Originally intended as a benign message to someone named “Vladimir,” the video was deceitfully edited to appear as if Wood was addressing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was spread across the Russian social media platform VK, and elsewhere. This strategy, exploiting unsuspecting celebrities for propaganda, presents new challenges in safeguarding online reputations.

What is Cameo and How Is It Used?

Cameo, if you haven’t heard about it, is a platform for personalized celebrity messages. You can visit the website, scroll through the list of celebrities, pay anywhere from $20 to $400 or more, and the celebrity will record a brief video saying (almost) anything you want. It usually includes the name of the recipient as well as the name of the person it is from. It’s an easy way to connect with your favorite actors, musicians, comics, politicians, entrepreneurs, influencers, and more.

What Can Go Wrong?

Seems innocent enough, right? However, it underscores a new challenge in online reputation management. This incident, highlighted in a New York Times article, reveals how unscrupulous or outright evil people engage in purposeful deception. It demonstrates too how reputation management is facing ever-evolving challenges, where authenticity is a constantly moving target that shifts all the time.

Cameo’s Role in Disinformation

As highlighted in the The Atlantic article, Cameo has become an unexpected yet effective disinformation tool. Prominent figures have seen their Cameo videos manipulated for political agendas, uttering absurdly embarrassing statements, and calling out brands by name—all leading to reputation damage for both the celebrity as well as the person or business mentioned. This emphasizes the need for ORM strategies to respond to these challenges.

Why Should You Care?

While we are not celebrities, there’s a lesson for regular folk like you and me. Anyone with just a few dollars can get a known person to ruin your reputation. If used by disgruntled ex-clients, angry employees, or competitors, a well-known person can be paid to say nearly anything, ranging from you or your business supposedly supporting Nazis, scams, extreme political agendas, etc.

Other Considerations

This is part of a growing trend of tools used to make fake content that gets you in trouble. We all know about how Photoshop can be manipulated, but there are even more convincing tools out there in the age of AI. “Deepfakes” are a constant problem.

What Can You Do to Protect Your Online Reputation?

Vigilantly monitor disinformation in all forms. Unfortunately, however, there is no easy way to find fraudulent videos in Cameo, due to privacy settings and being behind a paywall. Still, 

1. Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts for your name along with “Cameo” as keywords. This can notify you if you or your business are mentioned in any new content indexed by Google, including blog posts or news articles that might discuss Cameo videos. 
2. Cameo Website: If you might be susceptible to these kinds of defamation issues, regularly visit the Cameo website directly and search for your name. While this might not yield direct results.
3. Google Search: Use Google to search for your name along with the keyword “Cameo” to see if any publicly shared Cameo videos mentioning you appear in the search results. However, this could be less effective due to privacy settings of Cameo, it’s worth checking if any public testimonials or reviews mention your name.
4. Social Media Monitoring: Since people often share their Cameo videos on social media, set up alerts or regularly check platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Use hashtags, keywords, and your name for these searches.
5. Remove Cameo Video: If a video appears in Cameo mentioning you or your likeness, contact the platform directly for removal:
6. • safety@cameo.com
   • https://legal.cameo.com/communityguidelines 
   • At some point, it might be necessary to reach out to other regulatory bodies and social media platforms

Bottom Line

The emergence of disinformation campaigns driven by Cameo videos poses new reputation management threats to celebrities as well as average people. Strategies must always be agile, proactive, and nimble to combat false information as well as detect AI-driven content creation. The solution is to set up Google Alerts, check Cameo directly, and Google searches and remove damaging content as soon as possible.