Meet this week’s Campus Celebrity, Genevieve Douglas! Genevieve is a third year International Development Studies major from Aurora, ON. Being a lover of the nightlife herself, she says you will likely find her in Ecole Privée on weekends, but nowadays she’s busy promoting a new app: TakeOver Now. We sat down with Genevieve to find out more about what TakeOver Now has to offer!
Idil Copur for Her Campus McGill (HC McGill): Can you tell us a bit about the TakeOver Now app? What is it for?
Genevieve Douglas (GD): TakeOver now is an app that’s all about turning the average person into a local celebrity by paying you to go out and party and share your social life. When you go to local bars and take a photo of yourself with friends on TakeOver Now, you’ll start building a following in your city in real time just for going out. Over time, bars and clubs in your area will start paying users who get the most likes on their posts on TakeOver Now and ask them to draw a crowd. So basically, the premise of TakeOver Now is turning your average student into a celebrity who gets paid to go out for fun.
HC McGill: How would you explain the idea behind becoming a campus celebrity through TakeOver Now app?
GD: TakeOver Now takes the concept of ‘celebrity appearances’ at clubs and gives it to the average person. Average users can gain fame on TakeOver Now by sharing photos with partygoers in their local area, and become the local celebrity on campus or in their city. As you start gaining popularity over time, your posts will reach a greater audience so you’ll be able to see partygoers nationwide and build a reputation for yourself. Actually, over this holiday season, because it’s a brand new app that just started, TakeOver Now will pay whoever starts gaining the most followers over the next couple of weeks up to $300. So it’s going to start off with being paid by the app and then, over time, we hope the bars will become involved with wanting the students to be on the app and sharing their location and their photos.
HC McGill: It kind of sounds like you need to have your network of friends from Facebook to use the app, for the app to work. Do you need to have a network of friends – do you need to add people to use the app?
GD: No, it’s one constant stream for any city at any time. So you’ll have followers, but you can also explore any city’s nightlife as well. You can go to Montreal on the app or maybe just McGill, and you can see where anyone who is using the app is going, and you can choose to follow that person. That way, they will come up on your direct newsfeed, but you can also browse and explore. So it’s very similar to any other social media app like Twitter or Instagram; you can see what’s going on worldwide, but the ones you follow come up first on your newsfeed.
HC McGill: Can you see restaurant and bar owners finding the app useful?
GD: I think so. I think in the end they will want students to use TakeOver Now. Instead of having Facebook events where people say where they’re going, they can actually prove the fact that they are there. Bars would want students with most followers to come, in order to attract a larger crowd.
HC McGill: Is the app limited to restaurants, bars and nightlife for now?
GD: As of now, yes. Mostly clubs.
HC McGill: Do you know the person who developed the app personally?
GD: Yes I do. He’s my friend from Aurora, we both met there, but he goes to Princeton and developed the app there with some other students.
HC McGill: And how did he come up with the idea? What inspired him?
GD: The idea was basically to transform your social life into a way that you can make money and find out where everyone is going in the city in real time.
HC McGill: How did you decide to become involved?
GD: We had bounced off the idea – Montreal has a very prominent nightlife, and I think it’s going to be very successful here, of all places; there are so many bars and it’s not like everyone goes to one place every night. So I became involved when he asked me if I thought it would be a good idea to introduce the app here, and I said absolutely.
HC McGill: Where do you see the app going from here? Are there plans to develop the platform into something more?
GD: As of now, I think it’s going to try and focus on campuses and students. Hopefully, it will become more of a citywide thing where everyone uses it all the time, but we’re going to promote it on campuses for now.
You can download TakeOver Now on the App Store for free here and win $300 just for partying!
Images provided by interviewee.