Fame Engineering: James Dooley Interviews Fame Engineer Andrew Holland

James Dooley: Hi. So today I'm joined with Andrew Holland and I need to I need to start bashing you here about what fame engineering is. So I've seen that on LinkedIn you're a fame engineer. So for anyone who's watching this, including myself, can you explain what fame engineering is? Andrew Holland: Yeah. So it's an evolution of PR. So what we're doing is, you know, obviously we're in very transient times. You've got SEO, GEO, CRO, and we do PR. We're a PR company where I work with digital PR PR agency and we have SEO services on top of those which is what I'm responsible for. So, but over the last couple years I've heavily invested into the understanding of fame, how fame works, how it's cultivated, and it's incredibly linked with network science. There's a science behind fame and we've had a lot of breakthroughs with this over recent times. We can engineer it. We can map it. We have engineered it for clients. And once you understand the science behind it and what you can do is you can create fame for people. And because fame itself like you know everybody wants to be more famous relative to their sector and category you know I'm not talking about infamy talking about fame and positive feelings towards somebody and and yeah that can and the science is really really network science and it's no different than physical networking from network science and links online Google it's all very interlin once you get to the the bottom of it the object really is for a client is to be able to say Look, clients who want to become famous or more famous within their sector, how best can you do this? And that's like the science I'm in. It's new. I wrote about it recently for search engine land. It's a convers and marketing week to be honest with you. It's a conversation which is going to become more and more and the only reason we can do this now is because of the world of artificial intelligence. That's that's it. And the scientists have gone out there and done network science and understand fame. And the main one of those is a guy called Albert Llo Barabasi who published two amazing books. One's called LinkedIn, the one's called the formula. Uh all about the science of success and the science of fame. And then when you look around there's so much material out there around people became famous, how they became famous, what they did. There's models called preferential attachment also the same as link building and so forth. It's all one ecosphere. And we're now starting to be able to use AI to map things out, to help us break things out. And you can see this with TikTok. TikTok's a fame generator in itself, you know, and the subject is fascinating because I always say, how did the Spudman from Tamworth became become famous? How did, you know, how did people like Britney Spears become famous? How how does that actually work? And once you break it down, you can see how it works and you can engineer it. Now, I'm not saying that you can just like click your fingers and it happens. But you can certainly increase your fame specifically and targeted, but also reduce waste. And that's the big key with this, reducing the waste of your marketing budget. James Dooley: So, I've got quite a few questions on this then. So, with regards to fame engineering, um, let's say I wanted it for James Dooley on a personal brand level. Um, could I also have it for a corporate brand? So can I have it for personal brand as well as corporate brand? Are you just focusing on the fame engineering of individuals? Andrew Holland: No, it it works the same for corporate and uh for uh for for individuals the same. And how it works really is so so everybody has what they call fitness signals and that's an evolutionary term. So James, you have intrinsic qualities about you and your businesses that you own that make you are able to outperform the others. Every restaurant has intrinsic qualities. They are the things that you do really well that will attract people to you for the reasons. And once you isolate what they are, there is something called the Q effect or the Q number. And that is basically the an innate natural skill. So you've seen it yourself. So you've been at networking events and someone walks in the room and they've got an instant aur. They instantly able to speak to people. They they have a charm about them. Sydney Sweeney, call it what you want about Sydney Sweeney, the Hollywood actress. She's got a certain level of queue and you see that in in celebrities you know Molly May who obviously Manchester Molly May based as great example. So what Molly May had she started to been a mini influencer she started to do well got some Tik Toks YouTubes and stuff and started to get she had intrinsic qualities and a high Q effect. And if you got a strong Q effect or Q number, what you do is you stand a greater chance of winning fame more easily because you have things that people appeal to people, whatever that is. And that's the same on a product basis. Ninja Foodie, for example, is an example of, you know, Ninja Foodie Air Fryer had intrinsic qualities that made people appeal to it and made it easier to sell. So, some people have them naturally. Some some of products can have these things designed into good product design and you know, and some people have these strengths. And what it is really it's it's it's focusing on those intrinsic fitness signals and then they're an evolutionary thing that in every across the whole the all the planet and what you do is you take those intrinsic qualities and you maximize the fame of those qualities or place individuals or brands and circumstances where they can shine. Molly May is a great example of an individual. Google's a great example of a of a public and I'll tell you very very quickly both stories. So let's take Google. Google was uh grew because Yahoo got rid of the previous company whose name I can't remember. Yahoo put Google on as their search engine of choice and in the end because they did that they removed the previous company whose name I just can't remember. They put Google on the front page of Yahoo and everyone used Google to search 20 odd years ago. What ended up happening Google became so popular they actually said no Yahoo we don't need you because but it was Yahoo that accelerated Google. That was a preferential hub of fame. Molly May is no different. She's doing okay. She's got some followers. She's doing all right algorithmically. What she do? She goes on to Love Island, the world's biggest fame accelerator for people of her sector, her type. She gets in there. She stays in there for a very long time. Doesn't win. Links herself to Tyson Fury. Sorry, not Tyson Fury, to Tommy Fury, who is Tyson Fury brother. So, by the very fact that he's incidentally more famous and the two of them go together, they they they win or they don't win the competition, but they stay in a long time. They come out and Molly May instantly gets tons of brand deals offered to her and eventually um her brand just grows up to the point where now she's got her own Amazon Prime show. You know, that's how big she's become and clothing brand. And you see this on every notion and now that you can sort we can sort of engineer and map it out. You can do this for brands and individuals. And that's the next evolution of PR. And it's where where I'm taking this from PR SEO GEO fame. How do we make fame for people? How do we make people more famous? And that's kind of the the big play that I'm involved in at the moment. James Dooley: Yeah, that's class. So obviously with regards to fame engineering then are you like let's say someone came along, let's say like a Molly May, a smaller version of Molly May at present, right? The next Molly May so to speak. Would you if they came to you would you be looking holistically at all the channels let's say the TikTok the Twitter um digital PR campaigns getting in the newspapers and stuff like that or would you start off maybe just on social media how how does it work with regards to fame engineering where do you start and where does it move towards? Andrew Holland: Well budget matters because that's the way the world works you know and the media isn't free you know you can try and get free exposure but what you need to identify is the amplification places where the places where are going to make fame is towards the relative people that are going to appreciate that individual you know so shoving me into I don't know I don't even know exists anymore Al magazine is not going to do much for me shoving me on Forbes is going to probably help me a lot more and so it's understanding what are the amplifiers and understand what they want to known for and understanding also does an individual have the budget so on a small sense that's what digital PR does digital PR gets people more famous within the budget they have you know and there's ways you can do things you can do techniques and you see it all the time. Brew Dog's an interesting one. Brew Dog driving I think it was driving down streets in tanks and things like that they did originally made them tons of press coverage got them famous. Uh so it depends on the individual but once you understand where the the amplification is for that particular brand what budget they have and then you've obviously got different aspects you can do around PR but the thing that people make the mistake about PR and we did a fantastic campaign for a company called Prely once you years ago we got them in Lad Bible and what we did as a campaign we analyzed the fastest talking um and the rudest places in the UK through data and what ended up happening is the thing that that got the virality, got them on TV and everything. And Lad Bible picked it up. It went viral online. Millions and millions of exposures was the fact that according to the online language platform Preply that Manchester is the rudest place in the UK. I don't know if Manchester was or not, but it's it's it was the every place had something that they could be talked about within this data piece. And obviously that created the echo effect that got people talking. Molly May's not famous just because she was on Love Island. Molly May's famous because her and Tommy Fury's love romance on the show and the antics that got up with the different contestants that people talked about them online. So, uh, and that's another form of call mometics. So, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist, I think at Oxford, I think it talks about mimemetics. Um uh and it's a big thing about memes, how cultural memes and also corporate can push those down from the top in terms of you know you know advertising is a form of getting memes out there and getting people talked about. So mmetics is a massive subject and the echo effect you know if people stop talking about you you you cease to be popular and in famous and culture so people have to do more and more things and so forth. actors have to keep reappearing in top Hollywood films. And you see what happens when Brendan Frasier, a great example, injured his back in The Mummy Returns, I think it was, or one of the Mummy films, then put loads of weight on, couldn't get the roles, couldn't get the roles, and eventually stars in a film called The Whale, which he is a fat man in a fat suit, but he was still quite large. That becomes a big massive Oscar winner. And then now his entire career is then then reemerged because the Oscar role is and being winning the Oscar was a fame accelerant for him again. The fact that he got there. So so once you start breaking this down it's actually really easy to engineer with budgets included but and you can reduce waste but some people go more famous than others because they just naturally have that Q effect and and for other people it's a long time. Colonel Sanders was in his 60s mid60s and retired and broke when the KFC started. So, and same for Ray Croc. Ray Croc was very old and you know what made him famous was growing McDonald's and and the network effect of McDonald's and so forth. So, so once you get fame, you can engineer it and that's kind of the area I'm in at the moment I'm spending most of my time like working on as well outside of SEO and GEO. James Dooley: Yeah. So, one last question with regards to you being a professional fame engineer, right? Like obviously be doing fame engineering has massive benefits as well for getting the brand or the personal brand out into LLM. She mentioned like GEO, so he gets the the name out there, but it's also I always say like brand brand for the win, right? I'm obsessed with building brand. And I feel that Google are moving every single algorithm update, they move more and more towards like rewarding brands, rewarding have you got a knowledge panel, have you got a KGM ID and stuff like that. So if someone came to you that had semibr so to speak and had some fame, would you be able to within the agency and digital PR find the angles of where like connecting the nodes together and the relationship of what's missing and then say okay I'm already in Forbes I'm already an entrepreneur however now you need to get in X Y and Zed. Is that what kind of a fame engineer would be looking to do as well? Andrew Holland: Yeah. So, I'm very happy we like recently uh we've created fame maps so we can map out people's fame, how it looks online. We can use different proxies for this and and you know and and we we it's a really cutting edge. It's like literally we're talking this is stuff I'm involved in this week and and like heavily involved and spent the last two years researching and going out the root of but yes so in actual fact if someone's got like a little brand and I wish I could time work on my own and you have to have budget and that's the other thing you have to have budget bit of luck as well and not everything's and there's a failure rate with campaigns or is going to be and this is the thing with digital PR is when you go small as you can with digital PR you minimize risk but you don't maximize fame and and that's the other option so you have to have a risk analysis in terms of like okay what am I prepared to reduce does this make sense and by doing a fame engineering process you actually reduce the limits now there's all kinds of things that can happen to stop it you can do a great campaign and then Donald Trump says something so no media coverage can happen on that you know or you can go and do like some people say why aren't we getting covered in digital P why aren't the links happening or mentions happening well look at the media it's all talking about something else and you can't get into things and it depends honestly about the public a lot A lot of luck can come into these things. But over time, what you can do is you can deliberately maximize. So for someone like you, James, if you wanted to become more famous, then the Luke is that where do you need to be? Where's the hub that you need to be in to link yourself to fame? Now, so let's say this an analogy you're you could argue that you and Tony Robbins on the same stage together would completely make you com your you elevate your fame and Tony Robbins putting you out on your his channels. Now I'll give you a very very tiny example of this in in in retrospect. So me and my daughter got invented to uh P Louise. I don't know if you know P Louise. She's a fashion brand cosmetic brand in the UK geared towards children. And I got invited to her launch party. Now that's she P Louise is a fame engineer in her own right. She's made herself famous. Her whole business is incredible. The models incredible. What she's done is incredible and and she's worth 100 million or something crazy like that. So she hires the Everyman Cinema in Manchester to launch her own TikTok do documentary. She's not waiting for somebody to do a documentary on her. She's made her own documentary, hired a film crew, done a documentary that they put out on TikTok. She doesn't wait for somebody to say, "Okay, let's have a launch party with this documentary." She starts her own launch party. She invites every single influencer, TikTok influencer that are linked with the company. And I walk into this. I walk in down a corridor in the every to a live choir singing as we're walking down to a room full of influencers with cameras out on tripod with their phones out with ring lights. All doing live streams at the event. Talk about going out there to famous. They were doing live streams on the red carpet. A red carpet in Manchester for a fashion brand. And then in addition to that, my daughter then she does this whole event and the in the cinema and everything else like that. Incredible. loads of people viral footage going online, loads of conversation. So she goes and speak to my daughter and she says, "Oh, do you do TikToks?" And she says, "No, but my dad won't let me." And she says, "Well, why don't you start doing them?" She tells me, she says, "Will you let her do one tonight?" I said, "Yeah, she'll do a get ready with me." So what Paige Louise does, she Paige says to us, says, "If your daughter does this, send it to me and I will share it on Tik Tok." So my daughter does this, she shares it. This is the first TikTok video she's ever done. Because she's linked to P Louise, she gets a,000 followers instantaneously when she does the video. And it gets 170,000 views for your first, you know, 13year-old TikTok video. Why? Because Paige Louise had that fame. And it's no different than you, James. If you or anybody else, you can engineer this by being linked. We didn't engineer that. We didn't know that was going to happen. It was just on the on it was her really that directed it. But that's an element of fame engineering. Imagine if you could make that happen for real. And that's fame engineering. James Dooley: So if anyone wants to kind of reach out to you as a fame engineer, where can they reach out to kind of look to have some fame engineering done as a service? Andrew Holland: They can go to jbh.co.uk, which is our our website, and we can talk to you. We're a PR agency, so we can definitely help people become famous. It's all part of that. Or just message me on LinkedIn. That's another best way to get a hold of me. But yeah, it's it's an emerging field. It's emerging science. I'm very excited about it and and hopefully going to talk about it more. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about it today. James Dooley: It's been an absolute pleasure, Andrew Holland. And yeah, make sure you reach out. Fame engineering. I'd never heard it before. Now you are the professional fame engineer now that's out there. So, best of luck with it anyway. And speak to you again soon. Andrew Holland: Lovely. Thank you, James.