The Personality Economy: Developing the Formula to Manufacture Humanity
The attention economy has set the tone for the last decade of our internet experience, and it’s surreptitiously finding new ways to monetize our attention and hack our psyche in increasingly strategic ways. We now live in a post-scarcity internet era where nearly everything is instantly copyable or replicable, with almost zero marginal cost to producing new content and overloading our brains’ processing power. Any piece of content can be recreated and made cheaper, better or more easily accessible. So what makes something valuable in today’s firehose of digital content? Creating something that holds unreproducible value.
Wired founder Kevin Kelly proposed 8 key characteristics that grant something persisting and unique value in a post-scarcity internet: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, embodiment, patronage, and findability. Content that embodies multiple of these 8 characteristics is durable enough to stand out from the sea of competition for our attention. When inundated with impersonal and interchangeable content from strangers, we crave authenticity. As social beings, we seek to create relationships based on trust with personable creators in the sea of content. As the range of content expands, we struggle to develop accurate interpretations with minimal context and personal experience to relate it back to without the interpretation of a familiar creator. Addressing these three characteristics, authenticity, trust and interpretation is now becoming the winning strategy in the attention economy, giving rise to what we’d like to call the ‘personality economy’.
Some of the most successful creators of the last decade have built their business not on particularly unique, complex or creative content, but instead on their own personalities — take the Kardashians, Emma Chamberlain, Joe Rogan and more. If you investigate the most popular creators of a certain genre of content or niche — Emily Mariko’s slightly off-putting cooking content, Khaby Lame’s wordless videos mocking over-complicated life hacks, Addison Rae’s overly-enthusiastic dancing tik toks, or Ninja’s goofy Twitch streams — you see that personality is the clear force behind their success, even frequently allowing them to beat out more complex or creative content.
Popular Twitch streamer Ninja boasts over 18 million followers
Influencer marketing is following this very same playbook. Some of the highest grossing brands are centered around a celebrity or influencer as the face of their products: Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop, Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Lipkit, Jessica Alba’s Honest Beauty, 50 Cent’s Vitamin Water, Lebron’s Tonal, and the list goes on. Even religious institutions can sell personality as scripture, with famous televangelist Minister Kenneth Copeland holding a networth of $300M. The convenient nature of this personality driven brand approach is that it’s low cost and accessible, lending itself to the rise of the massive cohort of influencers which now accounts for a $16B industry. Live shopping bakes personality even more deeply into the consumer experience. Through entertaining live streams of influencers unboxing, trying on and bantering about products, viewers find themselves lusting after items they never even thought they wanted to buy. Live shopping is already a booming industry in China, growing to account for an estimated 20% of China’s online shopping industry’s gross merchandise revenue (up from 1.5% in 2018) and value of $423 billion in sales by the end of 2022. In China, platforms Kauishou and Alibaba’s Taobao Live are leading the way, but in the US we’re also seeing the trend take root with an estimated value of $35 billion by 2024 (up from $6 billion in 2020), with platforms like ShopShops, Popshop and What Not leading the effort with rapid growth.
Jiaqi Li, China's 'Lipstick King', raised more than $145M in sales on 'Singles Day'.
As people clue into the lucrative potential of personalities, new innovative business models are emerging. One unconventional idea that gets right to the crux of this phenomenon is the concept of a Human or Creator IPO. This concept mimics a corporate company IPO, except the vessel that goes public is a person instead of a company. The idea is that Human IPOs allow artists, entertainers and creators to directly fundraise from their fans in exchange for the equivalent of equity or stock in their (future) net worth. For creators whose personality and identity is core to their brand, this mechanism could allow them to get early, crowdsourced funding without needing to forfeit massive equity to management companies that have exclusive control of their content and may exploit them in the future (see: the highly publicized feud between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings LLC). Startup Human IPO serves as an early case study of the concept, allowing individuals to build a direct relationship with their fanbase or follower community by “turning their fans into shareholders.” This idea seems extreme and quite dystopian, but as the creator economy rapidly scales, creators and creator output could very likely become a clearly defined asset class that will be treated unlike any other economic unit of good.
Some of Human IPO’s top creators and their “stock” values.
You might be thinking, could a single creator generate enough capital to derive returns like a corporation would? K-Pop sensation BTS is an interesting case study to examine. BTS is one of the largest music groups internationally and contributes approximately $3.6 billion to the South Korean economy annually, making them a leading candidate for the Creator IPO model. Their label, Big Hit Entertainment, went public in October 2020 with a valuation of $4 billion USD. Curiously, while BTS is responsible for 97% of Big Hit’s revenue, each member of BTS was only worth $8 million at the time of the IPO — a mere fraction of the label’s valuation. While it could be argued that the members of BTS were vastly undervalued, it also signifies another more complex truth, which is that the carefully curated and manicured production of BTS is the product of far more than what 7 individuals alone are capable of producing. Instead, their charismatic presence is meticulously manufactured by an entire creative and business engine behind the scenes.
While the presiding thesis of the Creator Economy is around the empowerment of individuals to create value, it’s still hard to ignore the potentially colossal role management labels can play in K-Pop artists’ success. Labels have always sought young talent and enlisted them in multi-year programs where they curate an artist’s musical skills, look, and persona with the intention of combining individuals into music groups optimized for success (similar to the X-Factor’s creation of One Direction, for those familiar). When they are ready to publicize a new group, they launch them much like a new product, with fans eagerly following every group that comes out of their favorite labels, taking a far more “label-first, artist-second” approach to loyalty than many fans in the US. Artists then have countless teams that help scale their presence and art, with choreography and production teams that curate high production music videos and run weekly television shows, media managers that handle both social media and metaverse-like avatar representations of group members, musicians and producers that manage the music writing and recording process, and so much more. Now, we’re even seeing K-Pop artists overtake other categories of celebrity influencers as the new faces of popular brands. K-Pop labels have demonstrated their capacity to strategically scale their artists’ personhood far beyond assumed human limits, arguably to create a persona that’s more larger-than life-than that of any real person. Without these masterful management companies, it would be highly unlikely that K-Pop artists would reach the breadth of success they do today. This astounding model is not completely novel either, being very akin to the Disney child star phenomenon with Disney having developed a mastery over the formulaic model to which would create a star. Regardless of business model, it is clear that personality pays and while the K-Pop business model represents a very traditional, anti-creator economy sentiment, it demonstrates the power of a full behind-the-scenes creative team, orchestrating the genesis of a larger-than-life personality. In knowing this, the way to perhaps view Creator IPOs is less about valuing the direct individual output, but recognizing that the future is about succeeding in personality-driven business and those who could build the most robust organization around a compelling persona will succeed.
BTS behind the scenes for a media event.
While multi-billion dollar businesses can and have been built off of personalities, there are still limitations, and in this case, the limitations are rooted in our human mortality. Personality is one of the few sellable attributes that is deeply entrenched within the individual, and thus should only be as scalable as the individuals are capable of. Personality can be infinitely distributed on the internet (podcasts, YouTube channels, social media content, writing, publicity appearances, etc), but each of those pieces of content requires deep enough involvement from the individual to remain authentic (one of the core characteristics that makes personality so valuable). Take Kylie Jenner: her lip kit brand must scale without losing the element of her personality and authentic touch that makes it so attractive in the first place, which is why we see her investment in curating an appearance that she is intimately involved with creating the product through social media posts of her testing the products, using them herself and even in the lab fully suited in a lab coat. These appearances take time — and her time is quite literally money — but she and her team seem to understand that scaling her brand too far without a conscious personal touch risks a loss of the intimacy that consumers are most drawn to. Humans are also mortal beings with limited lifespans, are not replicable and often make career-altering(ending) mistakes.
Perhaps there is an antidote to human mortality that can perpetuate the pervasive growth of the Personality Economy: AI-generated content. Deep fakes have given us an early taste of just how (terrifyingly) real AI representations of humans can appear. We’re just beginning to see the power of GTP-3, the leading AI language model, through DALL-E 2’s image generation.
AI animation is beginning to outperform human animators with tools like Toei Animation. On the topic of the limitations of mortal human artists, we’re even now seeing AI voice models used to immortalize artists’ voices to be able to apply them to create anything you’d like. Learn From Anyone leverages GTP-3 to mimic the experience of engaging in conversation with a famous person, dead or alive. You ask it a question and it generates a probable response for that person. Not only will creators have to compete with one another, but also very likely with highly-advanced AIs. If things continue as they are, it is not unreasonable to assume creators and artists will confront the threat of AI taking over their jobs in the not-so-far future.
Black Mirror’s episode “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” with Miley Cyrus offers a dystopian depiction of a not-so-far off future for artists in the age of super AIs. In the episode, pop singer Ashley O’s management team releases a robotic toy that contains software replicating the singer’s brain and is designed to allow fans to engage with this copy of her directly, conversing with the toy and taking advice from the replica of their idol. In other words, every fan can buy their very own version of Ashley O, without Ashley O needing to be involved at all. We’ll let you check out the episode to see how this all pans out, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that it does not end well for anyone involved.
Miley Cyrus as Black Mirror’s Ashley O and her robotic replica.
This blending humanity and technology is often described as Transhumanism. From popular virtual streamer Miko, an AI controlled by a human woman called the Technician, to the mysterious fictional digital creator Lil Miquela who has 3 million followers on Instagram, ‘transhumans’ have begun to make their mark in the entertainment space, winning over the hearts and minds of fans. As this blurring line between human and technology furthers, it forces us to confront the question: if it's not our personalities that make us uniquely human, what does?