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He gets friend to act in video
Student creates fake online babe for viral campaign
By Gan Ling Kai,
The New Paper | Photo: Jonathan Choo | 31-05-10
TWO months ago, a doe-eyed beauty calling herself Holly Ho posted a video on YouTube and on her Facebook page. In the video, she asked for 10 cents from each netizen. She said she was hoping that at least 10 million netizens would respond, so she could become a millionaire without getting a job. Netizens responded all right, but with brickbats instead of pocket change. They called her lazy and blasted her for being a slut.
Others tried to flirt with her.
Her campaign for coins generated so much debate that it appeared on citizen journalism website Stomp in March and April, generating a total of more than 123,000 views. But the biggest shock was yet to come. It turns out that Holly Ho is a he. And the video was just part of a school project by Mr Marcus Lim, 26, who is pursuing a degree in design communication at Lasalle College of the Arts, specialising in advertising communication.
He was the one who adopted the Holly Ho persona as part of his final-year project to conduct a viral marketing campaign to create brand awareness for a bank. Mr Lim’s project supervisor Ms Kathryn Shannon Sim, 32, confirmed this. Mr Lim’s plan was to create a suitable personality online, then start a discussion on wealth management. He said: “The emergence of social media has changed the way people communicate. “So it is important for advertisers to build a participatory culture to communicate with their audience.”
Needing a pretty girl to create the required “controversy”, he roped in a friend, Elyn, to be the face of Holly, whom he named after the materialistic character Holly Golightly played by Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He shot a video of her asking for donations, uploaded it to YouTube and waited for it to go viral. Although the video was taken down by site administrators a few days later, it already sparked a flood of comments on Stomp after netizens posted two reports on Holly there. Mr Lim said Elyn, 20, declined to speak to us because “she didn’t want to draw additional attention on herself”.
Mr Lim also created a Facebook page for Holly, who has gained about 800 “friends” to date. While some netizens left messages of support, along with suggestions on how she could earn money, there were others who left nasty insults. No one donated a single cent.
Mr Lim said he was counting on these responses. “This project is designed to create a controversy. It doesn’t matter whether the comments are positive or negative. What’s important is that people respond to it,” he said. At the height of the controversy, Mr Lim slipped in his advertising message – a note from Holly that she now plans to “work, save and invest her money” with a foreign bank here. His project is now in the process of being graded.
Mr Adam Penenberg, author of the book Viral Loop, which discusses viral marketing, said that Mr Lim’s project is a “brilliant idea”. Mr Penenberg, 47, a New York University journalism professor who is visiting Singapore for work, told The New Paper: “He is able to grab attention and it probably cost him next to nothing.”
Danger of a backlash
But Mr Penenberg cautioned that if this is a real marketing campaign, there’s a danger it may backfire after the netizens find out that Holly and her story were made up. “It depends on whether the people feel betrayed or not (after learning the truth),” he said. When we told Mr Perry Tan, 35, an HR professional in a bank, about the school project, he said: “I don’t think a real bank would do this because the storyline sounds juvenile and may attract negative publicity.” But Ms Joscelin Kwek, 28, a corporate communication manager disagreed. She said:“I think the student is quite clever. There’s no problem because no one gave any money to Holly.”
