Direct to Fans

Have there been some celebrities who were resistant, needed a little extra care in convincing them to be on Cameo? And how did you change their minds?

Of course, I mean, we always say at Cameo that “Today’s no is tomorrow’s yes,” and part of that is, we are creating a new category. I was just out in Miami with Jared Leto and he was telling me about 10-15 years ago when his band was the first band to offer VIP meet and greet after the concert, right?
They got a ton of negative press in the UK about this, “How could you charge people that are already at the show more money? You’re such a scum bag,” blah blah. So, because of the bad press, they canceled it and then guess what? The customers were upset at the next tour stop that wasn’t there anymore because they wanted that opportunity.
So direct-to-fan modernization in general, had been seen as pretty taboo. Movie stars got paid by you going to their movie, and they got paid by the studio. Athletes got paid by the teams who made money from you going to the games but paying an actor or paying an athlete or paying a musician directly was fairly taboo five years ago.
But what you’ve seen is this world where there’s more famous people than ever before, and the underlying business models of sports of entertainment and of the creator economy, all these business models are growing linearly when the amount of people are growing exponentially.
There’s a gap between fame and modernization. And direct-to-fan modernization is in my opinion, the only way to plug that gap. So, I think people are seeing the writing around the wall, and now you’re watching NFTs and you’re watching Merch Drops and all the things that celebrities are doing, but it started with getting rid of this taboo of charging your fans for things.

The notion of who’s the celebrity has changed, right? I mean, you talked about back in the day, used to be agents can kind of control to that or movies studio control to that, but now, you’ve got celebrities on TikTok.

When you were growing up, right? If you ought to be famous, you went to Los Angeles, right?

Right.

You had to go to Los Angeles, and you had to hope that you got your break. The crazy thing now that’s so amazing is now, that same person, instead of having to wait tables, they can go on Instagram, they can go on TikTok, they can go on YouTube, and they can start making content. And if it’s great, they don’t need a casting director to say, yes. They can become famous for themselves.
So, there are just more famous people on earth today than ever before and that trend’s just going one way. You look at the survey data of high school kids, more people want to be influencers than doctors, lawyers, astronauts combined, right? So, it’s only going one way.