Culture

How Cameo Blew Up During Quarantine


A couple of summers ago, I was at my desk at work when I received a video link in a text message from a friend, with no additional explanation. When I clicked on it, I was befuddled: on the screen loomed the face of James Kennedy, a Los Angeles-based d.j. best known as one of the stars of the reality show “Vanderpump Rules.” Kennedy is British, cleft-chinned, and prone to referring to himself as “the white Kanye”; his rageful tirades, party-animal benders, and fits of regretful tears coupled with promises to “do better” had made him one of my favorite characters on the show, but he was not a real-life acquaintance. Yet, in the video, he hailed me by name. “Thank you, Naomi, for an incredible support,” he began, the indefinite article making the address more perplexing. “You’re amazing. You’re doing amazing. Keep being amazing.” Kennedy seemed to be delivering the words from the doorway of his bedroom; an unmade bed, a drawn shade, and his mussed hair gave the sense that he had just woken up. He rolled out some catchphrases, suggesting that we should one day drink “Pumptini” cocktails and share a “pasta”—a term that fans have speculated the show’s stars use to refer to cocaine, despite the cast’s denials—and ended the video by saying, “Love you, Naomi. Keep killing the game.”

The video, I soon learned, was not made with deepfake technology or sorcery, but purchased on an app called Cameo, which allows users to send “personalized messages from your favorite celebrities.” Its uncanniness stemmed from the difficulty of figuring out who, exactly, was behind its words. Was it Kennedy or my friend who was telling me I was “amazing” and encouraging me to “keep killing the game”? It struck me that this category confusion underlined something utilitarian, and perhaps even soulless about the app—“the rock bottom of capitalism,” as another friend put it, when I explained Cameo to him. Here was a star, or close enough to one, who, in the dead interstitial hour or two between, say, waking up and going to the gym, was likely banging out a half-dozen videos in which he repeatedly told strangers that he loved them, at the behest of their friends or family, for a hundred dollars a pop (Kennedy’s fee, his profile informed me).

So why did receiving the Cameo make me so happy? I shared the video online, captioning it, “This might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. ❤️❤️❤️.” There was something meaningful in the triangulation that Cameo had set up, in which a friend, wanting to delight me and familiar with my particular taste, selected the right marginal celebrity to wish me well. (Recently, a girlfriend of mine told me that, when she and her B.F.F. agreed to surprise each other with a Cameo, each booked the other a member from the Juggalo duo Insane Clown Posse. “I was, like, we’re soul mates,” she said.) The interaction with Kennedy was also surprisingly intimate. Despite the one-sidedness of the video, and its read-from-a-teleprompter quality, it seemed pleasantly ad hoc: bad lighting, rumpled duvet. In his Cameo, Kennedy managed to appear somehow both on and off the clock.

In March, I spoke over the phone with Steven Galanis, Cameo’s thirty-two-year-old C.E.O., who was living in Chicago, the site of Cameo’s headquarters. The company, which now has about a hundred and thirty employees, was founded, in 2017, by Galanis, then a LinkedIn executive; Devon Townsend, a onetime influencer on Vine; and Martin Blencowe, an N.F.L. agent. Galanis was a party organizer in college at Duke—a fellow-alum told me that his bro-y affability led peers to dub him “the mayor”—and he initially culled talent from his and his co-founders’ social circle. “A lot of our buddies were in sports and entertainment,” he said. The celebrities, however, were far from top tier. “It was, like, backup quarterbacks from the Baltimore Ravens,” Galanis told me. “The people we knew weren’t really famous.” Popular performers from the early days included Gilbert Gottfried, a comedian from the eighties known for his abrasive style, and “Countess” Luann de Lesseps, a wealthy divorcée from “The Real Housewives of New York” known for her vanity single “Money Can’t Buy You Class.”

Today, however, the bottom-feeder, has-been-or-never-were status of the app has begun to give way. Cameo, which sells approximately five thousand videos a day, has snagged a few bona-fide celebrities, like the hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg (seven hundred and fifty dollars a video) and the comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish (a thousand dollars a video, when available). Other mainstream stars, like Sarah Jessica Parker and Mandy Moore, have guested on Cameo to collect money for charity. This transition may be part of a broader cultural shift. Once, it was thought unseemly for a celebrity to make herself available to her fans directly, and in her free time. But, in today’s extremely online existence, even A-list celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and J. Lo purport to take us behind the scenes by posting on Instagram or TikTok. “Soon, you’re going to be losing your audience if you don’t participate through platforms like ours,” Galanis told me. “It’s no longer considered diluting the brand.” He added that Cameo provides a greater sense of mutuality than other platforms. “When you comment on a celebrity’s Instagram or Twitter, it’s unreciprocated. With Cameo, it’s about the exchange of love,” he said.

During our conversation, Galanis was exceedingly cordial and forthcoming, but, at the half-hour mark, on the dot, he brought the call to an abrupt end. “I’ve got a hard stop, this was great, though—thank you,” he said suddenly, with no preamble, and hung up. A switch from hot to cold is par for the course in interviews, which are necessarily transactional. But it struck me, too, that my exchange with Galanis was much like a Cameo, in which the warmth of human connection is sharply delimited by the boundaries of time and money.

There is something fascinating, and slightly addictive, about strolling the virtual aisles of Cameo, weighing your options. The platform now has about forty thousand talents on its roster, with offerings for every cultural niche. For the gossip-loving older millennial, you might book Perez Hilton, the blogger who became infamous in the early two-thousands for posting crudely scribbled-on paparazzi pictures of celebrities. (His Cameo bio is more positive: “You’re awesome! . . . please feel free to tip!”) For the nostalgic Gen X-er, you can book Larry Thomas, who played the “soup Nazi” on Seinfeld. (If you want him in a chef’s coat, you have to upgrade to the “business price option.”) For the irony-loving media worker, you can book the Instagram influencer turned self-professed grifter Caroline Calloway. (Her profile reads “Scameos ?”) You could choose the most expensive performer on the platform, the Kardashian-adjacent reality star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, at two thousand five hundred dollars. Or, for only twenty-eight dollars, you could book a YouTube-famous Jesus Christ impersonator. (“The ONLY verified Son of God on any social media is on Cameo!”)

A few months ago, while scrolling through the app, I was surprised to discover that Ben Sinclair, the co-creator and the star of HBO’s “High Maintenance,” was now offering his services on the platform. On the series, the bearded and amiable Sinclair, who is thirty-six, plays “the Guy,” a weed dealer who dips in and out of the lives of his New York clients. The show has garnered praise from members of the metropolitan intelligentsia, who likely see themselves reflected in its neurotic, libidinal characters. In his introductory video on the app, Sinclair appeared as fuzzy and light-touch as his “High Maintenance” character. “Hey, I’m your favorite guy from that show . . . whatever,” he begins. On a bright, chilly day in February, I visited Sinclair at his cozy Brooklyn office. When I asked him how he came to join the platform, he told me that he had decided to take the plunge at the suggestion of the actress Gina Gershon, who also maintains a profile. He has since recorded more than a hundred videos and made over ten thousand dollars. Gershon, as his recommender, takes a five-per-cent commission off the company’s cut of his fee—one way the platform incentivizes its creators to bring in new talent, pyramid-marketing-style. “We don’t make as much money from the show as someone who’s on NBC or CBS,” he told me. “Why wouldn’t I want to make extra money on Cameo and get a nice dinner at Roman’s?” he added, referring to a nouveau-hipster restaurant in Brooklyn. (More recently, Sinclair has decided to donate the money he makes on Cameo to charity.)





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