Flashes of fame | Parlaying 15 minutes of celebrity into a full-time career requires more than luck. Mentos, anyone?
On June 3, 2006, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, two men from Buckfield, uploaded a four-minute video to their website, EepyBird.com, of themselves dropping 532 Mentos into 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke — which triggers a reaction that sends the soda spraying out of the bottles — in a complex performance designed to recreate the famous Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas.
They posted the video on a Saturday. They sent the link to one friend. That was all it took, Grobe says. “It just exploded.”
Passed along from friend to friend, the video became viral. On Monday morning, the David Letterman Show called for an interview. On Tuesday, the Conan O’Brien show called. By Wednesday evening, Grobe and Voltz were featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Grobe, a professional juggler, and Voltz, a lawyer, were immediate celebrities. The turn of events didn’t surprise anyone as much as it did the two men who suddenly found themselves on prime time television. “When we first did the video we never thought we’d do [the performance] again,” Voltz says.
But two years later, the men are still performing the Coke and Mentos experiment, the foundation of their new careers. They’ve performed their act all over the world, from a nightclub in Istanbul to the set of a television game show in Paris. They made a video with the Blue Man Group and the band Barenaked Ladies. Now, the guys from EepyBird.com have brought their knack for doing crazy experiments with everyday objects to the next level. In early September, the men launched a new experiment on prime time television using nothing but sticky notes. “It’s been an incredible journey,” Grobe says.
Celebrities are created easily these days, whether from a video that spreads like a virus over the World Wide Web or a stint on a popular reality television show. But in the digital age, Internet fame can be fleeting. “For the last two to three years we’ve been expecting our 15 minutes to be over at any point,” Grobe says.
So what does it take turn that brief dose of the limelight into a full-time career? Zoe Zanidakis, the female lobsterman from Monhegan Island who competed on “Survivor” wishes she knew.
Zanidakis became a minor celebrity from her stint on season four of the CBS reality television show, then tried her luck acting in Los Angeles after being voted off the island. She soon discovered, however, that just because millions of Americans recognize you, it doesn’t mean you get a free ticket to Hollywood. “‘Survivor’ did not give me a leg up,” Zanidakis says. In fact, she says it might have even hurt her chances of becoming an actress. “I think they frown on reality TV shows,” she says.
David Seaman, founder of New York City marketing firm Shutterline Interactive and author of Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz: How to Attract Massive Attention for Your Business, Your Product or Yourself, says the most important thing to do after getting noticed is to harness that notoriety to build an audience. Do it by marketing yourself and building brand awareness, he says. “When you get a big hit, you have to capitalize on it,” he says.
Riding the recognition wave
Voltz and Grobe never hired anyone like Seaman to help them turn their Internet fame into a career because they never needed to. When it came to making the transition from Internet celebrity to bona fide celebrity — a tough hump for many playing the fame game — the pair had it relatively easy. The popularity of their video took over and did the work for them.
At first, Voltz and Grobe tried to rein in the video, pirated copies of which were showing up on YouTube and other video sharing websites. Voltz sent YouTube dozens of notices telling the company to take down the pirated copies, but to no avail. The company would take down one copy and several more would be posted. “It was like a hydra,” Voltz says. “We’d cut off their heads and 20 more would appear.”
Eventually, they gave up. In Seaman’s opinion, the pair did the right thing. A person who finds himself in the spotlight should not try to fight whatever is fueling that notoriety, Seaman says. “It’s the worst thing you could do,” he says. “It’s so much better to embrace it and build on it.”
When Grobe and Voltz realized they couldn’t control where their video showed up online, they decided to leverage its virility. The pair struck a deal with a then-new company called Revver, an online video sharing website similar to YouTube, to host their video. Unlike YouTube, however, Revver splits ad revenue 50/50 with its content producers.
Grobe and Voltz have made $30,000 so far from their video on Revver, which shared more than $1 million in ad revenue with its content creators in 2007, according to Television Week. “That wasn’t a grand slam,” Voltz says. “But it was a great beginning,” Grobe adds.
Grobe and Voltz’s experience demonstrates one of the paradoxes of this new age of Internet-generated fame: 40 million people could watch your video, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make any money from it.
Jeremiah McDonald knows this intimately. McDonald, a parking lot attendant in Portland, is a minor YouTube celebrity who has posted dozens of videos on the website. He calls the Internet a “fame simulator.” His most popular video, “YouTube is my life,” took six months to produce and has received 1.5 million views, but he hasn’t seen a dime from the effort. “People are treating you like you’re famous,” he says, pointing to the fawning comments he receives on his videos and the following he’s created through his YouTube channel, “but it wears off.”
The inability to generate revenue from Internet fame, coupled with its transient nature, makes it all the more important to make the jump to traditional media where the money is. Grobe and Voltz were successful in finding traditional sources of revenue in the form of sponsors for the performances they started doing. Their latest “Sticky Note” experiment that debuted on ABC was sponsored by Coca-Cola and OfficeMax.
In an attempt to keep the buzz going once the video became viral, Voltz says he and Grobe spent a lot of time thinking about marketing. He says the best decision they made was to continue getting their goggled faces and zany lab-coat characters out there through more videos and live performances. Many of the performances were sponsored by Coke and Mentos; one was sponsored by Google.
The two men got paid an undisclosed amount for their appearances as part of the production staff. They say it wasn’t a lot, but it was enough for them to continue traveling and doing the experiments — Voltz hasn’t practiced law since the video took off two years ago. “I’ll have to see how this goes, but this is a lot more fun,” Voltz says.
Fun, yes. A livelihood, no. “The real key is a transition from ‘we need what’s in the bank to last us for next six months’ to having some predictability and real sustainable business,” Grobe says. “That’s when we’ll be able to say we’re making a living.”
Standing apart from the crowd
Since the Internet can create fame, it’s logical that people looking for celebrity have turned to it. The result: more and more content out there that someone like Portland’s McDonald — who started posting videos on YouTube in hopes of launching a film career — has to compete with to get noticed. “Now [the Internet] is just so oversaturated,” McDonald says. “There are so many people on there, myself included, that it’s much harder to rise up the way people use to.”
It’s come to a point where McDonald no longer sees the Internet and its ability to launch stars overnight as his ticket to the film business — though it could be a vehicle to build a body of work and an audience, he says. Instead he’s realized that traditional methods of launching his career are more important. “You’re better off really doing the leg work,” he says.
Zanidakis of “Survivor” put in the leg work. She visited agencies in Maine and Los Angeles, and she took acting classes and made a little cash from speaking engagements. Zanidakis says she’s wanted to be a movie star since she was 7 years old; she thought “Survivor” would be her ticket to that dream. Unfortunately, she says, that’s not what happened. “You can have your dreams and then there’s reality,” she says.
In Los Angeles, a lot of people recognized her, but it didn’t open any doors. She ended up working as a production assistant on commercials — behind the camera, instead of in front of it.
Back in Maine, her television experience didn’t help her get a part in “Empire Falls,” which starred Paul Newman and was filmed in Maine. She had to wait in line for seven hours with the rest of the extras and waited two weeks before a call back for a non-speaking role. If you’ve seen the movie, she’s the bar patron who passes a pitcher of beer to Newman. “Making the change is the hard part… trying to cross over, to take that risk,” she says.
Zanidakis came out with a calendar, but even that was difficult because of contractual limitations about using “Survivor” to promote it. She says she had a chance to translate her time on “Survivor” into a lucrative stint as a motivational speaker, but that didn’t interest her. Last summer found her back on Monhegan painting houses and hanging shingles.
Zanidakis loves spending the summer in Maine, but she’s not giving up on a career in showbiz. “Everything for me has been a step in that direction since ‘Survivor’ — not since, but even before,” she says. “I’ve never let go of my dreams.”
Whit Richardson, Mainebiz staff writer, can be reached at wrichardson@mainebiz.biz.
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