Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Virtual influencers

Since following the story of Seraphine (that I talk about in this post) I had an interesting revelation: virtual inluencers are a thing. Of course I already knew Seraphine is not the only one of her kind, but what I wasn't aware of is that there are so many of these non-human influencers with insane amounts of followers on their social media accounts. Inspired by this I actually made a short presentation about virtual influencers for Finnish communication class, so I thought I might say a word or two about them here in this blog as well.

So we can agree that an influencer is someone whose opinion is valued by a group of other people, and this is where influencer marketing draws its power from. Usually when we follow someone on social media we get a peek into their life and might even converse with them in the comment section or through direct messages. This creates a feeling of knowing them on some level, so it's very easy to trust their opinion as if it were a friend's. When an influencer tries a product and then shares their experience with us, it feels way more genuine than watching an advertisement. Even if they only picked up the product because they're being paid for testing it.

What on Earth are virtual influencers then? Simply put they're digital characters that are created and managed by brands and individuals. Many of them are CGI-created and closely resemble real humans (sometimes so much that it gives you the creeps), but that's not always the case as some of them are also very cartoon-like. As regular influencers, apart from working with different brands they make posts about their everyday life: they have their own drama and some of them are also vloggers or even artists on the side.

One of the most famous virtual influencers right now is Lil Miquela (pictured above). She started on Instagram in 2016 and back then no one really knew who had created her and why. Now it's public knowledge that her creator is Brud, a startup company based in Los Angeles. Brud's website is hilarious by the way, it's just a short and simple Google Docs document. Here's a video about them and their virtual influencers (yeah, Miquela's not the only one):


The video's from 2019 but the information still holds true for the most part. 


Miquela has worked with various big-name brands such as Moschino, Prada, Calvin Klein and Samsung. Currently she has 2.8 million followers on Instagram and 560,307 monthly listeners on Spotify. (Yes, she also makes music!) On her Youtube channel she's got 248K subscribers and there you can find her music videos, vlogs and even some interviews. To top it off she's also on Twitter, TikTok and Facebook as well. Talk about social media savvy.

Another virtual influencer I find quite interesting is Imma, who was created by the Japanese company Aww Inc. 


According to Yumi An Anzai, a director at Aww, Imma was originally intended as an art project rather than a marketing tool. She just happened to attract a lot of attention and the market followed. I personally think she looks eerily real. Just look at this video of her "living" in Ikea Harajuku.


Even though virtual influencers are occasionally referred to as "AI influencers" and for example Miquela defines herself as a "robot", the fact is that there's no AI or robotics involved in their creation.. Yet. There are studios that have claimed to be working on it, so perhaps in the future these influencers will be even more human-like and require no help from real humans to produce their content. Time will tell.
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