Crowd Service Gets In on Act

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Crowd Service Gets In on Act
Staged: Adam Swart at his Beverly Hills headquarters.

In a town where it seems everyone is angling for their 15 minutes of fame, Adam Swart is happy to help.

For a couple of thousand dollars, his company, Crowds on Demand, will surround clients

with an entourage of actors posing as bodyguards and paparazzi.

The three-year-old idea was a hit, he said, but it didn’t take long for clients to start requesting a broader array of services. Indeed, the fastest-growing sector of Crowds on Demand involves long-term publicity campaigns.

The company now caters to businesses involved in legal disputes as well as politicians looking to generate excitement, which could prove to be a boon for Swart and his company as election season heats up.

Steve Kang, a campaign organizer who most recently worked as a field organizer for Los Angeles City Councilman David Ryu’s campaign earlier this year, said many candidates are increasingly open to hiring a third party, such as Crowds on Demand, to beef up attendance at rallies. Ryu’s campaign did not use the firm’s services.

“All campaigns have political rallies where you need large crowd sizes to generate media attention and buzz around the community,” Kang said. “Publicity is key.”

It’s a strategy that comes with some risk, however. Candidates run the risk of appearing nonauthentic if the public discovers that a well-attended rally was mostly made up of paid actors.

“There’s always a chance for embarrassment or some sort of negative press,” Kang said. “But it’s definitely beneficial despite the risk. … It’s better to pay for services to bring out that crowd for your rally if you have the finances to do so.”

Swart is mindful of the risk. He signs confidentiality agreements with clients to reduce the chances of the public finding out the crowds he provides are paid.

The company can – and often does – significantly impact the public’s perception of certain politicians or causes, Swart said.

While he said he has worked for presidential candidates, he typically gets more involved with local elections – such as city council or school board races.

“Those ones are great because we can make such a huge dent because turnout is so low,” Swart said. “We can really make a huge narrative shift.”

Swart hatched the idea for Crowds on Demand while he was on vacation in 2012.

“I saw there was a guy getting off the plane who was surrounded by bodyguards and was escorted by SUVs and all that,” he said. “And I got to thinking anybody could become a celebrity with the right surroundings.”

It was only a matter of weeks before Swart decided to turn that idea into a business.

Being in Los Angeles, it wasn’t hard to find aspiring actors looking for work, he said. He pays the actors, who work on call, by the hour. It took him about a month to secure his first client, but press coverage and word of mouth helped grow the business quickly. He said his company turned a profit about two months after it launched.

Entourage on call

Crowds on Demand now has a network of more than 20,000 actors across the country readily available whenever a client needs bodies, whether protesters or paparazzi. Once its planning team in Beverly Hills knows how many people are needed for a particular event, it will call nearby actors to share specific details regarding their day’s assignment. An actor might picket a restaurant in Inglewood one day, for instance, and then flash a camera at a client in West Hollywood the next.

“Particularly in L.A. and New York, where there’s a lot of people trying to make it as actors, it’s really something people enjoy,” Swart said. “It’s a fun way to make money while doing their passion. People are free not to go to an event as well. It’s not like they have to go.”

Swart wouldn’t say what he pays the actors or disclose the operations revenue other than to say it was in the six figures at the end of 2012 despite only operating during the last three months of the year.

“We’ve at least doubled our business every year,” Swart said. “We’re not a billion-dollar company, but we do very well.”

Swart’s initial clients came from Los Angeles, which is still one of the company’s busiest markets. But customers can now hire crowds in any city in the United States, he said.

Clients have a lot of freedom to customize the type of crowd they want for an event, Swart said, by working with Crowds on Demand to find the types of people best suited to fit their cause.

The price varies based on the number of actors needed, the distance they’d have to travel and duration of the event. Shorter events, like when customers just want an entourage for the night, start in the low thousands, Swart said. Campaigns and other reoccurring events are the most expensive.

Six Californias, the failed ballot initiative aimed at splitting California into six separate states, hired Crowds on Demand last year to put together events for the purpose of collecting petition signatures, said Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the initiative.

The campaign backing the measure shelled out more than $51,000 for those services, according to public campaign finance records from the California Secretary of State’s Office.

Burgeoning business

While political campaigns are poised to keep generating big business for Crowds on Demand, Swart said he has seen a growing level of interest from embattled businesses.

Companies involved in a legal dispute are increasingly looking for faster and cheaper ways to resolve issues, he said.

For example, a local contractor hired Crowds on Demand last year after an L.A. restaurant owner refused to pay for work it had completed, said Swart, who would only provide general facts about the circumstance.

“We had protesters outside during

the peak dinner hours every Friday and Saturday night for a while,” he said. “We did get them to pay up before it ever saw a trial or anything.”

The goal, Swart said, is to reduce the cost of litigation by enticing opponents to settle disputes long before legal bills pile too high.

He acknowledged the possibilities of new competitors entering the burgeoning market but he also pointed out that very few already exist.

But Brandon Marz, chief executive of Marz Sprays in West Los Angeles, said he is now in the process of starting his own business that would also connect businesses with protesters. For several months, he and a group of paid picketers have stood in front of a Walgreens location in Hollywood after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that the pharmacy chain had breached its contract to pay Marz Sprays some $500,000.

“Throughout this process we have recognized that others could use these similar services that we needed,” Marz said.

Even so, Swart remains confident that no other company would be able to garner a network of actors as strong as his.

“We’re really at the cusp of something great,” he said. “No one else can really build what we have. No one really knows this business, that’s the thing.”

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