Traditional structures aren’t set up to challenge an artist with the resources and tech savvy of a Lady Gaga. “It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma,” says Miles Beckett, co-creator and producer of hit YouTube series lonelygirl15 and now the CEO of EQAL, a company that “builds influencer networks around celebrities and brands”. “If you have a huge organisation, even if the leaders want to change, it’s very challenging to move in a different direction. There aren’t open incentive structures to fund little business units. They’re set up to take a couple of years developing a TV show. Every single component of that process, from the development team to the content team to the ad team, exists to make a product slowly, rather than, ‘We’re going to post a video Monday, and change it Wednesday, and the marketing department is going to have to respond quickly.'”
The Backplane is among the most high-powered and heavily funded entertainment-based social-media ventures in the marketplace, and an exemplar of a movement sweeping the industry. Beckett and his collaborators have built a platform that allows celebrities to plug their existing brand into an online framework; he describes it as “a mini-Facebook built around a lifestyle brand”. His clients can interact with their fans in a way that wasn’t possible two years ago. “Most celebrity websites are Flash sites that don’t even load on the iPad,” he says. “They look pretty but don’t build community.”
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