Opportunity knocks on the web

The entertainment industry has always been big on brand creation and is adept at manufacturing personas such as 'Robbie Williams' or 'Hugh Grant', whose publicists feed the press a steady diet of stories.

But the internet is, it seems, both democratising and accelerating this process. In the UK, for example, we will soon have our own first home-grown web celebrity as the TV come internet show Big Brother reaches its peak.

The programme is centred around 10 people living together in a purpose-built house in East London for nine weeks. They are under constant 24-hour surveillance from 24 cameras installed around the house and garden, and web users can watch them by clicking on the Channel 4 website or tuning into the show, which is broadcast every night.

Every week, viewers vote for who they want to leave the house and the person that is left wins £70,000.

But Jason George, creative director at Victoria Real, which is running the site, admitted: "Handling the traffic for the Big Brother website could prove to be a huge task. This is equivalent to creating a dotcom that only lasts for the duration of the show."

The Big Brother brand, which originated in Holland, has now been exported to Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the US, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Norway and Denmark.

But what the producers could not have foreseen was the way in which contestants have become personalities in their own right. Former contestants have released records, written cookery books, hosted their own TV shows - and one was even been offered a contract by Playboy.

In Germany, one participant who was ejected from the house for being 'too stupid' laughed all the way to the bank in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. He released a rap single ironically entitled I Miss You, which sold half a million copies, and he now has a line of beer named after him.

So it appears that while 'branding' may be the buzz word of ecommerce, it is also equally important for internet celebrities. The sudden rise to fame of contestants in the Big Brother series is just the latest example of the phenomenon.

I kiss you!
Earlier this year, Turkish schoolteacher Mahir Cagri was mobbed by more than a thousand people in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel. The reason? He had created a website called I Kiss You, where, in pidgin English, he invites girls from all over the world to send pictures to him as a potential marriage partner. His personal website has so far recorded more than 12 million hits.

David Hurran, an executive at the Noho advertising agency, believes that the internet is empowering people in a similar way that desktop publishing (DTP) applications in the early 1990s did.

"What is quite interesting is that, in the same way that early DTP empowered people to become publishers, the internet does give everyone the opportunity to become a media star," he said. "The internet gives you the ability to broadcast to a huge number of people at a very cheap cost."

But Hurran also wonders whether, ironically, the internet actually diminishes the idea of celebrity by demystifying the personalities involved. Everyone can be involved in the process of making someone into an online star by simply clicking on the relevant site - they are no longer the manufactured product of PR executives such as Max Clifford or News of the World editors, for example.

And unlike the offline world, celebrities can achieve fame much more quickly.

Graham Hansell, managing director of the Sitelynx grassroots marketing company, argues: "It's the synchronicity of global communications. Suddenly one person can typify everything about an entire scene. The amazing thing is that the internet travels at the 'speed of wires'. Suddenly so many people know about one person who typifies a subject or activity. You get this wildfire approach."

"It's always happened, but now it's so accelerated. So people become brands in spite of themselves. Pop stars have been doing it for years - the whole cult of celebrity. But that's more or less a professional industry," he added.

Hansell also makes the crucial point that when ordinary people such as Mahir Cagri become 'brands', they, in effect, become part of the media themselves.

"He had his own site and he became popular. But SmartGroups shifted him to its site to provide him with bandwidth and hosting space for free. It backed him. He's a character, and building a community based on technology needs to be humanised. A character fronting it makes it real. It personalises the technology," Hansell explained.

"There's so much content on the web that it needs to be personalised. What these 'peoplebrands' are is the personalising of all this information. They personify a community, they personify an activity or they personify an event. The internet markets to people, not computers. You need people to front that," he added.

The real thing
And it is the very amateurish nature of individuals who build their own websites that attracts companies wanting to lend an air of authenticity to their products. For years, actresses have masqueraded as ordinary housewives to sell washing powder in TV advertisements. But on the internet, vendors can provide the real McCoy.

This means that as companies recognise the power of internet marketing, such fame is likely to end up being as manufactured in the virtual world as it is in the offline world.

The UK producers of Big Brother, for example, have already learnt lessons from their foreign counterparts and write up their take on each participant, which can be read on the Channel 4 website.

Noho's Hurran said: "I watched Big Brother last night. I thought the democratic aspect was a bit of a masquerade. You vote for whom you want to be nominated. But I felt I had a very clear idea about who would get chucked out on the basis of how they would want the storyline to develop. It feels very scripted."

But at the same time, he argues, the web does strip away the artifice of fame. The Big Brother site has a popularity graph for each of the competitors that rises and falls as surfers cast their votes.

"The nice thing about the web is that the whole thing is measurable. There are 10 people on the Big Brother site, and they can very accurately measure responses to those people as individuals," said Hurran.

"It's almost like the mechanics of being a celebrity broken down into really hard figures, into data. Whereas before it was kind of, 'I like this person. I saw him in a film he makes me feel good'. Here it's, 'they got 22,000 votes so they are better than the next person'."