Apple’s WWDC Memoji Makeup Tutorial Starring Patrick Starrr and Desi Perkins

Apple unveiled enhancements to Memoji for iOS 13 during Monday’s WWDC keynote address, including a variety of customizations designed to help you make your Memoji look more like you. What was interesting to me was the “Makeup Tutorial” starring Patrick Starrr and Desi Perkins. These two younger folks are beauty influencers. What that means is that they make a bunch of beauty and makeup videos and have more followers than you can shake a stick at. What they are not are tech executives. Or coders. Or traditional celebrities. Or even project managers in Apple’s Memoji team. So, this represents Apple stepping outside the box, and it also means Apple is thinking differently about how to reach young people. Tapping social media influencers to spread the word about new customization features in Memoji means that Apple is targeting millennials and Generation Z. What it also means is that if you think this video is stupid or a bad idea, you aren’t the target market, and that’s OK. As it is, these new customization features are yet another step in Apple’s inexorable push in making iMessage a social media platform unto itself.