“We can guarantee virality.”
Bullshit. No one can do that…or so I thought.
I met two guys that made me wonder if you could potentially force it to happen.
That’s the focus of today’s Thought Liters.
Zach Katz and Jason Wilhelm are the founders of creator entertainment firm Fixated. It claims to turn creators and brands into cultural phenomena, and build viral moments at scale.
The key differentiation of Fixated’s operation is guaranteed distribution through an army of 25,000 micro-creators who can be activated to rack up billions of views on behalf of its talent — thus, theoretically manufacturing virality.
It’s part of the rapidly popularizing “clipping economy” which has taken short-form by storm. Podcasters, streamers etc incentivize people around the world to clip their content, and agree to pay them on a CPM basis. Plenty of creators and brands do it.
Fixated built this infrastructure for its roster just as the rest of the creator economy wizened to it. Credit to Jason — a creator in his own right, and one of the architects of the Sway House, a 2020s collaborative of TikTokers who shacked up together to create en masse. He saw how important that infrastructure was firsthand.
My philosophy with any of the houses that I've been a part of is…management as sort of the backbone to kind of help push everybody in the right direction.
So who actually uses this?
Zach and Jason built an attractive, differentiated offering for its creator roster, sure. But man did they catch lightning in a bottle with the first creator they discovered and convinced to come on board: Sketch.
Long before embodying the world-famous “what’s up brother” creator, Kylie Cox was a quirky Houston-based Madden live streamer with a comfortable, yet cozy concurrent audience. Entranced by his “magic show,” Zach and Jason flew him out to LA. They committed to throwing every resource imaginable at him…and Sketch agreed to take a chance on them. The rest is history.
Credit to Zach — whose career is marked with a keen eye for talent, having come from the music industry and discovering / launching mega-talent (like Sean Kingston, which he describes on the show).
Nobody's magic show was like his magic show…he was a people’s champ.
OK…but would it work for me?
The promise is seemingly too good to be true: join forces with Fixated, and you’ll be shot into the creator stratosphere.
But, certain rules of the real world still apply. Namely among them: garbage in, garbage out. If your content is shit, a billion views won’t make it not shit.
Also: there’s no guarantee of how long this tactic will work. We’ve seen plenty of growth hacks have their heyday: paid followers on Instagram, engagement pods on LinkedIn, livestream bots (something which plagued Speed’s would-have-been record-breaking stream).
Long term, will this form of UGC be likened to decentralized paid promo? Will viewers grow wise to it?
Will it even matter?
I don’t know. I’m just a guy who learns from the top of the world through the bottom of a glass. And all I can say for now is that these guys seem to be on the tippy top of the world in scaling creator empires. (Recent acquisitions of Ellify, Elevate, and Studio71 only add to that.)
And for that, I was thrilled to be a sponge. Watch the episode, and judge for yourself.
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Cheers!
Adam
