What were you thankful for this year? In most American households, it’s tradition for us to go around the table and say what we are thankful for.
Even if this wasn’t a tradition for you, you had to have at least thought of it sometime over the last couple days.
Something I’ve learned about being thankful is that we’re usually only thankful for things already accomplished. This is problematic because unless you’re thankful for the journey, you might be making the journey much harder and longer than it has to be.
Here’s what I mean.
Have you watched a show or a movie, seen a new actor and all of a sudden you see them everywhere?
How do some actors infiltrate the industry and skyrocket to success overnight, while others struggle to make progress for 20 or 30 years?
This is what they knew…
What I’m most thankful for this year is, the same thing they knew: opportunity.
See, we live in a time that, as actors, the world is in our hands. It wasn’t very long ago that we found our futures in the hands of the studios, agents, distributors, and a host of other people that didn’t really care about whether we failed or succeeded.
Today the world is vastly different.
We can reach millions of people with a YouTube channel and a phone. A semi-viral video can fetch more views than a prime time show with tens of millions of dollars in resources.
As actors, this medium of distribution is something most of us don’t understand yet. I don’t mean YouTube specifically, more like the internet and social media at scale.
Stick with me for a sec as I “speak geek.” There’s something called “the internet of things” that is right around the corner. You see early signs of it all around. Amazon’s Alexa can control your lights, lock your doors, etc.
Soon, everything in your life will be equipped with a sensor and be connected and communicating with each other. Your car will signal to your garage door to open when you get home, which will signal to your refrigerator to reorder your favorite snacks when you get low, and will trigger your TV to tune in to your favorite shows as soon as you walk in the door.
What does this have to with your acting career?
Distribution and a gigantic need for content.
The reason actors needed studios in the past was that they controlled the distribution. Pre-internet, you needed them because they controlled your ability to get in front of the public and to get your project seen.
That’s not the case anymore. The equation has literally done a 180. The studios need you now.
I’ll come back to the Internet of Things in a moment because it ties into your career in a very unique way, but first I want you to understand the power and leverage you hold.
What scares the Hollywood establishment more than anything is that you can pick up your phone and reach anyone in the world at any time. It could be through Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, your blog, etc.
This brings you immense opportunity, because opportunity follows attention.
And, that’s exactly what the internet and social media can bring you.
I like to say “they can’t hire you, if they don’t know you.” The goal then becomes to generate massive amounts of attention and “get known” by the industry.
This may seem contradictory to my earlier statement about not needing the studios for distribution. It’s not. The difference is that you now control your access to the studios. In the past, you had to go on the audition circuit, do workshops, etc. and hope to be seen and picked by them.
Now, if you play your cards right, they will be courting you hoping you pick them to work with.
There’s a marketing practice called “The tipping point.” It’s the point at which an idea, a product, a movie, or even an actor’s popularity crawls out of the shadows and starts to go mainstream. It then spreads like wildfire.
Your job as an actor, if you truly want to succeed in the industry and make this a long term, fulltime, rewarding career, is to get yourself to that tipping point.
You do that by generating attention. Build your social media platforms. Here’s how I can help you get the ball rolling with that. Because attention begets attention, it’s easier if you’re not starting from the ground floor.
There’s a great line in Jerry Maguire. He (a sports agent) is talking to a client and says “I will not rest until I have you holding a Coke, wearing your own shoe, playing a video game featuring you, while singing your own song in a new commercial starring you, broadcast during the Superbowl, in a game that you are winning, and I will not sleep until that happens.”
That’s the product of the tipping point.
The industry is looking for actors that are about to hit the tipping point, so they can take you across the finish line.
That’s why you see so many YouTubers, and Instagrammers crossing over into the in the industry. They are being handed shows, starring in films and even having entire productions developed specifically for them.
They have the attention and a reputation for delivering work that the public supports. Make sure your industry reputation is always in good shape too. Here’s a quick way to make sure it matches the scale of your goals and ambition.
Here’s where the Internet of Things comes into play and how it ties into your career. There’s already a refrigerator that can tell when you are getting low on milk and eggs, for example, and reorder your favorite brands for delivery. It does so without any intervention on your part.
The next step in the evolution of the IoT is that you will get recommendations for trying new things. You’ll have Morgan Freeman pop up on your screen and saying “I see that you are about to reorder Oak Farms milk but you should try Borden instead. It’s richer in vitamin D…”
There’s a reason celebrity placement in advertising works: they have attention and attention yields credibility. A good percentage of people will order Borden, just because Morgan Freeman to told them to.
This will happen everywhere. If you pick up a pair of Nike running shoes at the store, you’ll get a notification with someone trying to persuade you that Reebok is better.
It’s going to be a part of our everyday lives very soon and that creates a need for massive amounts of content and it creates a need for a ton of people with attention and credibility.
Put yourself in position to take advantage of this move now by building your social media, your reputation and your credibility.
The window is closing on social media. If you have been struggling to grow your following, because people with a few hundred thousand or a million followers are in the same space, imagine when you have to fight for attention when the numbers swell to 10 million followers being the norm, because they are being backed by the industry to cross the tipping point.
When we started to see Instagrammers on TV, we should have paid attention. When Will Smith launched a show on YouTube, we definitely should have paid attention.
The time to build your platform is now, so what will you do next grasshopper? The key to accomplishing this, is to be genuine and also to be believable. If you say you are an actor, people will look up. They will look for your recent works, check out your IMDb, etc.
Be sure that what they find matches your goals. Here’s how I can help.
Remember, I’m always only a comment or an email away because my goal is to…
See you at the top,
Scott