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how people get trapped in their brands— Dan and Phil
Dan and Phil are British YouTubers who live and work together in London. They are 25 and 30 years old and have around 6 million subscribers between them (many of them are the same people subbed to both channels, which makes drawing lines difficult — full disclosure: I am in their audience).
Their typical individual videos are done in vlog format and together they run a gaming channel which has nearly 3 million subscribers.
I spend a lot of time on YouTube. A lot. And in my many hours (more than I would care to admit) of watching, commenting, liking, and subscribing I have noticed an interesting metamorphosis take place on the other side of my screen. People — regular people who breathe and poop and all that just like everyone else — have started disappearing in their brands.
In the age of social media (it hasn’t technically been an age yet, but I’m gonna go ahead and call it now) cultivating a personal brand is something most of us do through maintaining reliable themes across our platforms.
As satisfying as it is to have your Instagram look coherent, most of us could post an out of character photo without real repercussions, but most of us don’t rely on the fickle clicks of internet fame for our income.
For someone in the public eye it is crucial to maintain a loyal fanbase in order to secure ad revenue, merchandise sales, performance opportunities and hopefully an audience for the art that you pour your heart into. But that audience has to want you in their lives. They have to keep wanting you and the best way to keep them wanting you is to keep fulfilling the same need.
One way to look at this relationship is is through the lens of the uses and gratifications perspective (developed by Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch). This idea is basically that people use media outlets to satisfy different desires.
Part of this perspective is the idea of parasocial relationships. These are one-sided friendships that occur when media tricks your brain into thinking you know someone who isn’t in your life at all. Ever had a crush on a fictional character? Or felt bonded to your favorite musician?
YouTubers have made an art of building parasocial relationships. By talking directly to the camera as if they are talking to a friend they make the audience feel as though they are in the room with them. The more videos you watch, the more your brain thinks you are with this person and the more you will genuinely care about them.
This is not an inherently bad or good thing and I’m not here to talk about how audiences feel about creators (a term commonly used for people on YouTube) anyway. I’m here to talk about what happens to the creators themselves as a result of their audience’s prolonged attachment.
Let’s talk about Dan and Phil. They have been making videos on YouTube for seven and ten years respectively. In that time their lives have changed a great deal. One dropped out of college and the other got a master’s degree, they moved in together, they have gone on international tours and many other general-life milestones, but their content and public personalities have not changed that much.
A great deal of the content they create draws on their personal brands — which they established early in their careers — and the contrast they present in their public friendship.
Dan presents himself as a dark-souled, lazy, meme-loving… general mess of a human.
While Phil embraces the world as a “smol-bean” with a kind, light heart and an innocence that makes his counterpart appear much darker by comparison.
These are two fully grown men with personalities, dreams and fears and all the other messy brain-things that human have locked up inside, but their public lives wouldn’t have you believe that.
The strength and longevity of the parasocial relationships they have built with their audience are based largely on their consistency. In this topsy turvy world, the Phandom (their fans) can rely on Dan to wear black and have his regularly scheduled existential crisis while Phil wears bright colors and has funny encounters with strangers. They have frozen their personalities in time.
It is entirely possible that they are happy with their content-I hope that is the case. They do, however, reference the trap they have built around their content within their videos sometimes and that is cause for concern.
In a video Dan made reflecting on his 2016, he talked about how he spent the summer making a documentary about gaming. He then remarked on how his audience essentially disregarded the work he did and turned it into a meme campaign that shoehorned this work back into his established brand. This was the first step he took that explored more traditionally serious work in his industry and after how his audience (his source of income, validation, and companionship)reacted, it may well have been his last.
Additionally, whenever the two collaborate with other creators their audience is quick to threaten the outsider and make sure that no one comes between their boys. It limits what can be done professionally and socially.
On the other hand, they are essentially performers. I don’t know either of these creators, so who am I to say that they are the same in their off time as they are online? Maybe danisnotonfire and amazingphil are two elaborately constructed characters that span multiple social media platforms. If that is the case, is that lying to your audience?
Is there harm in portraying yourself as having the same basic personality traits as the teen version of you when you are pushing 30 years old? Would that harm be to you or the person who believes you?
