
filmed-in-my-bedroom look, LonelyGirl15's video was as slick as it was consistent in its
pacing and editing. And the young teen herself was able to create a
thematically coherent storyline through each of her appearances. Last week
the whole thing was revealed as a scripted hoax. Ms. Rose is an actress
who has studied at the New York Film Academy and was hired to do the
viral videos as part of an advance guerilla promotion for an unnamed
movie. The incident is the latest in which marketing communications
professionals have invested significant amounts of their time, skills and
money to create fictional events that have been presented to the online
world as if they were factual. Some critics say that the practice is
helping establish the online media space as a place where readers and
viewers can't really trust what they see or hear, no matter how authentic it
looks. Others argue that in the new upside-down world of
consumer-controlled world of media and advertising, anything goes so long as it
works. What do you think?

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: Do you think the YouTube LonelyGirl15 stunt was
brilliant marketing or irresponsible deception? Tell us why. http://adage.com/poll?poll_id=36

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