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Thanks for bringing this issue to my attention via Twitter, friend. I really value your tweets.

I am opposed to gaming any system, it means your product or work has no intrinsic value that can create a genuine word of mouth campaign, spontaneously generated by satisfied and enthusiastic fans.

Multiple accounts and fake comments in a contrived and insincere "blogocombat battle" is a weak way to drive traffic to a video on YouTube or an ecommerce site.

I could enter fake comments in my blogs all day long, using fake names and legit URLs, but just doing so would prove that I'm desperate, vain, dishonest, pathetic, and not skillful at promoting my blogs in an authentic manner.

http://twitter.com/vaspers

The thing is, the campaign for the Blair Witch movie was completely unique to 1999. The Internet was only a few years old, and no one had even thought to pull anything like that. That's what made it so great. If someone pulled something like that again, I think the transparency issue would be secondary to the "Yawn...it's been done." issue. It's the originality that's important, I don't mind being tricked as long as it's really, really clever.

That being said, I thought the BWP was the stupidest movie I've ever seen, and was probably the only college student in America at the time who left the theater going "Um, that wasn't scary--can we get our money back?" :)

Thank You!!! For not allowing stupid cowardly anonymous posts on your blog.

I've been trying to get TechCrunch and other blogs to disallow these trolls from posting their unaccountable abuse.

I know nothing about Blair Witch Project. But Lonelygirl15 is an example of tricking people into visiting a video, and I think it is con artist BS.

Hey Todd:

Glad to hear you are plugged in again :)

I hadn't thought about the Blair Witch Project. I think there is a key difference between the marketing used for BWP and the techniques used by the commotion group: The marketing lead up to BWP's launch created an alternate reality that actually added to the movie going experience. These weren't frivolous fake pages, they were part of the art/craft of the movie makers.It's not too far from what the LonelyGirl people tried to attempt with that series and have really evolved in KateModern's use of social networking to enhance the entertainment aspect.

The Commotion Group, on the other hand, isn't adding to an experience; they are using the tools to create a fake sense of "social proof" behind their campaigns. It reminds me of a laugh track on a TV show and that's why we hiss.

We discuss this constantly in our firm. Where is the line? Personally, I didn't think the Blair Witch stunt was all that clever except for the fact that college kids came up with it. The source of the gag was what made it somewhat interesting. Otherwise, I thought it was a boring movie, poorly done. I think the same standards would probably still apply, for me.

I think that a lot of this is being done in the name of being "creative," which I think is NOT an acceptable reason for being dishonest.

I, like you, felt that the Comotion post on TechCrunch held a lot of great (and ethical) ideas.

I think the problem is that clients and providers don't want to do the work ahead of time (or spend the money) to have a network of real people that want to consume these entertaining videos. If they had a network, they wouldn't have to kick off the conversation themselves, their community would do it.

So many are still looking for the shortcut in the name of creativity.

At the time of BWP, my best friend was a college intern working the junkits for this movie. While it was clever and creative approach, we saw a lot of scared people who did not see the humor. The theatre had extra security and there was a public announcement before each movie leading to drama without good outcome. Of course, we laugh about it now.

How is Blair Witch different from lonelygirl15? Or rather, how is it the same? If the purpose is to entertain, and the payoff is good (a matter of opinion, sure), you could probably do it.

But you had better be right. I thought the lonelygirl15 thing was well played, I don;t know that everyone agrees. But like BWP, it was a series of fictional vignettes presented as documentary until it was time to unveil.

Now, if lonelygirl15 had gotten a bigger project to unveil at the right moment, it would have been really cool

My position is that Lonelygirl15 manipulated the emotions of the younger girls who got caught up in it.

I think hoaxes can be fun, and non-harmful. But we do need to analyze and ponder and draw lines. If we wish to be ethical, ie, powerful. For ill gotten gain just curses the con artists and charlatans.

I recall video responses from gals who said they prayed and wept and felt devastated by the fictitious LG15 events, and when the hoax was exposed, they felt betrayed.

Do you wish to risk being perceived as a manipulator, gamer, exploiter?

My personal perspective on this is that people are okay with hoaxes/reveals when they enter into the situation with an understanding that it's entertainment. I love films with twists at the end..."The Usual Suspects" is one of my all-time favorites.

The difference between BWP and LonelyGirl is that with BWP, going to a movie there is an expectation of entertainment. People got emotionally involved with LonelyGirl. When revealed it was entertainment, the empathy people felt for the young girl evaporated. It might seem like too fine a distinction, but I think there is some difference.

Thanks, all, for the thoughtful comments.

Jen, I tend to agree most with your take (including the fact that there may be too much nuance for us all to grasp it!)

Interesting discussion here, but let me provide a perspective on Blair Witch, a project that has never been properly (accurately) fully documented.

Full disclosure: I am the co-producer of Blair Witch, and one of the 5 (former) college students from Orlando behind the whole thing.

While we were building out the website and the community, we always knew we were walking a line, but we decided we were not going to try and hoax people outright. The regular members of the Blair Witch community, the people who lived on the forums, communicated with us regularly, built fan pages and went out into the world and buzzed about the film all knew it was a work of fiction, even before we premiered at Sundance in January 1999. We used to send out a production email newsletter to fans where we talked about the making of the film, and we did stories in the media leading up to Sundance were we discussed how the film was made (NY Times, Filmmaker Magazine). When the film was sold at Sundance, a full seven months before the theatrical release, pictures of the actors and stories appeared in publications from Premiere Magazine to Entertainment Weekly to local newspapers. We were not trying to fool anyone.

What we were trying to do, is create a world online that continued the "real" aesthetic of the movie, and allowed people to play in that world. Most of the fan sites that popped up played with this aspect -- people created sites to further investigate the mythology, some even created Private Investigator characters and added their own twists to the mythology.

That being said, a lot of people thought it was real. Many, many people would come to the site, scare themselves silly, find out it was fiction and then send all their friends to the site, telling them it was real to give them the same scare. Those who investigated, found out the truth, but the buzz spread to many more people than actually visited the site, hence many people believed it was real.

The BW experience was never ultimately about fooling people, and that's why very few people actually felt betrayed by it.

As for the difference between Blair Witch and Lonely Girl 15, I think that the LG creators allowed the "is this real" question to overshadow the story they were telling. The mass attention went from people involved in the story to people trying to figure out who was behind it.

But probably the biggest difference is that Blair Witch was constructed in a way that you didn't identify or invest in Heather, Mike and Josh as people -- they were already dead and the audience was piecing together a mystery that already took place. The fans of LonelyGirl felt they had a relationship with the character, they communicated to her and she responded back to them. They were all part of a community, so when it was revealed that she was a fiction, people felt betrayed because they were emotionally invested in her.

If you are going to walk that line, you have to be respectful of your audience and their emotions. People love a good prank, but they don't like to have their emotions manipulated falsely.

I never really looked at LG15 from the eyes of the young girls who got emotionally involved. As a college student during the BWP, I started following it before it was revealed to be marketing. After the hoax was up, it actually got me excited about the movie. I guess with LG15, I thought people would be excited about a new form of entertainment, an innovative new use of the media.

In terms of entertainment, we will see more interactivity (see NewTeeVee article: http://tinyurl.com/2j4vsh). In terms of marketing, we have to continue to remain transparent. I think we also have to move away from quick entertaining videos that contain messaging, but actually engage people in a conversation with our clients through new video strategies.

Great Discussion, btw!

Wow - I just didn't like the movie, and actually got my money back.

And, truth be told, it stank back then and it still stinks now. Manipulation is manipulation, no matter what year it is.

Michael, thanks for the clear, thoughtful response. I was (downright shocked and) thrilled that you stopped by and took the time to clarify those far-off events. Sounds like ya'll took the right approach (even for these more demanding times), and the success your team had with that first film speaks for itself. Thanks again.

Hey Todd,

Fun topic, no? Let me ask you (and the audience) if there's a huge difference between what The Commotion Group is doing with videos, and what every SEO/SEM firm operating on the web is doing with text or links? Gaming organic results, right?

What about parallels in other mediums? Having "fake" comments and multiple people "in" on getting a controversy started around a video is a little like having a laugh track on a sitcom, don't you think? It's there to infect the audience and get them invested in what they're seeing.

I don't know...the SEO/SEM industry is probably the closest parallel to what happened here, and no one is up in arms about how they fix search engine results. They're not even an open secret anymore.

Joel - Mainstream media journalists have solved these problems many decades ago. They at least, in spite of some other faults, draw a line in the sand regarding "advertorials", fake letters to the editor, and so forth.

If your client has a valuable, beneficial, infotaining product, you won't need to resort to dubious "gaming the system" practices to promote and sell the product.

Google has destroyed PayPerPost and all artificial, contrived "word of mouth" campaigns are doomed to fail, backfire, and cause more ill will than success.

Laugh tracks on sitcoms are so stupid, I can't see how anyone would think that's a good idea. If you think your audience is so dumb, they need a laugh track to provoke genuine laughter and enjoyment, how lame is that?

Fake comments and fake user accounts, culminating in fake blogocombat and fake audience creation is for idiots and crap products.

Great points Todd. I feel your pain on this one. We all know this can be a successful method in generating buzz but at what expense?

Myself personally, I feel transparency is key and call it moral fiber...I just can't professionally drop down to this level. Besides not wanting to, I think my time would be better off discovering another blog, reading an article on PR-Squared, or picking up the phone and creating a conversation.

The buzz around Blair Witch was exciting back in the day, hearing from a friend of a friend that it was real, but if you did any amount of REAL research, it was obvious it was not. As for LG15, its just sad, so very, very sad people went to those lengths.