"We've Been Creating Value for Instagram and TikTok With Very Little Actually Accruing to Us:" Trevor McFedries

This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries, who is behind Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, striking deals with Clavin Klein and Prada. But what’s more surprising is that she’s not actually human. She’s a computer-generated character. The company that Trevor co-founded, called Brud, created her image and life story. It’s only fitting then that Lil Miquela, who lives in a digital world, will start to leverage digital tokens.

We talked about how Lil Miquela will start to use crypto and web3 tools to connect with her fans and continue monetizing the value she has created. The first step will be to create secondary markets on open, blockchain exchanges for images associated with her. The first such drop will be on SuperRare.

[Note: Trevor says in the interview the drop would happen on Oct. 30 or 31, but they’ve since changed the date to Nov. 17. So you’re still on time to participate.]

In the future, even things like follows and likes can be sold in these open markets, and there can also be a governance model, where her fans could vote on her narrative based on how much of her tokens they own.

Trevor also talked about how he’s leveraging crypto himself, with his Friends with Benefits token, which allows access into a community of token holders who provide value to each other. He says that in the future, communities like these can become avenues for brands and companies to connect with audiences without going through platforms like Facebook and Google.

The pieces are coming together so that in the future, we’ll all be avatars interacting in the metaverse, he says.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, Sorare, a fantasy football game with officially licensed cards on Ethereum, and Near, a high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain that interoperates with Ethereum.

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Camila Russo: Before we get into all the craziness of the intersection of crypto and culture and media, I want to talk a little bit more about your background, which is really remarkable. Before founding Brud, you're also known as Yung Skeeter and worked as a DJ and producer with superstars like Katy Perry, Steve Aoki, you performed at Lollapalooza, Coachella, I mean, pretty amazing stuff. So how did that transition happen from being at the pinnacle of the music industry and then founding Brud and Lil Miquela?

TM: That's a great question. I mean, I think it probably requires giving some background on who I am, my journey, and I'll try to do it with much brevity as possible. But I grew up in Davenport, Iowa, a relatively small town in the Midwest, and I moved to LA when I was 16. When I was living in Iowa, I was writing code, playing in bands, doing things that kids do as hobbies, but in Iowa, that wasn't a career.

When I moved to LA, I met these friends whose parents owned companies and were thinking about technology or thinking about media and fashion design, whatever it was, and I recognized I personally do those things, and I want to do those things. In Iowa, I was playing sports, and I got recruited out of high school to play sports in college, and I ended up doing a couple of years and I quit. When I moved back to LA, I was basically doing web design, I was a web dev, and doing software stuff for a living. Then nights and weekends, I was DJing and making beats for rappers around town and making house music stuff, just for fun.

Out of nowhere, got signed to Interscope Records, basically ended up time at Jimmy Iovine’s label. When Interscope was changing quite a bit, the record industry was getting eaten alive by the internet. Because I knew a little bit about the internet, I started getting pulled into rooms and getting asked questions. The first time, I tried to establish myself as this conduit between media and technology, really music and technology, and that was probably 2008-2009. I end up leaving that band, and producing music and DJing. While I was doing that, I was building growth tools for artists.

Long story short, I opened for Katy Perry in 2010-11 on the California Dreams tour, and while I was there, I got approached by Spotify to come join and help launch this thing from Sweden into the US. Working with Spotify, I really fell in love with lean startup, and how different that was and what I had known in the music business. I think my experience in music was like spend five years and $5 million, making a thing and just push it off a cliff and hope people like it, versus software, making this product shipping and talking to customers, iterating into a thing people love.

The dream for me was to say okay, is there a way to integrate that software-based approach of shipping product into what I was doing with music. Then in parallel, I was really thinking a lot about media and the way it shaped people's hearts and minds and then fell in love with his television program Will & Grace here in the States, and seeing all this data around Will & Grace being largely responsible for gay marriage in the US, and then all this data on the Jeffersons and the work that they had done for the way black people are viewed in America.

“The dream for me was to say okay, is there a way to integrate that software-based approach of shipping product into what I was doing with music.”

In my head, this kind of skipping ahead quite a bit, I started thinking about, wouldn't it be great if you could use the power of narrative, the power of celebrity and fan relationships with the power of software, and its scalability and trying to create these narratives that could really outcompete Trump narratives or Kardashian narratives, whatever is dominating the mindset of young people and try to create these narratives as compelling as entertaining, but also imbue moral themes, these things that I think could build a more tolerant or empathetic world. That was kind of the pipe dream. It started looking like a modern Marvel or Disney. You know, here we are few years later, like with these characters telling stories and can hang out on cool podcasts like yours.

“Wouldn't it be great if you could use the power of celebrity and fan relationships with the power of software (…) to create these narratives as compelling and entertaining as Trump or Kardashian narratives but also imbue moral themes thatccould build a more tolerant or empathetic world.”

CR: So the genesis of Miquela was this idea of creating compelling narratives for people to consume and which would have, hopefully, some positive impact in the world, right?

TM: Absolutely.

CR: If you can introduce Miquela to my listeners, who actually is she?

Lil Miquela

TM: That's a good question. If you're listening at home, it's probably more fun as a visual experience and you can right away go to Instagram or Tiktok and type in Lil Miquela. What you'll see is a CGI character who has this narrative backstory. She's a sentient robot, navigating Los Angeles. She's programmed to be 19 forever. She has these dreams and ambitions of becoming a global pop star and sharing her story and her journey, really this journey of otherness with the world.

It started years ago where it was just her. Now there are other characters in the universe. There's an evil henchman who's tried to kind of manipulate her and originally created her. It really has all the trappings of a Marvel universe or Disney universe, just instead of being told in film or in comic books, it's kind of told primarily on those platforms.

Image source: Lil Miquela’s Instagram

CR: So how does it work? Did you initially sketch this character out and did you write out the whole story of Miquela and now you're basically executing it? Or is it more like, free form, sometimes you introduce new characters and new storylines? Also, I've seen, she's very much a fashion influencer. So how does that play into all this narrative as well?

Celebrity Storytelling

TM: There are so many good questions there. We say our characters are more like characters, and less like influencers, you get that language a lot. I think of Miquela as like Carrie from Sex in the City or something. Where like, Manolo Blahniks are kind of secondary to the story, but it is really important, I suppose in the grand scheme of things. Always to say yes, there's the narrative arc that we're seeing ourselves through. Very early on, I was lucky to have J.J. Abrams, of the Bad Robot team, bring us into the fold and be great champions. In talking with them, exploring ideas of how television programs over the years have come to pass, and how narratives come to pass.

You want to be able to be agile because there are situations where a guest star, everyone will love and may become the main star and someone you think is the main star might not be as well received and will kind of become more of a tertiary character or something. What we try to do is think about what are the major themes and lines you want to talk about. Then we basically also create space to be reactive about things happening in the world.

That's part of a more macro shift in entertainment that I'm a believer in this idea of we had a more broadcast world where you have writers hand lines to someone, and they deliver those lines, and that's how it made them famous. Now we have this world where there are characters or personalities or public figures whose real skill set is being dynamic and being interactive. If you talk shit to Cardi B, she's going to talk shit right back in a very real and not very contrived way. I think the authenticity comes through and allows people to feel like they're a part of who she is. We know who she is, and that's what we try to convey as well.

“Now we have this world where there are characters or personalities or public figures whose real skill set is being dynamic and being interactive.”

CR: It really shows because I was checking out her Instagram just now and saw that she has Black Lives Matter on the bio, so is that how you’re blurring the boundary between fiction and reality?

[ … ]

Paid subscribers have access to the full transcript, including sections on:

• Digital characters with an opinion“…one of the challenges is that when everyone can talk to everyone in real-time, artists who oftentimes are sensitive and kind of feel deeply, aren't as interested in the confrontation that maybe taking a position that is unpopular maybe directly impacts some of the other artists’ lives…”
• Lil Miquela’s business model“Miquela’s business and our business right now is not entirely different than you would if you were working with RAC or like other artists. But the dream is really to build out a talent that can do things traditional talent never dreamed of.”
• Open Secondary Markets“Crypto also allows for you to create this entity, like Miquela, build all this value and build a fan base around it and think about how you could create secondary markets for places that are probably atypical or non-traditional.”
• Narrative governance “You can imagine a world where Miquela tokens are being used to drive her narrative.”
• Building for the metaverse “If we can create characters that have huge fan bases on the platforms that exist today and are actually built for the platforms tomorrow, then we can help connect those dots again, and bring people across that bridge from TikTok to an open Metaverse of the future.
• A different ad model“There probably is a world where brands, communities, whatever, are vying for these different groups, and able to engage with them via these wallet addresses such that they can just airdrop NFT of some past some event or whatever it is.”

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About the founder and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.