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Travis M. Andrews
Washington – Carole Baskin wears her iconic flower crown and her husband, Howard, wears a tapered birthday hat. They have a bottle of Bacardi rum and rap “In Da Club” from 50 Cent, replacing a swear word with the word “sugar candy”.
They had been hired to shoot a video, perform a hip-hop song of their choice, to wish a woman named Charlotte a happy birthday.
“Go, Charlotte, it’s your birthday. We’re going to party like it’s your birthday. Let’s take a sip of Bacardi as if it were your birthday,” they recall, lifting the bottle of rum and then bursting into laughter.
As Baskin explained to The Washington Post two weeks later, “I don’t know much about birthday rap.”
His choice, however, was sensible, so much so that the video, created through the Cameo app, went viral and reached 50 Cent. He posted (and then deleted) the clip on Instagram with the caption: “This song is not music, it’s magical, it spread all over the world and then it never went all off and every day is someone’s birthday.” Jamie Foxx commented that its functionality “fun and mythical at the same time!!”
yes, even through the 2020 standards, Baskin had a year.
“Tiger King,” the Netflix documentary about the controversial datings between the great ecologist feline and the now imprisoned personal owner of the zoo, Joe Exotic, became a huge success when the pandemic began and turned Baskin into a surname. But just as its Big Cat Rescue in Tampa has a major tourist destination, the new coronavirus has prevented other people from visiting it, a coup, given that about 30% of its profits come from visitors, and the rest comes basically from donations.
In search of profit and anything to do, Baskin downloaded Cameo, who, like “Tiger King”, gained a resurgence in popularity thanks to the pandemic. About a month later, other people used the app to pay you $299 (approximately R5100) to create satisfied 30-second birthday videos. Two of the main phenomena of pandemic pop culture, “Tiger King” and Cameo, had converged, the best symbol of the perpetual Mad Libs that are in the news in 2020.
The Cameo concept is simple: users pay celebrities – Lindsay Lohan, Gilbert Gottfried, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Flava Flav, a forged component of the “The Office” cast, you call it – to create short videos of tradition about anything. The Saints Happy Hour podcast spent $500 on New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton to insult them. A woman hired Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray to break up with her boyfriend, while the breakup turned out to be false, but cameo is not.
Anthony Scaramucci looks like one for someone named Popehat (yes, Popehat), who, according to Mooch, was signed through a cat named Socks (yes, a cat named Socks). “There’s nothing about Dungeons and Dragons and video games. These are wonderful pastimes, Popehat. Follow Socks the cat’s recommendation.”
Co-founder Martin Blencowe, who in the past worked as an agent in the National Football League, learned about the concept a few years ago. When one of his friends first became a father, Blencowe asked a member of the Seattle Seahawks to record a short congratulatory video.
“It was raw. It was authentic. The guy posted it on Instagram and said it was the most productive gift he had ever received,” said another co-founder, Steven Galanis. “We immediately had the moment of the soft bulb: ‘We sold this.’ “His hypothesis, he added, was that “the selfie was the new autograph.”
At first, his ability consisted of B, C and D athletes whom he knew personally. They discovered more good luck when they invited influential people, especially those from the now-defunct Vine video site, where Devon Townsend, the third co-discoverer, was one of the first stars with over a billion loops. Eventually, Cameo grew up from word of mouth among celebrities. Ice-T convinced Snoop Dogg to sign up for it. By May, the site had generated 600,000 videos since its inception in 2016; now there are more than a million.
“People are better known than rich,” Galanis said. “People have these massive followers, but the length of their audience and their wealth are not necessarily correlated.”
Cameo tries to throw a few extra dollars at them, more than a few. Users can pay for text or video that lasts between 30 seconds and 3 minutes, and depends on the ability to set their own rates. (Cameo has a 25% discount).
“I started with $59 (per video), but I had to keep increasing the value because I was flooded with over a hundred requests right away,” Baskin said. Finally, “I set myself at $299, and this turns out to stay at about 30 a day. And I can take care of 30 a day.”
The app has the additional advantages of giving celebrities something practical about their social capital. “Every time they make a cameo, the user who receives it becomes a super fan. They love them more than they’ve ever enjoyed them,” Galanis said. The recipient, in theory, “becomes a living and breathable poster for the artist”.
And, in fact, Cameo helped the Baskins capitalize on their reputation as “Tiger King”, but with a little more information, to the extent that they decided which requests to accept and how to execute them.
“It’s a way of communicating that it’s Carole,” Howard Baskin said. “You know, that kind of very good and fun user who can write other impressions correctly.” (The Netflix documentary portrayed Baskin as a debatable figure for reasons too confusing to explore here.)
Baskin will classify the applications, which come in the form of some words that can be “really cryptic.” Most of them come from fanatics. Some come from companies. In one, Baskin cuts the Pastime Auto Wash grass, a car wash in Oroville, California, while driving his motorcycle while spraying it with hose water.
Not that Baskin wants Cameo to stay in the spotlight. It was recently reported for criticizing the use of big cats in Cardi B’s music video and Megan’s the summer glow Thee Stallion “WAP”. However, the app has one advantage: the ability to promote the Big Feline Safety Act, which would prohibit, among other things, personal ownership of wild cats.
If someone gives a note or notices after hiring Baskin, they can text him, and do so with a note informing him that the cash will help the bill. “And several of them responded by texting saying they had called a member of Congress,” he said. “And they’re going to have to pay 20 bucks to tell me.”
Exposure, of course, can have its drawbacks. Some cameos seek to make her say something clumsy, such as the one that required the word “clumsy tortoise,” a slang term for a hand gesture indicating “social awkwardness,” according to Urban Dictionary. Others have sharper leaves. In mid-July, Australian comedian Tom Armstrong hired her to wish Rolf Harris a happy birthday and mention Jimmy Savile. Unless he knows, Harris and Savile are infamous serial sexual predators.
“I don’t know what they’re communicating about Array. This turns out to be a jargon or some kind of non-public joke, an inside joke they have with a circle of family or friends,” Baskin told me. “I live under a rock. If there’s no cat involved, I don’t know.”
The Washington Post
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