This YouTube documentary segment goes behind the scenes at Madame Tussauds, showing the craft of creating figures and explaining the museum's data-driven process (the 'Flux Capacitor') for deciding which contemporary celebrities to immortalize. The Flux Capacitor aggregates hundreds of millions of signals from search and social platforms to estimate demand, demographic appeal, geographic spread, and trend durability; selections can cost up to £100,000 per figure. The segment includes staff discussion (David Boyle, data analyst) and marketing deliberations with Ollie Alexander.
Chapters
Do I curtsy or bow?
Welcome to Madame Tussauds.
We are entering the Magic Factory.
Founded in London nearly 200 years ago, it's a magical world of ancient craftsmanship.
Takes four to six weeks to do, like a full head of hair.
Cutting edge technology.
It's a bit lively, isn't it? Yeah, exactly.
And a barometer of fame.
I would class him as a shooting star.
And infamy, we're still question mark over.
Whether Johnny Depp will stay here.
Today's stars still queue up to be immortalized in wax.
Oh, my God.
It's a weird feeling.
Hoping to stay on display forever.
I'm dreading the day Madame Tussauds take my head off.
Now we're going behind the scenes of this iconic attraction.
I hated it when I first saw it.
To find out who's hot.
You got muscles.
Yeah, it's weird.
And who's not. This was Robbie Williams. And to ask why our fascination with celebrity keeps us coming back for more.
Being a wax worker, Madame Tussaud is like getting knighted. Fabulous.
Knowing which of today's famous people the public will pay to get close to is key to Madame Tussaud's survival. Each figure can go anything up to £100,000 or more. If Dan TDM proves to be hit, it will be down in no small part to this man.
Yeah, I'm definitely a data nerd and you can call me a data scientist or an analyst or a researcher. So, yeah, data nerd David is the.
Keeper of what's referred to as the Flux Capacitor.
So Madame Tussauds really wanted to understand the evidence behind the figures they were considering making. The Flux Capacitor brings together data from lots of different sources. Think of all the Google searches happening every day. Instagram followers likes engagement. Same with Twitter, TikTok, YouTube. The list is endless. For any one figure, we're looking at certainly hundreds of millions of data points and we try to understand for each of those names is the demand. Are people really excited to find out more, to engage and to have relationships with those names? Is that durable over time or accelerating in a really interesting way recently? Is it consistent and global? Is it more than one country, a tourist as well as local visitors going to be excited about that name?
Today, a batch of names of potential figures has been processed by the Flux Capacitor.
Should we move on to.
Ollie Alexander and the marketing team are meeting to discuss which of them to put their money on.
So, Instagram followers, again, simple, high level young women, big skew there towards 18-24s.
He's probably at the point of his career where it could go any way and actually kind of rock it. So I would almost class him as a shooting star that, like, we're just kind of seeing this fame journey and it's probably us to keep an eye on Emma Radicali.
I mean, there's going to have been quite a big spike. So this is the historical search or demand in the uk.
It's interesting though, looking at the female. Yeah, I just spotted that split, isn't it?
Yeah. I wonder here, because tennis fans are such a small share that I wonder if this is a sign actually that she's drawn lots of people into tennis who otherwise wouldn't have been into tennis. People whose primary love is football or politics or UK pop culture.
She's swaying them over.
Yeah, she really speaks to the non tennis audience, which is interesting.
I think she's an exciting one. Let's have a look at Josie Comer.
Pretty good score in Australia, in Ireland and then the uk. If we look just at her Instagram followers, the first thing I was really surprised at is how female skewed they are and how young they are and then what are they interested in? Walt Disney, Apple, Netflix?
She's relatable but inspiring at the same time. But women can see a little bit of them in her, so truly inspiring. But you can kind of get behind her, like it's not like she's off limits. Which I think is actually a really nice message for wax figures that we introduced around two swords.
