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#474: Leaders in Customer Loyalty Brand Story | Red Carpet Loyalty: Cameo’s Bold Bet on Experience-Driven Engagement

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In an era where personalized experiences are rapidly becoming the cornerstone of customer loyalty, Steven Galanis and the team at Cameo are creating new opportunities for fans to engage with their favorite talent. As CEO and co-founder, Galanis has spearheaded a unique business that blends entertainment, technology, and loyalty innovation. 

"Cameo is a marketplace where you can book personalized video messages from tens of thousands of the most interesting people in pop culture," Galanis explains. "We started the business in 2017 with the idea that the selfie was the new autograph." 

From that simple premise, Cameo has grown into a platform with a 4.9-star rating in the App Store, millions of videos sold, and a dedicated base of super fans. Yet, Galanis admits the opportunity is still much larger than the current footprint. "People ask, 'Did you ever think Cameo would be this big?' And the truth is, I look at it every day, and I can't believe we're this small," he says. "We believe there's about 50 million people in the world that could be professional creators on Cameo. Today, we have 60,000." 

Speaker 1:

Good afternoon and good morning everyone. This is Ethan Perry from Loyalty360 and welcome back to Leaders in Customer Loyalty Brand Stories. In this series we talk to the leading minds working at some of the biggest brands in the country to cultivate customer loyalty and create amazing customer experiences. It's great to have you with us every Thursday. For today's episode, we are talking with Steve Galanis, CEO of Cameo. Welcome, Stephen.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thanks for taking the time. We really appreciate it. So, for those who may not be familiar with Cameo or haven't bought a short-form video from you guys, can you give us an introduction to what you do and how the company was started and what's led you to the amazing success you've had?

Speaker 2:

sure. Cameo is a marketplace where you can book personalized video messages from tens of thousands of the most interesting people in pop culture. We started the business in 2017 with the idea that the selfie was the new autograph. My co-founder, martin, was an n agent and he showed me a video that he'd gotten made of one of his players congratulating this guy on becoming a dad for the first time, and I remember watching this video and he was just showing it to me to say, like look at the aura this guy's got. He's a star. Maybe he could be in movies. But I remember just watching this and I was like Martin, we should sell those. And you know that was in 2017. We're almost nine years into this now. We've sold millions of videos, have a 4.9 star app in the app store and you know, among the millions of videos that we've done, if you look at our customer reviews, it's like 4.99999, with a lot of nines all the time. So we really live to create magical moments for our fans and the people that they love the most.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. So can you tell us a little bit more about your role and how you got to where you are, kind of what positions led you to become CEO at Cameo?

Speaker 2:

Well, I started the company, so that helps a lot and it is the only job I've had at Cameo. You know I've got two amazing co-founders and obviously we've had so many incredible people that have worked here to help. You know, make sure that we have the talent on. That's going to surprise and delight our fans. And you know, from a marketing and tech side, just kind of a dream team that we've had to put this. You know, from a marketing and tech side, just kind of a dream team that we've had to put this. You know, amazing product experience together.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. So, in your role, what keeps you up at night? What's the biggest challenge or opportunity that you're facing these days?

Speaker 2:

You know it's funny because a lot of times people will be like did you ever think Kami would be this big? And the truth is like I look at it every day, I'm like I can't believe we're this small. This is such a global opportunity. We believe there's about 50 million people in the world that could be professional creators on Cameo. Today we have 60,000. So we have a lot of work to do.

Speaker 2:

Ultimately, the grand vision of Cameo was to create the marketplace for people's time. For X amount of money you as a fan should be able to pay to do Y activity with Z person. We've really just kind of focused in on the first Y activity all these years. The personalized video shout out because it's a really easy thing to do. We're asking for kind of 30 seconds to a minute of someone's time. It's asynchronous. They don't have to be the same way. There's no safety issues. So it really was like kind of a great first product for us to do. And as the business has expanded into other experiences like live calls, we own a merch company. We also have a B2B business that's been growing pretty rapidly called Cameo for Business, where brands could come and find bespoke brand endorsements people to endorse their product or service. That's been a lot of fun. We had a great customer event last night here for that, with a bunch of talent.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. So you kind of touched on a lot of the interesting things that you guys do and Cameo really sits at kind of a unique intersection of entertainment, fan engagement and the creator economy. So how are you seeing this space evolve in response to shifting consumer expectations and different digital behaviors?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think there's a couple things and, if you want to take it from the creator economy perspective, the whole idea of the creator economy is that there's more people than ever that are looking to the internet to kind of monetize their creativity, and one of the main ways that they do that is they accrue a following on an Instagram, a TikTok, a Snapchat, et cetera, and then they find other things to sell, because most people do not make any money from the ad share on the large platforms. Obviously, as we've moved from kind of a following-based graph on the social networks to an algorithmic-based graph, it's getting harder and harder for celebrities to actually reach the people that they care the most about, which are their fans that follow them, that have explicitly subscribed or said they want to see them. And how often are you on Instagram these days, where 30 minutes goes by, you're doom scrolling and next thing you know you're like you see a wedding of all these people you didn't even know and you're like wait, was I supposed to be at that wedding? Because most of the content that's out there has nothing to do with your following graph. So a lot of what we're building on our longer term roadmap at Cameo is almost creating like a talent-based loyalty program.

Speaker 2:

So think like fan clubs. You look at some of the best bands in the world someone like Pearl Jam. Or you look at the Great Field Dead Like. Why have they been able to have these like rabid fan bases? It's because they have the customer data and they almost are acting like a CRM, like a business would do, to let their best fans know hey, here's my merch shop, here's when we're coming to your town, here's, you know, here's an early access to the tickets that are coming out and what we want to do at scale. I think bands have done fairly good at that over the years, but digital creators like don't have that infrastructure and we would like to be the front end of them to be able to like, cultivate and reward their you know, their biggest whale fans.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. Well, as you know customer loyalty enthusiasts over here, we were excited to see that Cameo recently launched Red Carpet Rewards program. Yeah, how does this new initiative support, you know, some of that long-term vision for fan engagement and deeper, more meaningful relationships with your customers?

Speaker 2:

Well, number one, cameo historically has been a product that people use. It's got an insanely high NPS, they love it and then, ultimately, we haven't done a great job of getting people to come back. Now, that said, we have some whale customers that have spent six figures a year just on the consumer side. So we have huge enthusiasts, but for most people it's a one and done, and one of my board members, bing Gordon, who's kind of like a legendary consumer internet guy, just goes. Steven, I have never seen in my entire career a company with this high NPS and this low repeat rate, and a big part of that, in my opinion, is that we haven't done a good enough job, kind of like winning back these really happy customers that are coming through. So ultimately, with Red Carpet Rewards, what we first want to do is retroactively honor you for all of the business that you've given us in the past. So Red Carpet Rewards members, once they create their profile, we actually are going to give them 5% back in credits to spend by the end of this year and it'll be like airline miles going forward. But for year one of the program we're going retroactively back. So any of your listeners that have bought cameos from us or multiple cameos, you're leaving a lot of money on the table if you don't go create your red carpet rewards profile. So we're really excited to go do that. In the longer term, we would like to take the magic of Cameo, like what we do, bringing amazing people together and provide our loyalty members with one-of-a-kind experiences.

Speaker 2:

During the NFT era, we created something called Cameo Pass, which was extremely popular. We had a lot of great events and that was, at the time, like our big loyalty play. You know, as a brand like Cameo we are, as you mentioned, we're a tech company, but we're also an entertainment company. So we have tentpole moments that we activate at Lollapalooza, super Bowl, kind of these big global events that you know we throw. You know really cool exclusive parties or we have, like really awesome.

Speaker 2:

You know we have awesome speakers and we want the red carpet reward members to be you know that's kind of their ticket behind the red velvet rope on anything that Cameo does. So that's something that you know you'll see to come. And then, lastly, we have a lot of great relationships with brands because we have our B2B business as well. So in the future like if I'm looking five years from now, you know, I hope that our loyalty program, you know, has integrations with a lot of other top ones and we're cross-selling with the brands that we partner a ton with on the B2B side or relationships that I have. So we really want to make this kind of as fun and as valuable of a loyalty program as anybody's going to be a part of at scale.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's really cool. And that retroactive reward has got to be attractive for folks who are some of your most loyal customers, so that's really cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's been fun.

Speaker 2:

I mean like when we were even doing the math on this because the consensus has been the repeat rate is just too low to have a loyalty program.

Speaker 2:

And then when we really dug into the data, we had hundreds of thousands of people that have been multi-time buyers and there's over 100 people that have spent over 100 grand on Cameo just on the consumer side, and my team didn't know any of those people. So when we did the launch for this, not only did I invite that cohort first, but I gave them my cell phone number. I'm like, if you need anything, here's my cell phone number, call me, I will help. Right. And that's roll out the red carpet as our first corporate value and that's why we named red carpet awards what we did and the whole idea with that is, anytime you're interacting with our brand, you should feel like you're being escorted down the red carpet at the Oscars, like that's how we want anytime you touch our brand of fuel and we want our red carpet awards members. You know we want our talent to know that they're an RCR member, so that cameo gets prioritized and maybe they put a little extra special love into it. We're pumped to see where this goes.

Speaker 1:

That's really cool, and so, as a tech company, you know I'm sure you guys are always talking about data and, as loyalty people, data is at the heart of a lot of what we do too. So, like what, how do you guys look at? You know the role of like the value exchange between collecting people's data and then providing back to them something in the form of personalization. How does that work into your loyalty strategy?

Speaker 2:

Well, it's the whole core of our loyalty strategy, as it is for most. But I'll give you a really interesting example. So, ethan, if I buy you a cameo and let's say I know that you're a big Cincinnati Reds fan, I'm a big Chicago Cubs fan, right? Yeah, like I don't necessarily as Cameo. The end recipient right now is kind of out of our loop. So I'm the customer right that bought it. But 85% of Cameos are bought as gifts, so for a long time we've missed out on the ultimate recipient. That's actually the Redspan, right. So for me, if I just look at who I bought, it isn't necessarily correlated with what I like. So that's always been a problem for us.

Speaker 2:

As far as like retargeting and personalized marketing. So part of the RCR program is you know you sign in, so I buy that cameo for you. I then am prompted to join RCR. Part of joining RCR is I have to give you a couple of categories that I'm really interested in. So I like the Chicago Cubs, I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I like Survivor, right, and I would put those shows in.

Speaker 2:

And now, when you open the app in the future, right, we're going to use those groups that you said you like or the talent that you favorited, and those will be the people that you're hearing from on a marketing perspective. So you know, having done millions and millions of cameos and not having because we've always made it such a lightweight experience where you know we basically had your email or your phone number, we didn't have anything else on you. In most cases, we didn't even have your name. You know, this is just the beginning of kind of like doing a lot of retroactive work to close the loop and make sure that we have the data that we need on our customers to serve them as well as we possibly can.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. So, as you start to evolve that and you're working on building out this red carpet rewards program, what are you looking at to measure the success of your loyalty and customer engagement efforts? Are there KPIs or benchmarks that are most important to you and your team?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we're in the top of the first inning on this. So right now it's like there's been a big win back campaign. So we've gone to the millions of emails in our CRM. We presented them with this personalized offer. Hey, you know, hey, ethan, like you've got, you know, 600 RCR points waiting for you, which is X amount of dollars. Like we would love you to join the program to claim it.

Speaker 2:

So we're starting with that. So, from just a pure signup perspective, that's the first thing we're looking at it. Secondly, we're looking at like the use, usage rate of those credits. Right, we've given you the credits. Are you using them? Are people taking their credit and just buying one cameo, or are they? Is that the beginning of them kind of having more, like a higher purchase frequency and more frequent retention?

Speaker 2:

So right now it's all about kind of building more like a higher purchase frequency and more frequent retention. So right now it's all about kind of building this list up. You know there's a ton of work that we've been doing on trying to win back the existing, the old customers and then making it a great part of the new purchaser flow, right, so you order the cameo, you have a great experience. Right, when you're done. You get an email from us now saying hey, you know, join our loyalty program and you know you're going to get this many points with this purchase just like you know, if you try to buy a flight on American Airlines or something and you're not in, you know the Advantage program.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Well, are there any metrics you wish you had more visibility into, or some area where, like, maybe a different industry standard would help?

Speaker 2:

You know we're so early. It's like this is zero to one work for us. So it's like we had eight years where we didn't have a program. Now we have a program and you know we want to just build awareness about that, make sure people are coming in. And then we also want to hear from you know, our users Like what you know. What do you want to see out of this program as well?

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of things that we're excited to potentially offer down the line. So you can imagine RCR members maybe get like almost like Amazon Prime members, maybe get like a, you know, a faster guaranteed rate of like when their video is going to come back to them. You can imagine RCR members getting first look at new talent, like when they come on, like they're the first people that get the email before we email the rest of the CRM list, especially for like talent that are doing like limited duration drops. So we want to have a cultivation there. And then the other thing that we're doing is we're creating a newsletter.

Speaker 2:

I've never done anything like this before, but so many brands that I admire are really building in public in a big way, that I admire are really building in public in a big way. So we're actually going to, starting this next month in July, have a monthly CEO update to the RCR members, so it's almost like an investor update, but just to the customers. Here's what's going on. Here's what's new at Cameo, here's what to look for and I'm excited to ship that first one and get some feedback and iterate from there. Excited to, like, ship that first one and get some feedback and iterate from there.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. So one of the things that we keep hearing about is that you know, kind of in this time of a lot of economic uncertainty and change happening, that the definition of the definition of value is changing, especially when it comes to, like, digital experiences, where personalization, speed and exclusivity matter more. How are Cameo users defining value and how are you responding to their needs through the pricing, the loyalty program or even those great experience designs that you're talking about?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a really good question. It's something we talk about a lot here and part of it is just making sure we're always listening to our customers and saying, hey, this is the type of thing I would pay for, or not. So a really good example of that is we've. If you were to zoom out, I love Jeff Bezos. Somebody asked him one time, like if you had to design a 10 year strategy for the company. Like you know how do you even think about where to start? And Jeff's like, well, I have no idea where technology is going to be in 10 years. It's like there's all these, you know, ai, all this shit. Like I have no idea. But there are a couple of things I know for certain. Number one I know my people are not going to want to pay more for their goods in the future. They're going to want to pay less, right? Secondly, I know that people are going to want a faster delivery, not slower delivery. So he basically has this list of things.

Speaker 2:

And for Cameo, for us, we know that our users get the highest value when the Cameo comes as quickly as possible, when it's as well done as it possibly can be and when it actually happens, because there is a percentage of our orders that don't get fulfilled. If the town's busy, something happens, they don't do it in the time allotted. So it started with finding early like what are the things that our users are like clamoring to pay for? And you know, for us the first one of those was 24 hour turnaround. So you know there is an expedited price basically, where people can pay a little bit more but it's like guaranteed to come in the 24 hours. And when I think about the value that could accrue to the membership base, like, maybe at some point, like you know, free 48 hours, for example, is something that you know we could offer. It's not a ski that we charge for today, but it could be a nice perk versus the seven days that a normal customer would have to get the Cameo turned around.

Speaker 2:

Another one that we've seen recently is our watermark removal. So for a long time we've always been really adamant about keeping the Cameo watermark on the video. But we've had a lot of customers over the years that said, hey, we would love, you know, I'd pay you to like take the watermark off, right? And we just ordered, we just tested out a watermark upsell, a watermark removal upsell. So for 10 bucks. You know you could you pay a $10 upcharge and the watermark goes away, and that was extremely popular. Now we're testing it out at different price points so you could imagine maybe RCR members get something like that for free in the future. Those are the types of things that I'm excited as the program goes to just like have things that we're not charging for and then accruing like value to our red carpet rewards members that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I mean, centering the voice of the customer is always an excellent idea, so it sounds like you guys are on the right track. Um, so what would you? I know you guys are early in the loyalty game at cameo, but what would you say is the next big thing for customer loyalty or even just customer experience at cameo? Are there any emerging technologies or ideas you're exploring to help take that fan engagement to the next level?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's a lot. So, for those of you that have followed the Apple versus Epic Games lawsuit, one of the reasons that we have not been able to build our app out or make it the destination despite it being a 4.9-star app app out or make it like the destination despite it being a four star 4.9 star app, like you know, routinely ranked, like one of you know, Apple's top 25 apps for 2025. One of the things that that really hurt our business model is that Apple was taking 30% off the top of any purchase in the app. So the talent if you booked a cameo in our app before six weeks ago it's a $100 cameo the talent would be making $52.50, versus the exact same video booked on web they get $75. So that was always like a big issue for us. So the talent either like didn't want to do the cameos that were booked in the app, which was about 15% of our orders because they were making less for the same work, or what they would do is they would raise their price up by 42%, so they would still make the same, but then now you're charging your customers more money. We're really excited with the Apple versus Epic ruling that we now are able to allow users to either check out on web or check out on app, and the app pricing is like 42% higher. So we let the consumers make that decision. But the big thing that we're going to do now is we're now going to close the loop and make sure that every person that buys a Cameo, they get in our app ecosystem, and this is important because we know that retention is higher.

Speaker 2:

In the app. You have things like push notifications. There's a lot you can do with personalization. That's there, like push notifications. You know there's a lot you can do with personalization. That's there. So now that the business model allows us to do it, we're going to quadruple down on what we're building into our app make really fun, cool, engaging experiences that our users can do. And, kind of for the first time, we're going to be thinking about DAUs. Right, we never, really, as a marketplace business, DAUs didn't matter to us so much in our app, but that's going to be one of the big things that we're doing. And when you think about what drives DAUs, it's usually some combination of messaging or some type of feed. So these are all things that are in the app a little bit today, but we're really going to double down on and we just want to keep people in our ecosystem and give them more and more value as the network effect continues to increase.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's awesome. That sounds like you guys have a lot of exciting things on the horizon there, so that's very cool. Yeah, so in the early days, what are two or three things you're most proud of for the Red Carpet Rewards program?

Speaker 2:

You know it's been really cool.

Speaker 2:

Like I've had customers that you know I give myself a number right and I have, like this one customer that's probably texted me, you know 10 times in the last month and a half since I rolled that out, probably texted me you know 10 times in the last month and a half since I rolled that out and you know, just even developing like a relationship with that, like somebody that's a real well customer of our business, hey, when you're in Chicago, come by HQ, like we'll send you out some merch, like I just sent this girl, you know, a bunch of t-shirts that you know lives in Nebraska and like that's like that's just the type of thing that wouldn't have happened if not for the program.

Speaker 2:

You know, the other thing that I think is cool is it's it really was such like a cross-functional effort to get loyalty. Like loyalty programs are a lot more complex, as I know this audience knows, but you know it's like is this US only? Is it outside of the US? Like, what are the rules there? What can we actually like, what can we collect? How do we use it? So there, I've learned so much from that and, you know, a huge shout out to our legal team, our product team. Our engineers that you know have had to like kind of learn on a fly on this, but I think we got it to a pretty good place.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's definitely not easy launching a loyalty program from scratch. So kudos to you guys for making the investment and putting that at the center of your strategy going forward. It's a smart move, but it's definitely not easy.

Speaker 2:

Well, and you know, the good thing is, we started with a lot of happy customers, right. So that's, it's a. It's a brand that people have always been excited about, even our people that have bought once. They're huge net promoters of it, and I can't tell you how many people have their cameo story when they find out what I do and they want to talk about the cameo they got for their uncle for his 70th birthday, and I love those stories Just like anybody. If someone was talking about your kid and like a great baseball game they had or something you'd be so proud, and that's how I feel every time I have a customer come up and talk to me, and I think this is the pipes of us having much better relationships with our customers.

Speaker 1:

And that's what loyalty is all about, right? Yes, well, stephen, that brings us to our world famous quickfire question section. We try to keep the answers to these to like one word or short phrase, so I'm going to jump right into it. What is your favorite word, catalyst?

Speaker 2:

What is your least favorite word? Can't what excites you.

Speaker 1:

Making people happy. What do you find tiresome? Nagging?

Speaker 2:

What book do you like to recommend to your colleagues? I have so many, but for entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1:

I always recommend the Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Speaker 2:

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Well, I tell people when they ask me what I do, that I'm a horse jockey all the time so maybe that Awesome.

Speaker 1:

What do you enjoy doing that you don't get to do as often as you'd like?

Speaker 2:

I really enjoy experiential, like getting out, you know, getting out in front of our customers in the wild. We have a bunch of interns working at the company right now and they're doing all this like fun man on the street content and I always just get a lot of energy out of that.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Who inspired you to become the person that you are today?

Speaker 2:

My babu Spiro, my grandfather.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. What do you typically think about at the end of the day?

Speaker 2:

It's always a cameo, you know. There's always so much like how can we be better tomorrow? You know team drama, issues where we're going. So those are. Those are ever present, omnipresent.

Speaker 1:

And how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family?

Speaker 2:

I want to be so. I want to be remembered as somebody that gave people the best experiences of their life.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was really a pleasure talking with you and learning more about Cameo and kind of seeing the future for this amazing company that I've known about for a while, but it's really cool to see you guys branching out. So thank you so much for coming and telling us all about it and good luck with all of your Red Carpet Rewards program improvements in the future.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, ethan, excited. And if you've bought Cameos and you haven't joined RCDR, go check your email. The link's waiting for you.

Speaker 1:

Awesome and thanks to everyone for listening. Make sure you check back with us every Thursday for another episode of Leaders in Customer Loyalty Brand Stories.