A luxury VRP on the Croisette
Galo Diallo is the agent of the stars of the very small screen (not that of television, but of the mobile phone): TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube… Accompanied by about twenty of his talents, all actors, he landed in Cannes, in the middle of the Festival, for an unprecedented com’ operation set up with Instagram, posting videos from a bling-bling villa located on the heights of the city. “For a content creator, making movies is the Holy Grail,” says Galo Diallo. He skims the evenings to present his artists to the producers who matter, entices the streaming platforms and the big brands, and even pitches subjects to pros of the 7th art, when they are sufficiently accomplished. During the previous edition of the festival, in 2021, his networking helped propel one of his protégés, Just Riadh, into the lead role in the film La Belle Etoile, by Stéphane Tulard, which is due out by the end. of the year.
A successful talent manager
At the head of the Smile agency, which he created in 2016, the 32-year-old man manages the interests of 300 content creators who accumulate nearly 4 billion views on social networks. He advises them, negotiates partnerships with brands, manages their image and career and lands contracts with streaming platforms. The profiles are varied and cover different fields: dance, drawing and above all a lot of humorous videos. Among the most famous, Just Riadh, revelation of LOL: Who laughs, comes out!, a series on Prime Video, one of the idols of teenagers, known for his short formats in which he plays different roles, launches grotesque challenges. Spotted by the agency when he had less than 100,000 subscribers in 2017, the actor now has 10 million subscribers, all social networks combined.
An autodidact revealed late
Born of a worker father and a cleaner mother, Galo Diallo is from Cergy-Pontoise (Val-d’Oise). The youngest of six brothers and sisters, he fled his studies. He ended up getting his BEP in sales, but at the age of 17 something clicked during a trip to Senegal, his parents’ country of origin. “I didn’t want to be the one for whom the parents made a lot of sacrifices and who is hanging out, who lets himself be carried away by life,” he says. Back to the classrooms. He made his diplomas a priority: he completed a baccalaureate in sales, then a technical DUT in marketing before joining the Parisian business school INSEEC. It was during this master’s degree, in 2015, that the idea of embarking on digital communication with Smile was born.
A transmission enthusiast
The businessman Victor Newman, hero with silver temples of the Young and the Restless, is his main source of inspiration in business. He learned everything, or almost, by watching the series with his mother, who was trying to learn French. From these afternoons, he retains a taste for transmission. Now, every month, he goes to REP-classified high schools or to the countryside, “where there are fewer prospects” to talk about his experience. One day, he would like to set up his own digital content creation school to pass on what he has acquired on the job. But, before that, Galo Diallo would like to develop long formats with streaming platforms.
