Olivia Rudensky watched The Menu on a recent flight. She was struck by an exchange between foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his girlfriend, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) about his hero, Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).
“What’s with this food obsession?” Margot asked toward the beginning of the film.
“You know how people idolize athletes and musicians and, like, painters and stuff?” Tyler responded, later explaining, “I’ve watched every f*cking episode of Chef’s Table two or three times. I’ve watched Slowik’s probably twenty times. I’ve watched him explain the exact moment at which a green strawberry is perfectly unripe.”
“It reiterated that it’s not just musicians; there is fandom in everything,” Rudensky, the co-founder and CEO of FANMADE, tells Uproxx over Zoom during a conversation about technology’s ever-growing role in fan engagement (the irony is not lost).
But it was musicians for Rudensky and Claudia Villarreal.
And because of the internet, they didn’t need to board a boat to a mysterious island, like Tyler in The Menu, to feed their fandom.
Rudensky launched a Twitter account and website dedicated to all things Miley Cyrus at 12 years old. Villarreal did the same for One Direction at 16. Each account attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, and by the time Rudensky turned 16 in 2013, Cyrus was impressed enough to offer Rudensky a position on her management team. While Villarreal never physically crossed paths with One Direction — “They disbanded before I could get to them” — she landed her first job in live music after attempting to sneak into a One Direction concert at 17 years old.
Rudensky and Villarreal met through Twitter in 2015. They bonded over successfully converting their formative fandoms into budding careers. Rudensky interned for Power 105.1 and Z100 and studied in Syracuse’s Bandier Program, while Villarreal’s resume includes assisting at WME, handling superfan coordination for Dick Clark Productions, and working under Sonny Takhar at KYN Entertainment to build a fan base for the girl group Boys World.
They co-founded FANMADE in late 2021. Rudensky and Villarreal, the Chief Creative Officer, are channeling their first-person understanding of fan engagement into FANMADE’s unique strategy for clients, which have so far included Cyrus, Hailey Bieber, NBC, and Zach Sang.
“We work as translators for those who didn’t grow up in the fandom space. If you weren’t online, you just don’t understand,” Villarreal explains.
Below, Rudensky and Villarreal further unpacked how the internet has changed how fans are viewed and their ultimate mission to empower fans everywhere.
How does constant connectivity, or even the illusion of constant connectivity fan accounts, social media, and the internet provide, directly correlate with real-life fan engagement?
Claudia Villarreal: There is a lot of expectation from fans to receive so much from their favorite artists. Having constant communication with your audience is one thing, but being constantly in the public eye is another. Those things can be spread out differently depending on how often an artist actually wants to be online. During the pandemic, everything went online and everybody became readily available, and now everything is going back to being more in the live space.
Olivia Rudensky: We worked with NBC on Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party and the People’s Choice Awards. With them, [we were] trying to communicate and support how to make fan experiences a little better, whether that’s in-person activations or online activations — really working with fans to hear what they want to see, helping them build street teams, getting super fans in the room. We actually provided a bunch of super fans to the pit at the People’s Choice Awards and Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party. Seeing that companies like NBC are also trying to explore how to make the experience better for super fans, whether it’s at home or in person, has been really rewarding for us.
Claudia Villarreal: We really dove in for [NBC] and helped reward the super fans that we were working with with access, which, at the end of the day, is all a fan wants: Access to anything that they can get about their favorites.
It’s so tempting to have every different kind of social media account and flood the system because you’re scared of losing relevance, especially when starting something as exciting as FANMADE. How do you strike the balance between widespread exposure and lasting resonance?
Claudia Villarreal: We’ve been having these one-on-one sessions with artists, brands, and all of our clients, and they’re wondering why their messaging isn’t coming across as genuine or the way they want it to be. Sometimes, they don’t even know how to post what they want to say. We’ve been sitting with them and helping change that mindset of not doing it for numbers. With how easy it is to blow up online nowadays, people want to see instant results. But instant results don’t equal a long-lasting relationship, especially when it comes to building a community.
There’s a strong argument to be made that a stan account or a fan community is almost more of a vehicle for fans to develop relationships with other fans than to connect with or meet the person you’re all a fan of.
Olivia Rudensky: I agree. What’s been really cool for Claudia and I to see is so many super fans that I knew from Twitter back in the day are now at really awesome jobs. I’ve seen fans starting to write at newspapers or get jobs at Instagram and TikTok. It’s just so cool to see how the passion they’ve shared with other fans also empowered them to go out there and work in the industry they love. That’s been the most exciting part for me, and that’s a conversation I’ve had with Miley in the past. To show her, like, that one time we had a fan do all the graphic design and visuals for her Instagram Live show during the pandemic? That girl now has a job at a real company. [With online fan communities], you’re getting internship-like experience without realizing it, and it helps them get jobs down the line.
What do you say to fans who don’t believe they can replicate your success and turn their fandom into a full-blown career?
Olivia Rudensky: I am so lucky to be in this position, but there’s so much opportunity across entertainment to be about to work on your favorite artist from a distance, whether it’s at a label, an agency, or with a brand that ends up doing a deal with that artist. You can really touch music fandom wherever you go. Don’t be afraid. I was running a website at 14 years old. The more you look at fan accounts or the communities you’ve been building online as real-life skills and experience, your mindset starts to change.
Claudia Villarreal: A lot of fans don’t understand that they have a little bit of power, especially if they build their own audience within a fandom. My mom used to tell me, “You need to get off Twitter. This isn’t going anywhere.” And my Twitter page was actually the only thing that got me somewhere in the industry. I had something to show for all my hard work. Maybe 10 years ago, fans would’ve struggled a lot more the way Olivia and I did to be taken seriously. Now, the industry has finally started to recognize that fans can be valuable outside of how much money they spend on a brand or an artist.
It’s like the quote from the writer Jessica Hopper: “Replace the word ‘fangirl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens.”
Claudia Villarreal: When Sonny Takhar hired me, I had to basically convince him that he needed the fan perspective. He didn’t know where to put me. I had to tell him, “If you want to build another girl group or boy group, you’re going to need somebody who understands what it’s like to be on the other side.” I was there for two years, growing and building audiences. It’s crazy that, now, it is a serious job.
Olivia Rudensky: I remember moving to LA to join [Miley Cyrus’] massive management team. I would have conversations with people and say something very casually, like, “Well, there’s obviously going to have to be an album signing.” And people would say, “Wait, that’s a great idea!” I feel like within fan culture and with my Twitter account, I expected these things already as the norm. When I’d throw out ideas, it was like I was some expert in this space. It was so confusing for me. It’s actually been really hard for me to paint the picture of what I do because I felt like, Isn’t this all obvious?
Do you think that the negative, or almost shameful, connotation with the word “fan” has changed post-social media boom?
Claudia Villarreal: I think it’s changing. Fan is always going to be a pretty loose term. The internet has just made it more of a public thing. Before the internet, you had to seek out these communities of people. I have friends who are a little bit older and during their Backstreet Boys and NSYNC eras, they used to write letters to each other. Now, it’s more readily available. It’s really easy to find like-minded people that you want to share your excitement with. On the outside looking in, [fans] might look a little crazy. They’re empowered, smart people, and they want to share their ideas. They’re willing to do whatever they can for their favorite thing in the world, and I don’t think we give them enough credit. Now that fans have a platform to showcase their skills, these fans aren’t just crazy girls or boys. They just want to be part of something bigger than they are.
What did you initially set out to do when FANMADE launched toward the end of 2021 versus your purpose for the company now?
Olivia Rudensky: We were really excited to work with so many different clients. Throughout this year and a half of working on FANMADE, we’ve gotten into a really good groove of taking the philosophy of quality over quantity with the way that we look at super fans and how to engage a fan base. We tell people: If you have 200 engaged super fans, even though that might seem like a low number, that’s actually really great. With the Instagram age, it used to be followers over everything. If you looked like you had a ton of followers, you were important. Now, it’s more about engagement. When I started to see that shift, I was looking at our company and was like, I’d rather work really passionately on a few different clients and use that same philosophy that we have with super fans.
It’s funny. When you mention having 200 fully engaged fans as a really good thing, it reminds me of a pity party I threw for myself a while ago with one of my friends. I was like, “I’m so lame. I only have 800 Instagram followers.” And he said, “Imagine if you were sitting in a room in front of 800 people; that’s a lot of people.”
Claudia Villarreal: And that’s the thing. Too many people have been fazed by these astronomical numbers that are so easy to achieve now, especially on TikTok. People look to it and think, Oh, anybody can do that. But if there’s no care, if there’s no purpose, your follower account isn’t your fan count. Followers don’t equal fans. Again, people who didn’t grow up as a fan see these numbers and they’re like, Wow, with all these followers, look at how many people love them. But how many of those people genuinely go out of their way to support this artist? A lot of clients ask us that. They ask us, “Who are my real fans?” That takes a second for us to figure out, but we’ll figure it out for you. It’s not as black-and-white as most people want it to be.
The distortion of how we perceive ourselves and what we’re comparing to has changed so much.
Claudia Villarreal: And it changes all the time. We’re still in the very, very early stages of social media. I can’t wait for 40 years down the line to really see how communication has changed because it’s just getting started.
Olivia Rudensky: Some artists or talent might be really social media savvy but can’t sell tickets to a tour, right? People might just want to see them on the internet. So being able to see behavior switch — like, I look at Billie Eilish’s fan base. There’s definitely a certain demographic. The way that they engage with her content might make her the most engaged, whereas an artist that has been around pre-internet, it might look like they don’t have any followers, which is why I don’t think there’s one bit of technology or data that can determine anything. I think there really has to be that personalized touch that Claudia and I use to gauge an audience.
How is technology most valuable as a tool at FANMADE?
Claudia Villarreal: The access to information is unreal. The answers are always online. Everything is happening in front of us. As long as you care enough to look, you can find whatever you’re looking for. I don’t know where I’d be without the internet.
Olivia Rudensky: Thirty years ago, there was still fandom, but you’d have to go to a concert to engage with people. Now, I could snoop on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok accounts and get insight into a fan’s thoughts and daily lives. Everyone’s an influencer on the internet right now. Whether it’s 800 followers or two million, I can go into anybody’s world and see what they’re fans of.
Forty years down the line, what do you hope FANMADE symbolizes for people?
Olivia Rudensky: The message of FANMADE is universal. The message that everyone is a fan of something is really cool because it started with not being afraid to be vocal about what you’re a fan of. Being able to spread that message and hopefully have our stories inspire people to get out there and chase things they’re passionate about, that’s why we set out for this.
Claudia Villarreal: We think we’re at the forefront of technology now; I truly think there is going to be so much coming in the future. It’s going to be a more engagement-driven world. Ice Spice, for instance, is somebody that has blown up massively recently from TikTok, but she has grown into a cultural figure because people love her. It’s going to come down to whatever the people like. As much as we want to control whatever that is, it’s really anybody’s game.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
