Research on a new social media service
Empire State University of New York
Cameo is a newer social media platform that was established in 2016, but it was during the pandemic that it really took off and grew a large number of users. Today over 50,000 celebrities have accounts on Cameo (Gray, 2024).
The basic premise of Cameo is that for a fee set by the celebrity, you can receive a video fashioned from a request that you have submitted. It can be as simple as a request for a birthday shout-out, but it also could be a request for a pep talk, an answer to a question, or an acknowledgement of some other major life event such as an anniversary or other celebration.
Parasocial theory is based on the definition of parasocial as a non-reciprocated interest in a distant person, most often a celebrity. The lack of reciprocity is the most typical defining feature, although most often there is a lack of direct access to the celebrity and a status difference between the celebrity and the fan created either by fame or wealth or both. Para-communication is the celebrity’s efforts to communicate with their public as a group, and parasocial perception is defined as the impression one takes away concerning the celebrity based on para-communication. It is in this broader sense that there is a give and take between the celebrity and their fans and this becomes the basis for the parasocial relationship. When the object is a fictional character rather than a real person, para-communication comes via the creator of the character, either a screenwriter, author, or other media producer (Giles & Stever, 2024).
My own interest in Cameo originated as part of a participant observer study that I was doing on fans of The Hobbit films. One of the actors, Dean O’Gorman, had an active Cameo account and the fans were telling me about the Cameos they had gotten from Dean. Interested, I reached out to him, and we ended up doing a series of Zoom interviews concerning what he thought Cameo meant for fan/celebrity relationships. We talked about the role Cameo had played during the pandemic and how contact through Cameo compared with meeting fans at conventions.
From the perspective of parasocial theory, one of the implications of the Cameo format is that all of these videos use direct address and eye-gaze as a fundamental aspect of the videos sent to fans. Research has shown that these features play prominently in the formation of the strongest parasocial relationships (Cohen et al., 2019; Dibble et al., 2016; Hartmann, 2017; Hartmann & Goldhoorn, 2011). It would then follow that Cameos should create stronger parasocial relationships between these celebrities and their fans. However, contrary to typical parasocial interaction where the viewer feels in some way that they are being spoken to by the celebrity (but actually is not being personally addressed), in a Cameo this is in no way an illusion. The message is personal to either an individual fan or a small group of fans in almost every case. This creates the potential for an even stronger parasocial relationship than might typically happen.
It is also the case that if there are repeat Cameos between a celebrity and a particular fan, the relationship could cross over from the parasocial realm to a more social connection. Both Dean O’Gorman and also Star Trek actor Nana Visitor reported in interviews that with these repeat Cameos from the same user, they were able to get to know a bit about the fan and reply in an even more personal way. Visitor used the Cameo service during the pandemic to actually do video chats with some individual fans. But in most cases, actors interviewed agreed that the relationship with a fan was parasocial as they usually did not get to know much about the person for whom they were making the video. Indeed, occasionally the request came from a friend or family member of the fan and so the information came through a third party.
My students and I did a study of Cameo where we looked at a stratified sample of 120 Cameo accounts. We looked at a number of variables such as fees being charged, popularity of the account as measured by how many reviews the celebrity had received, the average length of the videos, and the subject matter typically addressed in a video. Overall, the birthday videos or pep talk videos were the most frequent and popular (Stever et al., 2024).
One of the defining features of a Cameo is the fee being charged. These fees range from a few dollars all the way up to thousands of dollars. My observation during this work thus far is that the amount of the fee changes radically the nature of the relationship that the Cameo is reinforcing. For example, O’Gorman charges a very reasonable fee (given the time and effort involved) of $45, a fee that is less than many celebrities charge for an autograph or photograph at a convention. This makes repeat Cameos very possible, and through a series of Cameos, the fan becomes known through their questions and other information provided in their requests. In contrast, Harry Potter actor Tom Felton is currently charging $499 per Cameo (and in the past has charged as much as $900). When such large sums of money become involved, it changes the character of the interaction, a relationship that very much needs to be investigated in future studies. The highest fee we observed was Caitlyn Jenner, currently charging $2500 for a Cameo. In our study, the mean for fees was $111, the median was $75, and the mode was $50 (Stever et al., 2024).
Another variable in the Cameo world is the length of the video. Typically, these are in the one-to-two-minute range although some celebrities do longer videos and some stick to the 30 second minimum set up by Cameo. When looking at the average length of Cameos in minutes/seconds for the sample we took in our study, for females this was 1.36 minutes (81.6 seconds) and for males it was 1.54 minutes (92.4 seconds), a difference that was not significant (t=.69; p<.40; Stever et. al., 2024). Actors and musicians tended to make longer videos than did athletes (a difference that was significant).
These preliminary interviews and our aforementioned study analyzing 120 celebrity accounts (40 each for actors, musicians, and sports stars) suggest that Cameo is a platform that is well worth investigating for its impact in both the areas of parasocial theory and fan studies (Giles & Stever, 2024; Stever at al., 2024).
References
Cohen, J., Oliver, M. B., & Bilandzic, H. (2019). The differential effects of direct address on parasocial experience and identification: Empirical evidence for conceptual difference. Communication Research Reports, 36(1), 78-83.
Dibble, J. L., Hartmann, T., & Rosaen, S. F. (2016). Parasocial interaction and parasocial relationship: Conceptual clarification and a critical assessment of measures. Human Communication Research, 42(1), 21-44.
Giles, D.C. & Stever, G. (2024). Parasocial experiences: Psychological theory and application. Oxford University Press.
Gray, M. (2024). The most popular celebrities on Cameo that you should book ASAP. Eonline. https://www.eonline.com/news/1399463/the-most-popular-celebrities-on-cameo-that-you-should-book-asap
Hartmann, T. (2017). Parasocial interaction, parasocial relationships, and well-being. In L. Reinecke & M.B. Oliver (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of media use and well-being (pp. 131-144). Routledge.
Hartmann, T., & Goldhoorn, C. (2011). Horton and Wohl revisited: Exploring viewers’ experience of parasocial interaction. Journal of Communication, 61(6), 1104-1121.
Stever, G., Crompton, S., Austin, H., & Hailemariam, S. (2024). Cameo: Description and theory about a social media service. North American Journal of Psychology, 26(4), 729-746.
