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Ahead of the Curve with Coco Mocoe
Addison Rae's Marketing Playbook: The Importance of "Social Proof" When Breaking Mainstream
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Addison Rae has laid out a blueprint for how a creator can go from being Pigeonholed as a TikToker or YouTuber to an A list pop star. But how exactly did she do it? We are going to talk about my theory of social proof, as I like to call it in marketing, and what exactly that means and how you can achieve it and why. Addison Rae is a great example of that happening right now. When scripting out this episode of Ahead of the Curve with cocomoco, I thought about diving into the history of Addison Rae's rise, but I realized that if you've clicked on this episode, then you already know all of that. Instead, I want to spend this time talking about how and why should I combine the two words how and why she was able to make the jump from TikToker to pop star. And I want to compare her to other similar creators such as Emma Chamberlain. Although she's not a pop star, but she made a jump in a different way. Thank you all so much for listening to Ahead of the Curve with cocomoco and for all of the new paid subscribers. If this is your first episode now that you're a paying member, hi. Thank you. Thank you to those of you that have been leaving reviews on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And thank you to those of you watching the video on Substack. You can watch the first half of the video version for free@cocomoco.substack.com and then if you want to unlock all of the extended episodes and videos, you can do that by becoming a paying member of the substack for $9 a month. When it comes to marketing and breaking out of just being known as a TikToker or a YouTuber, I've always thought that there are three main stages to fame online, and the cycle will often start again once someone is rebranding or evolving as a creator, those three stages are first Trial and error, two Repetition, and then three Social proof. But a lot of times not everyone reaches the stage of Social proof, so they keep repeating. Trial and error repetition. Trial and error repetition. There are tons of creators that reach 10 million followers and get millions of views a day on multiple platforms, but they might never reach the last pivotal step of Social Proof, which is why they might never break out of their own social following. While having millions of followers is amazing and you can have a lucrative career from that, not everyone wants the last step of Social Proof because it can be scary and I'll explain why. But if you never get to the third step then you may never break out of that one or few platforms that you're known for. You will always be at the mercy of trends and algorithms. We could wake up tomorrow and TikTok could be gone just like vine was. The difference between the vine creators that evolved and still have thriving careers versus the vine creators who fade away when the app did was social proof. So we're going to go back at step number one and we're going to talk about trial and error. This is the first step to becoming famous online. Before any creator finds their audience and footing, they will have months, if not years of the trial and error stage. As you know, one of my favorite sayings is it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. I always use her as an example because she's so brilliant. But Amelia Dimms from Chicken Shop Date just celebrated the 10th anniversary of her show. She was working on this show for over five years before it began to go viral. If you've ever come up with a viral video format on TikTok or other platforms, then you probably know how long it took you to get there. I always say behind every viral video format is 100 failed versions of it. It takes time to get to where you're meant to be. The trial and error part of being a creator or a creative is so important. Even if you see those videos as failing and not getting a ton of views, you are learning with each video about something new. Maybe you are learning what the best lighting is, what the best hashtags are, what the best intro or hook is. This also happens for musicians. Musicians will sometimes have hundreds of songs that they create and then they narrow it down to a dozen or less for an album. Sometimes artists will put out music and albums for years or decades before they finally reach their audience. Short and Sweet was Sabrina Carpenter's six studio album. So you think of like an Olivia Rodrigo who found success with her first album Sour. But there's also artists like Sabrina Carpenter where it takes time. The Dare is an artist who I made a TikTok about over a year ago when he only had a thousand followers on Instagram. He wears a suit and sunglasses. He produced the song Guess for Charlie xcx which then had Billie on the remix. He has a dance underground sound that is really popular in New York City. I honestly thought he was British for the longest time just by looking at him. But lo and behold he is from the Pacific Northwest and was a schoolteacher at one point. He used to put out indie rock music under the artist name Turtlenecked before He turned into the dare, moved to New York City and found fame. He had years of this trial and error stage, and if he wasn't willing to evolve and try new things, then he may have never found the dare version of himself. In this stage, be willing to admit when something isn't working and pivot the best part of the trial and error stage as a creator is that it's typically when you're not getting a ton of views so less people are aware of any mistakes you might be making. See the beauty in this stage? I'm always so grateful that I jumped into the trial and error stage of my career constantly, because when I started out I was doing tarot and astrology videos and I always say like, if I had been successful doing that, if I had been getting millions of views on every single video and 10 million followers the first year, I would have never posted my first trend prediction. I would have never gone to Ken Lion, I would have never worked with a list talent on their marketing strategies. I would have always kept those two worlds separate and I would have never been able to find my core audience, my true side of myself. If I had been successful doing tarot, it was because it started slowing down and there wasn't a ton of views on it anymore and I felt like I was flopping that I was forced back into the trial and error stage. Thank God I was. When Addison Rice started out on TikTok, she was a dancer and cheerleader who just graduated high school and was beginning college soon. She ended up not going to college and moving to LA instead. I remember when she would come into my old job a few times and she was always very kind, on time and professional. Those traits go a really long way and I really felt like she was going to be a star. While she found success from TikTok early on, I think a part of her appeal is that she's always evolving and not afraid of the trial and error stage. When she put out her first single, Obsessed, she was an independent artist. This means that she found a way to create and produce this song and music video by herself. She didn't have a huge label backing her and if she did, then there's a chance that she would have signed away her rights. Even if she was successful, she maybe wouldn't have even seen any of the fruits of her labor now that it's paying off years later. While some people were critical of her for this song, I actually really loved it. But I know that taste is subjective. I think it's one of the better self produced songs to come from an Internet star, and the fact that she was willing to put out music as an indie artist and not wait around for a label and tell her what to do. That is such a great sign of a healthy trial and error stage as a creator or a creative. The second stage of fame is repetition. This happens right after as a creator, you've done the trial and error enough that you like kind of have an idea. You maybe find a format that works, you know, like me when I found my ahead of the curve trend prediction format and then you just got to milk that cow dry. Repetition is so, so very important. Repetition is important because it is what makes you memorable online. It is one of the most underrated tools in growth. Think about the creator Jules Lebron, who grew to millions of followers earlier this year because of the demure trend. She was also in a years of trial and error stage. She said that she'd been trying to be a creator for years and years and years and demure was finally the thing that took off for her. She found ways to say the demure word in multiple videos a day. She didn't shy away from it or try to pivot too quickly. Online people are already seeing hundreds of videos a day. The for your page is unpredictable and you never know what you're going to see next as a user. So when a user sees a familiar face, they want them to be doing familiar content. There is comfort in finding creators who bring predictability to an unpredictable algorithm. Repetition happens once you find a win in your trial and error stage. Find a format that you can do a dozen times a day and trust that you are capable of bringing something unique to the table with each one. That is also why you never want to go viral for copying a trend you don't even love that much because then you are going to be stuck with it. Find something that you love filming. And the reason repetition is so important too on algorithms, even if you're in the trial and error stage and you want to pivot to doing new content, is I always think of the algorithm as like a robot or something on the other end. And you have to constantly tell the algorithm what type of content you are making, especially if you're pivoting before they decide to push you out to an audience. So let's say you were making videos as a chess player and it's been a couple years and now you want to be a Yu Gi oh Pokemon card person on TikTok. You have to post videos about Yu Gi oh and Pokemon every day for like a month before the algorithm is like, okay, I think this creator is taking Yu Gi oh and Pokemon video seriously. So the next time they post a Yu Gi oh or Pokemon video, we will pump them out to a hundred thousand people that liked a Pokemon video last night. So that repetition is also important before you even see success in training the algorithm to understand what content you were pivoting to. Nara Smith is another great example of success in the repetition. She went viral for her calming voice and making food for her family from scratch. When she started to go viral earlier this year, she didn't try to become a makeup creator or pop culture podcaster. No, she leaned into what she was becoming known for. She made videos of her making new things from scratch every single day. The same format in the same location, often over and over and over again. Repetition is a less fancy way to describe branding. I hate when people throw words like branding and authenticity around without really describing how to get there. But branding to me is repetition. McDonald's makes hamburgers and chicken nuggets. They don't sell burritos on Tuesdays and then chow mein on Wednesdays and then pizza on Thursdays. No, they do the same thing over and over and over again. They didn't see a Taco Bell open up across the street and say, oh my God, we have to stop making hamburgers because now crunchwrap Supremes are trendy. Imagine if you were driving your car, you pulled into a McDonald's drive through and you're like, hey, I'm here to get chicken nuggets. And they're like, sorry, we only sell tacos and burritos now. You'd be like, what the hell? Like, that would actually disorient you. Because branding is repetition. It's a promise. It's you're going to get that thing over and over again. And breaking of that trust can lose your audience. Another example of this is In N Out. They only have three options on their menu and they're world famous. They mastered those three versions of a hamburger, cheeseburger and Double Double. And they do them over and over again every single day. I always say you can't be great at one thing if you're good at everything. And if you're getting tired of the repetition stage and you feel like your format has run its course, that is okay. That is when you go back to trial and error until you find the next thing that you can repeat over and over again. Most people never break out of the trial and error and then repetition cycle of fame online and that is why they can have a very lucrative career. And most people don't want to break out of that. I'm not saying that you have to have social proof, but they often cycle through those two things. But the creators that actually break out of that and become more mainstream or, you know, find fame that's even bigger than the platform they're known on, they are the ones that have mastered, either accidentally or on purpose, social proof. So what is social proof? Social proof is when you get someone from a third party perspective to talk about you or cover you. This could be a news article, it could be a podcaster, it could be another creator duetting or stitching your video talking about you. Social proof is a fancy way in marketing to say word of mouth. Word of mouth is so important in winning public favor over, but it is the trickiest thing to pull off because you can't force other people to talk about you or be interested in you. More on that later. Think about it like this. Have you ever met someone who looks average, but everyone in your friend group keeps talking about how hot they are and how they all have crushes on them? It kind of piques your curiosity, right? You might be more open to seeing this person in a positive way, or even developing a crush on them yourself, even though you weren't interested at first, simply because everyone else has told you that they have a crush on them too. Now imagine you're in a new friend group and some random person walks up to you and they say, I'm just so hot. Everyone has a crush on me and you should too. I'm the most attractive person in the room. Da da da. You'd be like, what the hell? If someone tells you how great they are, how hot they are, or how funny they are, not only will it be less believable because it's literally them singing their own praises, it might even make you cringe or be off putting. The difference between being off putting and singing your own praises versus confidence is when it comes to confidence, that is someone who has mastered the art of what they're doing through hours and hours of work when no one was looking. And they know that their work speaks for itself. They don't have to say how great they are. They know that their work speaks for itself. That is confidence. Okay, so I'm not saying don't be confident. The same goes for creators online. The ones who talk about how accomplished or great they are usually can come off off putting or lose their audience. Instead, whenever my interest has peaked about a new creator who's taking off online. It's typically because I heard someone else talking about them. For example, I don't watch cooking videos. They don't really come up on my feed. But I became interested in Nara Smith because I saw other videos of people talking about how famous she was becoming and how fascinating she was. One way that some creators are able to reach the social proof part of fame is that they will hire PR teams who are paid on the lower end of $5,000 a month. That's like two months of rent to guarantee that their clients get covered in People magazine or get fluff pieces written about them. You can tell because there's really no breaking news about this person. I always think that, like, it's genuinely news if something new is happening. Like the word news is new information. And so if there's like an article covering someone and there's no new information being covered about this person, then it might be a fluff piece. Someone who I think is doing this, in my humble opinion, I don't know for sure, is that one couple on Dancing with the Stars this season. I believe their names are Brooke and Gleb. There were so many random paparazzi photos of them in tattoo shops late at night and backstage videos of them kissing. First of all, paparazzi would not be at a tattoo shop late at night unless you told them that you were there. Unless you're like, Britney Spears. Like, there's a certain level of fame where that might happen, but, like, oftentimes that's not happening. And now that I work on the back end of working with some public figures, I realize how many of these pop walks are staged. There were so many random articles about them. And ABC owns Dancing with the Stars, who owns Disney and other media sites. So I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to pull strings to get some articles written about Brooke and Gleb in People magazine, etc. I believe that ABC saw the virality of Riley Arnold and Harry Jousie's volatile relationship from last season. It got a bunch of new Gen Z people to tune in, and they probably wanted to manufacture a similar thing this year. On top of that, Brooke and Gleb recently got eliminated and she posted a TikTok that like, they had insinuating that, like, they were never dating or they had broken up. And I guess it worked because now I know the name Brooke Nader and I have no idea who she was prior to this. It kind of reminded me of the time on Snapchat. And I believe it was like 2016 when they just launched like a home feed with news articles. And all of the news articles were reporting on some girl named Demi who was supposed to be the next Kylie Jenner, but it never took off. But, like, so many people were reporting on her and like, none of the articles were, like, interesting or there was nothing important happening, but she was all over these news articles. One tiktoker that was really great at social proof during her rise would be Victoria Paris. She got covered by a ton of media companies and had a lot of fluff pieces about being a creator in New York City. I think she's really smart and I'm not saying this as a bad thing. If she was paying for a publicist, I wouldn't be surprised, but I almost don't even think she needed it because she's really brilliant at going viral regardless and getting people to talk about her. Social proof often happens accidentally for some creators, and it often happens when they're being canceled. So be careful what you wish for. However, it is still a very important step in breaking into the mainstream. Zeitgeist. One last example of this before I get into the specific Addison Rae Part of this podcast would be the tiktoker Harry Daniels, who sings at Celebrities. I am actually lucky enough he's become a good friend of mine recently, and I really think he's a genius at the Internet. And I don't say that lightly. Like, as someone who loves marketing and, like, talks about it and makes videos about it, very rarely have I actually met someone where I'm fascinated at, like, their knowledge of the Internet and how they see the Internet and thinking about it differently than the average person. And Harry Daniels is one of those people. It was feature, not like he was in snl, but snl. Bowen Yang and Billie Eilish did a literal skit last week about singing at Celebrities and it was a reference to Harry Daniels. So that is like the ultimate social proof is getting a skit about you on Saturday Night Live. And if you think about, like, the formats that you're doing and if you're okay with poking fun at yourself or I always say, like, when you want to find fame or you want to become an extreme version of whatever you're doing, do not just, like, become someone else or become like a caricature of someone else instead. I say, like, the best creators are the ones that become extreme versions of who they already are. They just, like, turn it up to a thousand degrees when they're on video. Like Jojo Siwa. Like I don't think JoJo Siwa is being inauthentic. I think she's just being an extreme version of who she already is. So if you have a format that you're doing as a creator and you're like, how can I ramp this up a thousand notches and you're okay with making fun of yourself, think about like, how could it be an SNL skit? Like, how could I lean into this in a funny way? Nara Smith was also referenced in that kind of SNL skit last week. Now I want to talk about Addison Rae and how she was able to create social proof for herself. And I'm going to do that in the extended portion of this podcast on Substack. So if you want to unlock the full episode, you've made it this far and you can listen to me talk a little bit more, then you can go to cocomoco.substack.com and become a paying member for $9 a month. You will also be able to unlock every single episode that I've done before this as well. So you'll have like hours of content to listen to if that is what you're interested in. But if not, that is so okay. I appreciate all of you guys for listening and making it this far. I hope this brought some really great insights into why some creators are able to break into mainstream fame versus the ones that have tens of millions of followers but really fail to launch outside of that and are really at the mercy of the platform that they are biggest on. And let me know in the reviews of this podcast, someone else who you think has really been able to use social proof either accidentally or purposefully. And if there's a specific creator that you want me to do an episode on, thank you guys so much. And if you are a paying coconut, if you're a paying member, I'll see you on the other side.