A "hello" valued at 13,000 euros: the celebrities who charge for sending messages to their fans

For prices between 5 and 13,000 euros, anyone can get a celebrity to send them a personalized video message.

After five years of international growth, the Cameo platform has just arrived in Spain with signings such as Alaska, Chenoa or Pau Gasol.

The idea came to Steve Galanis, a former Chicago stockbroker, in 2016.

His friend Martin Blencowe worked as an agent for NFL players and showed him the video he had recorded of one of his clients, Seattle Seahawks defenseman Cassius Marsh, congratulating some of his friends on the recent fatherhood of his son. the.

Two facts caught Galanis' attention: the emotion of his friends when they received the video and the statistic that most professional athletes are left without money two years after their retirement.

"Fame does not equal wealth," Galanis explained to NPR.

"People are more famous than rich, especially in the age of social media."

Since the advent of reality television and the internet, with its social networks and viral videos, the making of celebrities has been accelerating to the point of generating a new celebrity ecosystem: today there are more celebrities than ever and they are more famous than ever.

The criteria to enter Cameo is to have a minimum of 20,000 followers on Instagram.

It is estimated that there are five million celebrities in the world.

Many of them are so well known that they cannot have a normal job or walk down the street without being approached.

To all the other Cameo offers the possibility of monetizing that fame.

There notoriety does not mean the same as in the real world.

It is a neoliberal system: a video message is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it.

A face as popular as Elijah Wood (Frodo in

) is paid the same as TikTok star Jason Coffee.

Having participated in a cult movie or series guarantees a stable source of income in Cameo.

The appearance of Oliver and James Phelps, who played the Wesley twins in the Harry Potter saga, collapsed the platform last December.

James Marsters (Spike in

) always tops the list of the most requested, Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy in

) is among the most expensive, charging 551 euros per video and, for a little extra, Ernie Hudson gets the

suit,

and Larry Thomas the Nazi soup steward's uniform on

.

Actor Richard Dreyfuss waving.CAMEO

Actor Richard Dreyfuss puts on a

shirt even if he is not asked (he charges 636 euros).

Lance Bass, member of the band NSYNC, is among the most popular because he has his own catchphrase: he dismisses all his videos with

the chorus of his band's 1999

. On the contrary, Kristian Nairn, Hodor In

, he'll say what's in the script, but he turns down requests that only ask him to look into the camera and yell "Hodor."

Jaime De Wenetz, director of Cameo in Spain, points out that the famous decides how much to charge, although the platform offers to guide them.

“If you are known locally, we recommend that you adapt your price to the local market.

Pau Gasol has played on three NBA teams, so his rate [273 euros] is designed for the United States.

Chenoa fans are more localized in Spain [its price is 86 euros]”.

De Wenetz cites Rober Dragos (Oslo in

) as an example, who after Christmas decided to cut his price in half “and demand skyrocketed, because for people paying almost 100 euros is not the same as paying less. of 50″.

Cameo keeps 25% of what they earn.

Fine-tuning until you find the exact number is an art.

Actor Brian Baumgartner, known for playing accountant Kevin in

, was the most successful star of Cameo in 2020. He earned a million euros.

And that in the videos of him he cannot emulate his character because the most defining features of him legally belong to the NBC network.

Fernando Cayo, who plays Colonel Tamayo in

, clarifies that in any case he does not imitate his characters in his videos.

“Interpreting is my job, I don't like to take it out.

I send my videos as Fernando Cayo.

And I have a great time doing it,” says the actor.

The actor Fernando Cayo waving. CAMEO

The platform had to insist, but in the end he was encouraged by the recommendation of a colleague.

“It made me curious and, apart from that, a lot of people asked me for things on social networks, on the street or when leaving the theater [currently starring

in Madrid].

They no longer ask for autographs, but send greetings to their relatives, their friends or their partners”.

Cayo has hardly rejected requests, only some from brands, because most consist of “messages of support, encouragement, affection, for people who are going to take an exam, who have health problems.

Or groups of friends, sports, clubs that get together and want to celebrate themselves”.

Like Cayo, many Spanish celebrities were reluctant, according to Jaime De Wenetz.

Now there are more than 300. “They didn't think there would be people willing to pay for a video-message of theirs, but everyone who tries it continues.

We have not had a single casualty in Spain.

They try it out, they see that they have requests, and since things are going well for them, they decide to allocate a part to charitable organizations, ”he explains.

Some celebrities indicate in their Cameo profile that they collaborate with a charity, although they do not specify what percentage they allocate and, as De Wenetz acknowledges, the platform does not check if the celebrity really sends the money to the NGO.

A celebrity can activate the solidarity tab and then keep all the money that comes to them.

De Wenetz promises, yes,

Fernando Cayo is among the most requested Spaniards, along with Gasol, Enrique Arce (Arturito in

) and Alaska.

The international figures favored by Spanish clients are the singer Bon Jovi, the actor from the

James Buckley or Jordan Belfort, the former stockbroker played by Leonardo DiCaprio in

and who several Cameo users define as "the fucking master".

Cameo Spain's latest signing is

, a 19-year-old magician from Córdoba who has more than 11 million followers on TikTok.

Actress Lindsay Lohan waving.CAMEO

In addition to

From former Hollywood stars (Lindsay Lohan) to veteran artists (José Feliciano, Gloria Estefan), Cameo includes accidental celebrities like Zoe Roth, known for a meme in which, as a child, she smiled at the camera with a house on fire in the background.

He charges 27 euros.

Also on the platform is Hide the Pain Harold, a senior model whose stock photos smiling yet visibly in pain are almost a visual dialect on Twitter.

Or Charles McDowell, whose arrest photo went viral because of the large size of his neck and who records videos of him from prison with a friend holding his cell phone through a glass case.

There are even politicians, such as the former president of Mexico Vicente Fox or the Republican vice-presidential candidate for the White House in 2008 Sarah Palin, who promises to send the video in less than 24 hours.

Reality television is an endless source of celebrities.

One of the most fashionable is Simon Leviev, known as

who swindled thousands of euros from his girlfriends.

Leviev, whose real name is Shimon Hayut, criticized Netflix for making a documentary series about him, but now he has embraced his fame and for 91 euros he sends video messages parodying his

“Jessica, Charlie is running away because his enemies are after him. , he needs you to send him money!

And he also wants to wish you a Happy Valentine's Day."

Victims of Leviev's scam, Pernilla Sjoholm and Cecilie Fjellhøy, called it "devastating" that Cameo "collaborates with a scammer."

They have signed up for Memmo, the Swedish platform that competes with Cameo in Europe.

De Wenetz indicates that Leviev does not break any of the three rules of Cameo: no nudity, no violence, and no hate speech.

“It's a delicate matter,” he admits.

“When Cameo was proposed, figures appeared who do things that are not right, but limits had to be set that help us in these cases to make yes or no decisions.

Sure there are ways to interpret it.

You have to lay some foundations and follow them.”

Two celebrities have been expelled from Cameo, but those responsible do not want to reveal who they are.

'Tiger King' star Carole Baskin waving.CAMEO

The fifth most successful celebrity of 2020 on Cameo was Carole Baskin, the Texas cat rights activist who became famous against her will thanks to the Netflix documentary series

, in which it was suggested that she had murdered her husband. and had fed it to his tigers.

Baskin tried to denounce the producer of the series, but days later she threw in the towel, opened a profile on Cameo and wrote in her bio "Joe Exotic tried to kill me."

She raised €90,000 in one week, a record figure for the platform, in March 2020.

By then, covid-19 was about to revolutionize Cameo.

Many artists were suddenly without their main source of income (fan conventions, bar gigs, company events) and Cameo offered an easy, fast, no-middle way to earn money from home.

For customers, it was an easy way to give a gift or send encouragement to a loved one from far away.

During the first month of confinement, the catalog of celebrities increased by 77% and that of requests by 176%.

In July 2020, Cameo had multiplied its value by seven compared to the previous year.

Throughout 2020, profits multiplied by four, thanks to the 1.3 million video messages sent.

The growing popularity of Cameo has been attracting more relevant figures such as Caitlyn Jenner (2,300 euros per video), the undefeated former boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr (the most expensive on the platform: 13,650) or Brian Cox, the

Emmy-winning star of

, who promises in his presentation video that for 634 euros he will be "happy to send you to fuck you" as his character Logan Roy.

Pau Gasol, waving.CAMEO

Cameo has an artificial intelligence

that reviews all requests and "detects constructions of sentences or images", according to its creator, that may violate the rules and blocks it until a person reviews it.

"But of course, the

does not detect if it is a joke or if the recipient of the video is in jail," she says, referring to the video in which Carole Baskin sang happy birthday to a man convicted of pedophilia.

Attorney Rudolph Giuliani inadvertently campaigned against one of his clients.

Brett Favre, Andy Dick and Soulja Boy recited anti-Semitic messages.

Comedian Nick Ciarelli asked several bodybuilders to call out a kid for eating too much candy, and the compilation video had 1,000 retweets and 167,000 views.

YouTuber Jack

made increasingly outlandish requests to see how far people were willing to go for money, and posted the result in a 17-minute video.

These jokes led John Egan, CEO of tech market research agency L'Atelier, to compare Cameo's celebrities to "court jesters."

journalist

Thomas Barrie agrees that "there is something undeniably undignified in the image of a singer jumping at the whim of his fans, seeing a celebrity recording a video-message in his room for 50 euros quickly erodes any aura of mystery that may have".

Caitlyn Jenner, waving.CAMEO

The Cameo client can leave a review in which they rate their satisfaction with the video-message from zero to 5 stars.

In a way, the platform reverses the traditional power dynamics of the celebrity: for a few euros and for a couple of minutes, it is now the anonymous who has the power over the famous, supposedly the privileged party.

The name of the platform is the term that describes the brief intervention of a famous person in a movie.

In this case, the celebrity appears in your life playing the role of "person who knows who you are."

That video, in which the celebrity looks into the eyes of his admirer, calls him by his name and tells him exactly what he wants to hear, generates for a few seconds an illusion of equality, reciprocity and intimacy.

"It's prostitution of talent," says Nico Cary, director of the content creators agency Influentially.

"It's vulgar and it's seedy."

According to him, the videos are uncomfortable to watch and even grim because "we know that everything is false, we know that the famous person does not want to do it."

Fernando Cayo disagrees.

He loves interacting with people who admire his work and believes that mystery is “something from another era” and that now the public values ​​closeness.

“I work on the videos, I want them to be professional, fun and human.

Now the closeness is celebrated, from Rosalía to the Marvel actors.

Dwayne Johnson comes out in his kitchen eating some pancakes talking about something that worries him in a close and prosaic way.

We have to change the mentality”, he assures.

Cameo is introducing new features such as the client, for extra money, to ensure that the celebrity sees his photo or video request.

“Cameo's mission is to create the most personalized and authentic [celebrity-fan] connections on the planet,” says Steve Galanis.

Paradoxical, considering that there can be nothing less personal or authentic than paying someone to do something they wouldn't do otherwise.

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