74 new york | august 5–18, 2019
stantly refreshing Perez Hilton’s website
for celebrity gossip.
Before long, Comenos found a way to
turn her compulsion into a start-up of her
own. She teamed up with Dana Lampert,
who had founded an education-software
company in college and sold it in his 20s.
Lampert was fascinated by the sports side
of celebrity, particularly the data side of the
sports side. What Billy Beane did for base-
ball, Lampert wanted to do for fame—
Moneyball it. He came up with a system
for tagging everything a famous person
was caught wearing in paparazzi shots,
from the designer kaffiyeh down to the
limited-run Yeezys. In homage to those
brands that inundate journalists’ in-boxes
with subject lines like “Tinsley Mortimer
spotted wearing Swarovski,” they called
their company Spotted, Inc.
“We found a gap where a lot of celebri-
ties were using brands naturally in their
everyday lives,” said Lampert. “We became
interested in how we could leverage or uti-
lize those endorsements.” The idea was to
feed the information back to the brands,
monetize the influencers, and take a cut.
They hired a behavioral scientist, Steve
Hutchinson, who’d recently earned his
Ph.D. by studying how stress affects learn-
ing. He wasn’t so much into celebrity, but,
as he told me, “it was such a cool data set.”
That was “two pivots ago,” as Hutchin-
son put it. Spotted soon became a match-
making service, using the data it had col-
lected to try to rationalize the endorsement
process. The company signed up Nike,
Neiman Marcus, and H&M. But it turned
out that brands didn’t really want to be
told which stars best suited their image.
“The brand would ask us to look at a list of
five or ten people,” said Comenos. “Our
scores would show that the majority, if not
all of them, scored really low in terms of
trust and likability and appeal with the
brand’s target customers.” The recipients
of those reports weren’t grateful; they
“were pissed off.” They felt second-guessed.
Eventually, Comenos turned for advice
to an ad veteran, Sir Martin Sorrell. Sorrell
had recently resigned from the advertising
juggernaut WPP, reportedly after it was
discovered that he had visited a brothel on
the company dime. (He has publicly
denied it.) Perhaps out of a fresh apprecia-
tion for the fallout from disgrace, he told
her she’d have much more success by play-
ing to advertisers’ fears: “Focus on the
risk.” Comenos decided to pivot again.hanes is the current co-president of
the North American Contingency Asso-
ciation. In May, his new boss headlined its
annual conference for the public debut of
what was now rebranded as Spotted Risk.Comenos took the stage wearing a Brit-
ney Spears concert T-shirt and laid out
some of the behaviors tracked by Spotted:
public intoxication, cultural insensitivity,
child pornography, animal abuse, gang
affiliation, bribery, physical attacks, eth-
nic discrimination, racially charged com-
mentary, cocaine possession, bullying,
extortion, sexism, DUI, tax evasion, sex-
ual assault, possession of a deadly
weapon, ageism, transphobia, child neg-
ligence, arson, child abuse, solicitation,
body shaming, infidelity, and bankruptcy.
She cited Spotted data showing a 29 per-
cent increase in disgraceful events from
2017 to 2018—despite which only 1 per-
cent of productions bought disgrace
insurance. She got a laugh when she said,
“Males tend to be a little riskier overall,
not surprisingly.”
According to Spotted, all kinds of things
make one celebrity riskier than another.
Firstborns are at slightly higher risk of dis-
grace, as are those under 35 or who’ve suf-
fered recent breakups—until the passage
of time sends the bereft partner back
down the “risk-decay curve.” But behaviors
are far more important than demograph-
ics. Mishaps needn’t be catastrophic
events; drunk driving looms large because
it signals “poor impulse control and emo-
tion regulation,” according to Pete Dear-
born, Spotted’s second behavioral scien-
tist. (Comenos calls him and Hutchinson
“the Doctors of Disgrace”.) Another risk is
association—the kind of company that,
say, Hailey Baldwin keeps (husband Justin
Bieber, for one). Often it comes down to
finding not a skeleton in a closet but a trail
of half-buried bones.
Mitigating the risks are seemingly fuzz-
ier factors such as “likability” and “resil-
ience.” Sometimes positive behaviors can
help people bounce back (as they did for
Aziz Ansari, whose sensitivity and self-
questioning have raised his “trustworthi-
ness” 13.38 percentile points since he was
accused of sexual aggression). Other
times, it’s beyond their control. Spacey
may have been doubly doomed because he
has played so many bad characters. “Indi-
viduals who play villainous roles are not
forgiven at as high a rate,” said Comenos.
She didn’t mention Spacey’s sexuality.
Spotted has, for now, excluded “protected
class” attributes from its model, avoiding
the most blatant kinds of profiling (though
it does track education levels and other
proxies for class). But here is the contro-
versial, incontrovertible fact of disgrace
insurance: It is not a moral arbiter of
behavior but a reflection of society’s toler-
ance of it. Spotted aims to quantify our
standards, which are never as immutable
as we think they are. Disgrace has alwaystabloid scandals and there’s always been
disgrace events,” he said—but for decades,
they were relatively sparse and easily bur-
ied. What has changed is “the severity and
randomness of it all.” The recent spate of
category-four Kevin Spaceys parallels the
sudden prevalence of hundred-year
floods—never mind the utterly unprece-
dented events, evidence of a world out of
whack. “Something like the college-
admissions scandal: That is a snowstorm
in California in June.”
Spotted aims to make disgrace at least
as predictable as the weather. The com-
pany’s model relies on two key scores,
both ranging from 0 to 100: a risk score
and a reaction score in the wake of a dis-
grace, the latter of which maps onto a
patent-pending Public Outcry Index. Just
like flood maps or a 21-year-old’s chances
of crashing a car, the risk score helps set
the premium. And just like the Richter
scale or tornado categories, the Outcry
Index sets the payments.
Spotted outsources its risk-data collec-
tion to India, where workers scan celebrity
gossip and send reports to analysts in Bos-
ton, who organize and relay the information
to data scientists for algorithmic tweaking.
And it is working with Lloyd’s, whose inves-
tors will be backing the payouts, to set limits
around $10 million and premiums some-
where between .7 percent and 2 percent (so
up to $200,000). That’s within the normal
range for catastrophic insurance. (Brand
sponsors are expected to opt for lower limits
than Hollywood producers.)
All of this is new both for disgrace
insurance and for SpottedRisk, a com-
pany that Janet Comenos, its 33-year-old
CEO, founded less than four years ago as
Spotted, Inc. Over an outdoor lunch a
block from her Back Bay office, Comenos
narrated her business trajectory in a
flurry of tech buzzwords. After the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, she worked on a
trading floor before going into start-ups,
first at a mobile-ordering company called
LevelUp, then at Promoboxx, which uses
digital marketing to help align brands
with local retailers. “It wasn’t the most
exciting thing,” she said. During sales
calls, she developed “a nervous tic”: con-The Rise of Scandal
Insurance in Hollywood
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 62TRANSMITTEDREVISED
________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC1619CR_disgrace_insurance_lay [Print]_35557129.indd 74 8/1/19 4:30 PM74 newyork| august5–18, 2019
stantly refreshing Perez Hilton’s website
for celebrity gossip.
Before long, Comenos found a way to
turn her compulsion into a start-up of her
own. She teamed up with Dana Lampert,
who had founded an education-software
company in college and sold it in his 20s.
Lampert was fascinated by the sports side
of celebrity, particularly the data side of the
sports side. What Billy Beane did for base-
ball, Lampert wanted to do for fame—
Moneyball it. He came up with a system
for tagging everything a famous person
wascaughtwearinginpaparazzishots,
from the designer kaffiyeh down to the
limited-run Yeezys. In homage to those
brands that inundate journalists’ in-boxes
with subject lines like “Tinsley Mortimer
spotted wearing Swarovski,” they called
their company Spotted, Inc.
“We found a gap where a lot ofcelebri-
ties were using brands naturallyin their
everyday lives,” said Lampert. “Webecame
interested in how we could leverage or uti-
lize those endorsements.” The idea was to
feed the information back to thebrands,
monetize the influencers, and take a cut.
They hired a behavioral scientist, Steve
Hutchinson, who’d recently earned his
Ph.D. by studying how stress affects learn-
ing. He wasn’t so much into celebrity, but,
as he told me, “it was such a cool data set.”
That was “two pivots ago,” as Hutchin-
son put it. Spotted soon became a match-
making service, using the data it had col-
lected to try to rationalize the endorsement
process. The company signed up Nike,
Neiman Marcus, and H&M. But it turned
out that brands didn’t really want to be
told which stars best suited their image.
“The brand would ask us to look at a list of
five or ten people,” said Comenos. “Our
scores would show that the majority, if not
all of them, scored really low in terms of
trust and likability and appeal with the
brand’s target customers.” The recipients
of those reports weren’t grateful; they
“were pissed off.” They felt second-guessed.
Eventually, Comenos turned for advice
to an ad veteran, Sir Martin Sorrell. Sorrell
had recently resigned from the advertising
juggernaut WPP, reportedly after it was
discovered that he had visited a brothel on
the company dime. (He has publicly
denied it.) Perhaps out of a fresh apprecia-
tion for the fallout from disgrace, he told
her she’d have much more successby play-
ing to advertisers’ fears: “Focus on the
risk.” Comenos decided to pivot again.hanes is the current co-president of
the North American Contingency Asso-
ciation. In May, his new boss headlined its
annual conference for the public debut of
what was now rebranded as Spotted Risk.Comenos took the stage wearing a Brit-
ney Spears concert T-shirt and laid out
some of the behaviors tracked by Spotted:
public intoxication, cultural insensitivity,
child pornography, animal abuse, gang
affiliation, bribery, physical attacks, eth-
nic discrimination, racially charged com-
mentary, cocaine possession, bullying,
extortion, sexism, DUI, tax evasion, sex-
ual assault, possession of a deadly
weapon, ageism, transphobia, child neg-
ligence, arson, child abuse, solicitation,
body shaming, infidelity, and bankruptcy.
ShecitedSpotteddatashowinga 29 per-
cent increase in disgraceful events from
2017 to 2018—despite which only 1 per-
cent of productions bought disgrace
insurance. She got a laugh when she said,
“Males tend to be a little riskieroverall,
not surprisingly.”
According to Spotted, all kinds of things
make one celebrity riskier than another.
Firstborns are at slightly higher risk of dis-
grace, as are those under 35 or who’ve suf-
fered recent breakups—until the passage
of time sends the bereft partner back
down the “risk-decay curve.” But behaviors
are far more important than demograph-
ics. Mishaps needn’t be catastrophic
events; drunk driving looms large because
it signals “poor impulse control and emo-
tion regulation,” according to Pete Dear-
born, Spotted’s second behavioral scien-
tist. (Comenos calls him and Hutchinson
“the Doctors of Disgrace”.) Another risk is
association—the kind of company that,
say, Hailey Baldwin keeps (husband Justin
Bieber, for one). Often it comes down to
finding not a skeleton in a closet but a trail
of half-buried bones.
Mitigating the risks are seemingly fuzz-
ier factors such as “likability” and “resil-
ience.” Sometimes positive behaviors can
help people bounce back (as they did for
Aziz Ansari, whose sensitivity and self-
questioning have raised his “trustworthi-
ness” 13.38 percentile points since he was
accused of sexual aggression). Other
times, it’s beyond their control.Spacey
may have been doubly doomed because he
has played so many bad characters. “Indi-
viduals who play villainous rolesare not
forgiven at as high a rate,” said Comenos.
She didn’t mention Spacey’s sexuality.
Spotted has, for now, excluded “protected
class” attributes from its model, avoiding
the most blatant kinds of profiling (though
it does track education levels and other
proxies for class). But here is thecontro-
versial, incontrovertible fact of disgrace
insurance: It is not a moral arbiter of
behavior but a reflection of society’s toler-
ance of it. Spotted aims to quantify our
standards, which are never as immutable
as we think they are. Disgrace has alwaystabloidscandalsandthere’s alwaysbeen
disgraceevents,”hesaid—butfordecades,
theywere relativelysparseandeasilybur-
ied.Whathaschangedis “theseverityand
randomnessofit all.” Therecentspateof
category-fourKevinSpaceysparallelsthe
sudden prevalence of hundred-year
floods—nevermindtheutterlyunprece-
dentedevents,evidenceofa worldoutof
whack. “Somethinglike the college-
admissionsscandal:That is a snowstorm
inCaliforniainJune.”
Spottedaimstomake disgraceat least
aspredictableastheweather.Thecom-
pany’s model relies on two keyscores,
both ranging from 0 to 100: a risk score
and a reaction score in the wake of a dis-
grace, the latter of which maps onto a
patent-pending Public Outcry Index. Just
like flood maps or a 21-year-old’s chances
of crashing a car, the risk score helps set
the premium. And just like theRichter
scale or tornado categories, theOutcry
Index sets the payments.
Spotted outsources its risk-data collec-
tion to India, where workers scan celebrity
gossip and send reports to analysts in Bos-
ton, who organize and relay the information
to data scientists for algorithmic tweaking.
And it is working with Lloyd’s, whose inves-
tors will be backing the payouts, to set limits
around $10 million and premiums some-
where between .7 percent and 2 percent (so
up to $200,000). That’s within the normal
range for catastrophic insurance.(Brand
sponsors are expected to opt for lower limits
than Hollywood producers.)
All of this is new both for disgrace
insurance and for SpottedRisk,a com-
pany that Janet Comenos, its 33-year-old
CEO, founded less than four years ago as
Spotted, Inc. Over an outdoorlunch a
block from her Back Bay office, Comenos
narrated her business trajectory in a
flurry of tech buzzwords. After the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, she worked on a
trading floor before going into start-ups,
first at a mobile-ordering company called
LevelUp, then at Promoboxx, which uses
digital marketing to help alignbrands
with local retailers. “It wasn’t the most
exciting thing,” she said. During sales
calls, she developed “a nervous tic”: con-
The Rise of Scandal
Insurance in Hollywood
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 62