4 Things We Learned Making a Campaign Video on Cameo

John Fetterman’s campaign has been crushing it on social media including using Cameo to hire Snooki to troll New Jersey resident Mehmet Oz. 

Their campaign makes social look easy (it’s not) so we wanted to test out Cameo ourselves. Here’s what we learned: 

1. Finding talent is harder than it looks
   • First you have to sort through thousands of potential people. The selection is awesome and a fun trip down memory lane but it can be overwhelming.
   • You should pick 2-3 people that you like, because your request might get rejected. That happened to us twice for a couple different reasons that we’ll share below.
   • Make sure the person you pick is available for Cameo Business. There are a lot of people who only do personal messages. You can make it easier on yourself by limiting your search to only show people who will create videos for Business. (This is reason #1 our video proposal was rejected.)
   • You should watch example videos by people you are considering what their overall vibe is to make sure it matches what you want. This is where you can also see if they get into character, which is something we wanted.
   • Make sure you run the people you pick by others who are older and younger than you to make sure everyone knows who they are and why they’re relevant to your message.
     
2. Don’t overthink the script.
   • We initially wrote a very specific script that was too long and too in-the-weeds. (This is reason #2 our video proposal was rejected.)
   • The magic of Cameo is for the personality to be as authentic as possible. It’s hard to be authentic if they’re reading a script word for word so give them a little leeway to ad-lib.
   • If you want the person to get into character or strike a certain tone, be very clear in your request.
     
3. Pair the video with an editor.
   • The video itself can be great but you can also make it even better (or cover up things you didn’t love) by having an editor add animations, URLs, or cut out certain sections.
   • Make sure you factor video editing into your budget.
     
4. Bonus idea we haven’t tried: Live video calls as virtual campaign events.
   • Some personalities also offer video calls through Cameo. 
   • The video calls are up to 10 people but maybe you can negotiate a higher limit or, depending on your campaign finance rules, you could potentially select 10 lucky donors that donated via tweet with their video to attend the call with them.