Does your market want to be friends with your character?

[Tags: interactive pr, pr]. Interesting move by movie studios to promote their films as reported by the WSJ:

"Creating real-looking profiles for fictional characters is the latest step
in marketers' quest to reach the highly sought-after MySpace contingent. John
Tucker, the womanizing teenager of "John Tucker Must Die," and each of his four
girlfriends have MySpace pages. (You can check John's basketball schedule or
read about Carrie's plans for college.) So do seven of the characters from
"Accepted," a film about college students debuting this week. (Bartleby Gaines,
the fictional star, lists "Fake I.D.'s" and "Monica" as his interests.) Even the
creepily-quiet mascot king from the Burger King commercials has a site. ("If
you'd like to be the King's friend, he's totally down with that," his page
introduction says.)
"Although anybody can create a MySpace profile for free, and fake ones
abound, these pages are the result of paid advertising deals with News Corp. The
arrangement allows marketers to add extras like longer videos -- including
trailers for movies -- and more pictures than a free page has."

Although the intention is to create a 'relationship' with consumers, there's an interesting contrast between these pages and others created by fans, with the upshot that the tactic could backfire with some 'friends'.