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The real point of a ‘SELFIE’ (and the new economics of celebrity)
People have been taking photos of themselves for years. Yet, suddenly – like the explosion of a little cultural word grenade – the word ‘Selfie’ has entered the mainstream. I bet you have used the word in conversation in the past week. And I also bet you had never mentioned the word in your life before that. Like me, you might have found this quite odd. You may have wondered about how easily our sponge-like brains can be manipulated, with not even a book or a classroom to impart the information. Just where did this all come from?
This is an example of a “meme”, coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to describe a unit of a transferable idea, in the same way as a “gene” is a unit of heredity. If I remember correctly, the first example Dawkins used to illustrate his new term was the wearing of baseball caps backwards, which just goes to show that just because a meme is successful it doesn’t mean to say it is necessarily tasteful or for the general betterment of humanity.
But a successful meme is very powerful. As I write this, our Festival of Media judges are sifting through 192 shortlisted entries to this year’s FOMG Awards. All are examples of meme-building – with growth in fans, views, shares and sales being the evidence of memes doing their clever business. The advertising industry is a meme machine.
You might have heard The Chainsmokers’ song '#SELFIE.' (view music video below). At the beginning of March, the song hit No. 1 on the US iTunes’ Top 10 dance chart, securing a record deal for the band, The Chainsmokers. Their video has been viewed more than 41 million times. One of our speakers, Oliver Luckett, the Hollywood impresario and now CEO of social agency theAudience, was the man behind it. Oliver has joined forces with Sean Parker – of Napster fame – and Ari Emmanuel of William Morris Endeavour to create an agency designed to create even more memes on the back of some of the world’s most recognised celebrities.
theAudience doesn’t identify their clients, but they have about 300 accounts – with access to about 800 million fans. Rumour has it that Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jack Black, Hugh Jackman, Usher and Pitbull have been advised by Oliver in recent months. The British comedian, Russell Brand, used theAudience to help promote his shows without any ‘conventional’ advertising – and was also advised on how to route his tours based on the geography of his fan base. That feels pretty smart. Oliver also helped electronic dance musician Steve Aoki, grow his Facebook “likes” to 1.2m, up from 408,000.
theAudience is disruptive in many ways. It charges studios a fee to access the social fan base of the movie stars it represents. In a world of agents and hangers-on, many studios are unimpressed that they have to pay yet another payment to their asset. Shouldn’t access to digital fan-bases be part of the actor’s contract and not split into a separate silo? One article about the new world of influence put it this way: “If you were wondering how Rihanna was cast in Battleship, it was lost on no one at Universal that she came with 26 million Twitter followers”. So maybe theAudience is on to something… And it’s not just about box-office receipts.
theAudience also takes a commission on any merchandising or sales of items that their stars promote. So this is something of a challenge to the celebrity-focused world of media, particularly to consumer magazines, who are themselves seeking ways to get closer to the world of e-commerce.
Earlier in his career, Oliver helped Disney manage its cartoon characters’ online presence, such as the Facebook page for Dory the fish of “Finding Nemo 3D” and Cinderella’s virtual existence. As the master of memes, it may be no surprise that Oliver is something of an amateur biologist. And he makes an interesting analogy between social networks and real living organisms. Perhaps this isn’t so strange. Have you noticed how social network connection graphs resemble those images of neurones in the brain? Perhaps it is possible that billions of human individuals interacting and connecting in social media will actually begin to act in similar patters to our own synapses firing away.
“Sharing” provides nourishment for the social network. Emotions drive this sharing and Oliver thinks he has cracked the relationship between the two. He also views the “social organism” as having an “immune system”. Anything that gets in the way of positive messages (such as trying to monetise content too early before it truly flourishes) restricts the flow of information and eventually kills that precious meme.
Oliver can cite seven analogies between living and social organisms which he will share with delegates at the Festival of Media Global*. If he’s right, then he might well become as famous as the people he represents – and the brands present will gain an insight into managing reputations and commerce in the social world. And, so, we return full circle to data. Our conference in Rome started with particle physics and it ends with evolutionary theory. Perhaps here at the Festival of Media we are getting closer to our very own unified theory of marketing.
By Charlie Crowe, Founder of Festival of Media and Chairman of C Squared
*Oliver's presentation at The Festival of Media will be available to view soon!
**This post was spotted on M&M Global
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