On Thursday, July 9th, dot.LA entertainment reporter Sam Blake hosted a one-on-one video interview with Steven Galanis, founder and CEO of Cameo, the thriving video platform featuring celebrities and influencers.
"From our estimation we believe that there are two million people in the world that are qualified influencers," said Cameo Founder and CEO Steven Galanis in a conversation with dot.LA's Sam Blake. "And probably more than in any other city on Earth, those people are in Los Angeles."
<p>The website allows celebrities to send personalized video messages to paying fans. Cameo recruits big names, usually through social media. Other times, celebrities are referred by their friends — like the time Snoop Dogg popped in on Ice T's video.</p><p>"He ended up Face-timing me later that day and joining the platform," Galanis said. Later, he said, Snoop Dogg became an investor. These scenarios, where celebrities join by referral, make up about 55% of all Cameo bookings. To date, the company has collected over 40,000 influencers. </p><p>But how? What's in it for the celebrity? The platform acts almost as a marketplace for talent. Mainstream and niche performers alike can build their following. </p><p>"The value prop of the Cameo is that talent is getting paid to become more popular," Galanis said. "The person who receives a Cameo from you literally becomes a bigger fan of you than they ever were."</p><p>Right before Mother's Day, one customer wrote to Galanis on LinkedIn to tell him the video he bought for his wife was "the best Cameo that's ever been made." Naturally, Galanis was intrigued; the four-year-old startup has churned out over a million of these videos. </p><p>Galanis confirmed: it was the best Cameo he'd ever seen. He booked the same artist, Michael Fronti, to make one for his mom. She became an instant fan of a singer she'd never heard of. Her Facebook friends love him now, too.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Virtual Fireside Chat with Cameo Founder & CEO Steven Galanis</small>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prXO59TdZGo&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">www.youtube.com</a>
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Cameo CEO Steven Galanis
<p><a href="https://www.cameo.com/" target="_blank"><br>Cameo</a> has emerged as the world's leading marketplace for personalized video shoutouts recently cementing roots in Los Angeles. Cameo has raised over $65 million to date; most recently a mid-2019 $50 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Playa Vista-based The Chernin Group.</p><p>dot.LA entertainment reporter Sam Blake will host an in depth video discussion with Cameo's CEO on how he plans to <a href="https://dot.la/cameo-ceo-on-his-move-to-l-a-and-his-companys-future-2646225672.html" target="_self">disrupt the entertainment world</a> and more!</p>
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'All Celebrities Are Gig Economy Workers': Cameo's CEO On How He Plans to Disrupt the Entertainment World
Jun 22 2020
"Fight for simplicity" is a guiding principle at Cameo, a marketplace platform that launched in early 2017 out of Chicago but is increasingly rooting itself in Los Angeles. No surprise, then, that the company's premise isn't too complicated. Celebrities with over 20,000 Instagram followers – which occasionally stretches the limit of what one might consider a "celebrity" – can set up a Cameo account and list a price at which they will record a short, personalized video for customers. Caitlyn Jenner currently charges $2,500. Former NFL MVP Brett Favre asks for $300. Someone who goes by MeesterMario requests a humble $5. Whatever the number, Cameo keeps 25% of the transaction and the talent does what it wishes with the remainder.
<p>To date, Cameo has sold over 1 million videos, with a peak of 69,000 in the week before this year's Mother's Day. The company currently has 130 employees – 80 in Chicago, 40 in L.A., 10 distributed elsewhere – and expects to generate $100 million in bookings in 2020.</p><p>Cameo has raised over $65 million, most recently a mid-2019 $50 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Playa Vista-based The Chernin Group. The private company does not publicly share its market value, but following that Series B, PitchBook pegged its post-money valuation at $300 million. Since then, however, Cameo has reached profitability, chief executive Steven Galanis says, boosted in part by tailwinds associated with the pandemic.</p><p>Galanis moved from Chicago to L.A. in May this year. A native Chicagoan, he attended Duke for undergrad then returned to the Windy City, where he worked in finance, film production and at LinkedIn before founding Cameo. He has been running Cameo's Chicago office while his two co-founders Devon Townsend and Martin Blencowe have been holding things down in L.A. </p><p>Now based in what has become the informal live-in headquarters for Cameo's leadership at a house in the Hollywood Hills, Galanis took some time out to chat with <em>dot.LA </em>about his decision to move out west, what he's looking forward to in the city, and his plans for Cameo.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">What is Cameo? 🤔</small>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsY3vYrZGk8" target="_blank">www.youtube.com</a>
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</p><p><em>This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity</em>.<br/></p><h3>Why did you decide to move to L.A.? </h3><p>When the pandemic set in and shelter-in-place orders started, one panic moment I had was not being able to travel. Last year I took over 150 flights, and, like, 60 red-eye flights from L.A. to Chicago. I was living in Chicago but really I was living on airplanes. In a world where you can't travel, I felt I could be most impactful in this period in L.A., and now I'll be here indefinitely.</p><p>L.A. is the best place for me to be for Cameo right now. I've been focused on being <em>the</em> tech company to work for in Chicago and I think that's mission accomplished in many ways. Now my objective is to make Cameo that place in L.A. I think it's so simpatico with the king industry of the economy here, which is entertainment. </p><p>The <em>Hollywood Reporter</em> put out a list with the <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/hollywoods-top-innovators-15-people-shaping-future-entertainment-1292439/item/inovators-2020-list-eric-shanks-steve-myers-1292460" target="_blank">15 people disrupting Hollywood</a> and I think I was the only one on the list who wasn't living here. If you can be disrupting Hollywood without even being in L.A., imagine how much we could get done if I were living here.</p><h3>You've been able to raise a lot of money really fast. To what do you attribute your success? </h3><p>It's a couple things. Number one, in the very early days, being in Chicago was pretty helpful to us. If we'd started in L.A., I think there are so many vested interests in the entertainment world that might've snuffed us out early. But there was huge demand for a hot consumer social company that dealt with entertainment and celebrities. It's very classically an L.A. business, and some early investors even told us we would never be able to build this in Chicago – that it has to be in L.A. or New York. But I think it actually helped us get started.</p>
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Cameo CEO Steven Galanis
<p>The other thing is that our product creates magical moments. It's so visceral, how happy you make the person. On the talent side, our value proposition is that you're getting paid to become more famous. It's similar to back in the day when you'd go to a concert and buy the merch and you'd become a living, breathing billboard for that person. Cameo is in many ways the 2020 version of that. I think the other thing that's happened is our product NPS (net promoter score) is over 80 – one of the highest in the whole world. Users become such fans and that started the consumer-side network effects, which turned early- and late-stage investors into big customers of ours. When you have investors using your product and telling stories about it, that's a good sign.</p>
<h3>What are your plans for growth? </h3><p>We've been really fortunate that the pandemic has been really accretive to our business. One thing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/24/business/media/new-model-celebrity.html" target="_blank">I said to the </a><em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/24/business/media/new-model-celebrity.html">New York Times</a></em> a couple weeks ago was that at their core, all celebrities are gig economy workers. They get paid per concert, per game, per show. So in a world where all productions have stopped for the indefinite future, we are excited to be able to provide talent with a meaningful revenue stream that helps them to get paid to become more popular. </p><p>The business grew by about 1000% from the week pre-COVID to a peak around Mother's Day. We tend to do well when Hallmark does well; it's seasonal. So we're thinking about how to take these tailwinds from COVID, shelter-in-place, and social distancing, where people want to send love remotely. Part of that is to stay innovative, so we recently launched Cameo Live, which is basically Zoom chatting with celebrities. </p><p>And the other lasting thing is how do we take all these people using the service and lock them into the ecosystem and create a more sticky experience that's based on engagement, not just on revenue. We think there's a lot of cool innovation on our product roadmap coming in the next few years and I think that'll be a good story to watch.</p><h3>What are your hiring plans? </h3><p>During the pandemic we've decided to move to a fully distributed team but we'll have legacy centers of gravity in Chicago and L.A., especially as we expand our presence with me here.</p><p>Cameo became profitable in April, which is a rarity for tech companies, and we were profitable by a substantial amount in May, which means we haven't burned cash since February. We're profitable and we have a majority of the Series B funding left so we're extremely well funded. We could go raise more capital but we're much more focused on building a killer team. Everyone on product and all our designers are in L.A. Historically our talent team had been in Chicago but we're looking to hire more people in L.A. for our talent team, which is basically working with or recruiting celebrities. We're also looking to add talented marketers and I think most of our hiring will be in L.A. despite the fact that we're distributed. Even within L.A. you usually need multiple offices so we think being distributed will be great and this house and our sublet in Venice will be great assets as we continue to grow.</p><h3>On a personal level, what excites you most about being in Los Angeles?</h3><p>Well, the weather's a lot better here than in Chicago, especially in the winter. I'm from Chicago. I went to Duke then moved right back, so I spent 10 years establishing myself there. It's not to say that my work there is finished for the rest of my life, but it's an exciting challenge for me personally to make new friends and establish myself in a place I've been coming to for a long time but never called home.</p><p>Devon surfs every morning so I've spent a lot of time in Venice, but I'm not a surfer; I don't really go to the beach. To me that L.A. wasn't my cup of tea. So I've been enjoying my time in the Hills. And I think downtown has a lot going on. There's a lot of cool stuff emerging there and I'm looking forward to exploring that more.</p><p>Plus my girlfriend's really excited about all the hikes we can go on. I've never hiked before – you live in downtown Chicago, you don't go hiking.</p><p>Oh, and plus I'm excited about the best tacos in the world.</p><p>--- </p><p><em>Sam Blake primarily covers media and entertainment for dot.LA. Find him on Twitter @hisamblake and email him at samblake@dot.LA</em><br/></p>From Your Site Articles
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This New Facial Recognition Extension IDs Celebrities in Videos — and It’s Actually Pretty Useful
Jun 03 2020
RealNetworks is releasing a browser extension that automatically identifies celebrities and other public figures in YouTube and Netflix videos, using the same facial recognition technology that the company originally developed for use with live surveillance video at schools, casinos and airports."StarSearch by Real" doubles as a video navigation tool, pinpointing the places the celebs appear in the videos, and letting users quickly jump to those spots.
<p>No, it's not going to revolutionize the web, <a href="https://25yearsofstreaming.com/" target="_blank">like the company did 25 years ago</a> with its early streaming media technology. But I've been trying out a preview, and it's a surprisingly handy little tool, albeit in a pretty narrow set of circumstances.</p><p>So far, I'm primarily using it to skip directly to the portion of a news segment that features the person I'm interested in hearing from.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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</p><p>StarSearch is available starting today as a Chrome extension for Windows and Mac, and as a feature of the new RealPlayer 20/20 software for Windows PCs.<br/></p><p>It's not available via set-top devices or smartphones. But the way RealNetworks CEO and founder Rob Glaser sees it, when it comes to video, the PC is back.</p><p>"A super interesting thing has happened in the last three months, which is the PC has yet again moved to the center of video in the context of the pandemic," Glaser said on a recent video call where he and other RealNetworks showed the new products. "It's really been a Renaissance period for PCs."</p><p>Although the Chrome extension is limited to Netflix and YouTube at launch, the company says it will expand to more video apps and streaming services over time.<br/></p><p>"We figured those were the two best places to start, but we're going to branch out support to pretty much any major video source on the web," Glaser said.</p><p>The release comes at a time of heightened concern over facial recognition technologies due to issues of privacy and bias. This consumer application, focused on celebrities, isn't likely to raise those kinds of alarm bells, but it's an example of how pervasive facial recognition is becoming in many technology products.</p><p>It's the first time RealNetworks has brought AI into one of its consumer products. It's also the first expansion of the company's SAFR facial recognition technology beyond its core market in live video surveillance. The company <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2018/realnetworks-debuts-facial-recognition-software-k-12-schools-raising-ethical-questions/" target="_blank">launched SAFR two years ago</a>, initially for schools, before expanding to public health and public safety.</p><p>StarSearch is a free extension. It brings up thumbnail celebrity bios that link to a RealPlayer "Discover" site that includes ads, but the main benefit to RealNetworks would be if StarSearch were to spur more RealPlayer downloads. RealPlayer these days is used largely for downloading, organizing and playing videos. RealPlayer 20/20 is a Windows app that comes in both free and premium versions, starting at $24.99.</p><p>In the StarSearch browser extension, the facial recognition is limited to celebrities and other notable people, but people can use it in RealPlayer 20/20 to tag and find family members and friends in their own videos.</p><p><a href="http://www.danrayburn.com/" target="_blank">Dan Rayburn</a>, a streaming media analyst and consultant who got a preview of the technology, said he could envision StarSearch ultimately expanding beyond celebrities, even identifying inanimate objects such as a company name, a type of car, or a sports team in a video.</p><p>"Over time, it's going to become more and more personalized, where you have more options and you can pick what you want that tag to really be," Rayburn said.</p><p>RealNetworks says StarSearch differs from other offerings, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/adlp/xray" target="_blank">such as Amazon X-Ray on Prime Video</a>, by using AI to identify people on the fly, rather than manually indexing videos in advance.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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</p><p>Glaser, who worked at Microsoft before starting RealNetworks, said the interaction between the SAFR and StarSearch teams reminds him of how Microsoft Windows became better back in the day because Microsoft's internal Excel and Word teams were building on the platform and pushing Windows to improve.<br/></p><p>"Having a team of people that are really relying on SAFR, putting it through the paces, pushing it, has actually made SAFR better," he said. "So hopefully we'll get some synergies like that out of this too."</p><p>Asked if RealNetworks secured the StarSearch trademark from the company that holds the rights <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Search" target="_blank">to the old Ed McMahon talent search show</a>, Glaser noted that it's specifically called "StarSearch by Real."</p><p>RealNetworks' Consumer Media division, which includes RealPlayer, generated $3.5 million in revenue in the first quarter, about 8% of the company's overall revenue. RealNetworks <a href="https://investor.realnetworks.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2020/RealNetworks-Announces-First-Quarter-2020-Financial-Results/default.aspx" target="_blank">posted a net loss of $4.6 million</a>, with $19 million in cash on hand as of the end of the quarter, after <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/realnetworks-ceo-rob-glaser-putting-10m-money-back-company/" target="_blank">Glaser invested $10 million in the company in February</a>. The company <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/publicly-traded-seattle-tech-stalwart-realnetworks-receives-2-87m-federal-relief-loan/" target="_blank">received a $2.87 million loan</a> through the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program in April.</p><p><a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/realnetworks-browser-extension-uses-facial-recognition-id-celebrities-videos-actually-pretty-useful/" target="_blank"><em>This story first appeared on GeekWire.</em></a></p>
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