The videos, which began appearing on YouTube in mid-2006, quickly became a Web phenomenon. Merrill said that an early episode called "I'm Mad At My Parents" garnered 50,000 page views in the first two hours after it was released online. Later installments got 500,000 page views in their first day on the Web, he added.

The lure of lonelygirl15 didn't end even after journalists and other online snoops revealed that Bree was a fictional character played by an actress who, according to her bio, was born in the US and raised in New Zealand. Viewership of the videos continued to skyrocket, as did participation in online chat rooms set up by fans of the series.

The people who watch the lonelygirl15 videos and take part in the chats are "your customers," Merrill told conference attendees. "Nobody cares that it's all a lie. All they care about is the engagement." As a result, he said, "you can let users write ads for you, or write the story."

That approach isn't without risks, of course. As an example of it in action, Merrill pointed to an online marketing campaign that General Motors created for the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV in the US, in partnership with "The Apprentice" TV show. The auto maker, in 2006, posted Tahoe-related video and audio clips on a Web site and invited visitors to create their own ads, with text they could write themselves.

Predictably enough, some of the videos painted the Tahoe in a negative light, including one parody ad that said the SUV's low petrol mileage would contribute to global warming and concluded with a tagline describing the vehicle as "the ultimate padded cell." One marketing consultant said in a 2006 blog post that the campaign was doomed to fail from the start.

But on a GM blog that April, a Chevrolet executive insisted that the video campaign was "one of the most creative and successful promotions we have done." He wrote that an "overwhelming majority" of the 22,000 videos submitted at that point had been "earnest attempts at creating positive advertisements," and that the campaign "sure got people talking about the Tahoe." He also noted that GM knew it would get negative submissions but decided that it "would be summarily destroyed in the blogosphere if we censored the ads based on their viewpoint."

Whether the marketing campaign actually helped influence buying decisions or not, Merrill said today that Tahoe sales did rise in its aftermath -- although they have since fallen to earth as part of a general decline in sales at the big U.S. auto makers.

So why is it important for IT managers to pay attention to any of this? Because, Merrill said, IT is the key to providing the infrastructure that can support content requiring so much bandwidth and storage capacity. In the mainframe-dominated past, when lowering costs was the primary purpose of technology, "the optimal CIO job was invisible," he said. "That's not true anymore.

IT executives have to find ways to improve the scalability of systems in their data centers, while still keeping costs from spiraling out of control, Merrill said. For example, he noted that Google relies on multiple data centers to speed up searches for Web users. But to prevent IT costs from getting out of hand, it does things such as use consumer-grade disk drives instead of higher-end models that are more expensive and power-hungry.

Building an IT infrastructure that can scale isn't easy, Merrill acknowledged. But, he added, there's no alternative. "The distinction between technology and business is antediluvian -- it's gone," he said. "The good thing is it gives us more power [within companies]. The bad thing is that if we screw up, we take our companies with us."