📈 first Derivative [97]
📈 first Derivative [97]
nature of celebrity — movie money — US suicides peak —Michelin's stellar reputation — Bronze Age Pervert
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Good reading,
-Teddy
⭐️😎 On the changing nature of celebrity. I was reading this article in the WSJ about parents having never heard of the celebrities their kids are going crazy over.
It turned out her 14-year-old daughter Khaloni Crowell had recognized a clothing-store clerk as “Dhatboiitre,” a young TikTok personality who posts prank, lip sync and comedy videos for his 1.1 million followers.
Pinellas, who is 42, isn’t among them. Though a regular at the shop, she had no idea she had been buying sports jerseys from a social-media star until then.
Parents not knowing their kids’ celebrities is something that’s probably happened with every generation but there are ways in which our gap actually is different this time. I remember growing up with a single TV in the home and a single computer, back in the day probably a single radio. Even if everyone wasn’t gathered around the media hearth so to speak, you’d probably catch a glimpse of what everyone else was consuming. Now, not only does every individual have their own screens, usually multiple, the content we get delivered is personalized by algorithm.
Even if we’ve never been sure about what was going on in someone else’s head, we’ve traditionally had more confidence that we were more or less seeing the same external world. But we live in an age when everyone’s inputs from the external world, at least the digital ones, are almost as inscrutable as the internal mental processes that digest them.
And not only is celebrity both more discrete and discreet, there’s more of them than ever, changing the underlying concept of what a celebrity is. If all you need as a creator is 1000 true fans, or 100 true fans, the obverse of that is that there are now millions of what you can legitimately call “celebrities". To put it into TV/movie terms, there are no more singular DiCaprio’s but instead a young Chalamet (who probably comes closest but not close at all), a Jacob Elordi, a Noah Centineo, a Gavin Casalegno.
Even that framework is outdated of course because the true personalization and structure of idiosyncratic celebrity is on social media. The number one Substack, with over 1.2 million subscribers and over a million dollar in annual earnings, is written by a Boston College professor, Heather Cox Richardson, and I’d guess most of you have never heard of her. Or think of “Roaring Kitty”, aka DeepFuckingValue, who became a celebrity on r/WallStreetBets during the GameStop craze and now has a movie based on him. It’s why some influencer no one my age has heard of was able to summon thousands of people to Union Square and basically start a riot.
Speaking of monetization, I’m still thinking of this MrBeast quote I came across last month:
This model has already become so common, with celebrities monetizing the attention they command not by selling others’ products but their own. Ryan Reynolds seems to understand this new paradigm better than most (Mint Mobile, Aviation Gin) and I can’t think of a purer and more cheeky example of selling celebrity and attention than his and Rob McElhenney’s show Welcome to Wrexham.
One of my personal micro-celebrities, Nongaap, wrote a prescient post about all of this in 2019 that I highly recommend reading.
One day, the most important and profitable sales person in a Company won’t be employed by them. Odds are they won’t even know who she is, but she’s going to move a ton of product. Companies will eventually need to reorganize themselves to better handle and embrace this sales funnel.
Just in the last year we’ve seen the #Gentleminions meme and the Barbenheimer meme do things for those films the good people at Universal and Warner Bros could only have dreamed of. (Barbie probably would have done fine but it didn’t hurt)
As brands are investing more in influencer marketing, their focus is shifting to microinfluencers as a key strategy for engaging with younger consumers who spend more time on social platforms. Plus, 78% of millennials either don’t like celebrity endorsements or are indifferent to them, according to eMarketer. Microinfluencers or other non-celebrity influencers are seen as more engaging and trustworthy.
Nano-influencers command roughly four times the engagement rate from their followers than social media royalty. Why? Because they’re real people who are responsive to their friends. Indeed, a recent study finds they get 22x the number of buying conversations you’d get from your average consumer — and up to 11x the ROI you’d pay for a digital advertising campaign.
And re: real-world impact, Nongaap, who usually focuses on finding investing alpha analyzing corporate governance, wrote a few posts about some oddities in biotech Ilumina’s acquisition of GRAIL, which were then explicitly quoted and referenced in Carl Icahn’s proxy fight against the company. Clearly one of Icahn’s analyst got his Substack subscription’s worth there. Talk about a nano-celebrity impacting billion dollar outcomes.
🎬💰How does a movie actually make money? Even after working in the industry for a few years I learned a ton of new stuff from this episode of Matt Belloni’s podcast, The Town. The episode goes soup to nuts breaking down the waterfall of all the revenue streams involved with movie.
If you’ve heard but don’t quite understand terms like PPV, EST, VOD, SVOD, AVOD, PVOD, Pay-1, Pay-2, I highly recommend taking a listen.
🇺🇸🪦 Another troubling sign of the sickness of modern society, US suicides hit an all-time high last year.
Experts caution that suicide is complicated, and that recent increases might be driven by a range of factors, including higher rates of depression and limited availability of mental health services. But a main driver is the growing availability of guns, said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention…
The largest increases were seen in older adults. Deaths rose nearly 7% in people ages 45 to 64, and more than 8% in people 65 and older. White men, in particular, have very high rates, the CDC said.
I hope this goes without saying but if you need help please let your friends and family know or call the national lifeline: 988.
🧑🍳🍳 The Michelin Guide is expanding its coveted brand but risks diluting it with new pay-to-play structures and overexposure. Is it also responsible for culinary homogeneity and bias toward fine dining?
Many chefs and diners see a creeping sameness among Michelin-starred restaurants around the world, and not only in the consistently excellent ingredients and techniques that the guide says it rewards. Long menus of pre-composed mouthfuls, tiny proteins and the ostentatiously arranged small plates satirized in “The Menu” have become the rule.
“At this point, we can all serve Japanese fish, we can all do knife work, we can all make a gelée,” said Charlie Mitchell, the chef and co-owner of Clover Hill, in Brooklyn Heights. He said that since winning a star last year, he has had to fight the urge to make his food ever more Michelin-friendly rather than following his own instincts.
Always interested in 1) examples of Goodhart’s law and 2) examples of when brands change quality tiers, usually by debasing their previous value. Recently learned Abercrombie & Fitch used to be a high-end outdoorsmen retailer before transitioning in the 90s to the teen apparel brand we know today. Michelin stars still have a lot of juice to be sure but the brand overall seems less synonymous 1:1 with purely haute cuisine. Maybe that’s good for Michelin and maybe it’d be good for eaters everywhere if we cared less about it anyway.
If you want to learn how a tire company ended up running the most renowned gastronomic guide, check out this longer history of the Michelin Guide in the Financial Times from 2011 which covers some of the financial problems (losing €20m a year) which spurred the changes.
🥉💪 One of my favorite philosophers, John Gray, on the right-wing Internet personality (a nano-celebrity!) known as Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP:
BAP’s ideal male would be unrecognisable in the Mycenaean civilisation that produced the great epic poems. The Iliad is as much a lament on the pity of war as a paean to the warrior virtues, and it is patent that BAP has no knowledge of military life, certainly not of armed combat. Those who do – male and female – do not brag of their exploits. Even the bravest are scarred by trauma, which they survive through the care of others. BAP’s image of male predation, rapine and pillage is the fantasy of an aspiring teenage gang member in a disintegrating modern city.