Are We Witnessing The End Of The Human Influencer And The Rise Of The CGI Influencer?

So what's a virtual influencer anyway? Say hello to the “content creators” that are actually digitally-created characters, sometimes controlled by AI, which are the new faces of many brands looking to boost hype around their products. 

Between how eerily realistic digitally-created characters are becoming and how airbrushed and FaceTuned real people are choosing to present themselves on social media, it’s growing harder for your average Joe or Jane scrolling online to discern whether or not the person on their feed actually has a pulse. Will virtual influencers ultimately replace the role that human influencers have on our consumer behavior, or is this all just a momentary blip in contemporary culture that we’ll laugh about in a couple of decades?

Let’s Meet Two Examples of the “Women” Taking Instagram by Storm

LilMiquela or Miquela Sousa

With over 3M followers on Instagram, Lil Miquela is a “19-year-old Robot living in LA” that boasts the largest virtual influencer following. Scroll through her feed and you might swear up and down that she’s actually striking a pose on the streets of the City of Angels, or doing yoga on the beach.

She has “traveled” to New York City to promote Pacsun’s Soho Store, has worked with high-end brands like Prada and Dior, and was in a controversial Calvin Klein campaign kissing Bella Hadid. She makes regular appearances in a variety of up-and-coming magazines and models countless indie jewelry and fashion brands with the same style of effortlessly cool captions we’re used to seeing influencers post.

Miquela is so successful that Time has named her one of their “25 Most Influential People on the Internet,” and she’s signed with the talent agency that manages Ariana Grande, Will Smith, Harry Styles, even Joe Biden – CAA.

Barbie

Yes, I said Barbie. Though the @barbie Instagram feed (which has 900,000 less followers than LilMiquela, for context) still retains a lot of content including the plastic dolls we all knew growing up, Barbie takes on the persona of a public figure on Instagram. She even has a second account @barbiestyle posing in perfect angles like a human influencer, wearing trendy clothing, and showing off an ideal lifestyle.

Barbie is also a virtual influencer who vlogs on YouTube. Her channel has 10.9M YouTube subscribers, and Mattel is reaping all the benefits: In Q1 of 2021 alone their sales surged over $276M (that’s 87%) thanks to Barbie’s virtual influencer status.

Barbie takes you along on her plastic perfect life, doing her morning routine, a holiday “Get Ready With Me” a.k.a. GRWM, cooking challenges with Ken, doing viral tag videos, and has even had her virtual friends visit her vlogs to chat about their experiences facing systemic racism…don’t ask me how that one works.

Kim Culmone, the Vice President of Design for Barbie, has explained how the brand has shifted to “refining digital strategies because that’s where it’s at.” Instead of Barbie existing physically in the hands of young girls who use their own imagination to bring her to life, she’s online chatting with them about social change, self-esteem, self-love, feminine trends, and much more.

But Are Consumers Sold on the Idea of CGI Influencers?

A PR Agency called The Influencer Marketing Factory did a survey of over 1,000 Americans to gauge their knowledge and interest in this new trend. Their findings might take you by surprise.

Up to 58% of survey respondents follow at least one virtual influencer. Respondents were split on where they mostly follow virtual influencers, with 28.7% following them on YouTube, 28.4% following them on Instagram, 20.5% following them on TikTok, and 14.6% following them on Facebook. 4.6% said they follow them on Twitter, but knowing how many bot accounts there are out there I wouldn’t be surprised if more of us were accidentally following virtual influencers.

When asked why respondents didn’t follow virtual influencers, 51.4% stated that they were disinterested, 24.5% shared that they prefer human influencers, and 24% of users who don’t follow any didn’t even know that virtual influencers exist.

Of those who follow virtual influencers, 27% choose to follow for the content posted, 19% follow for the influencer’s story, and 15% actually reported following the influencers because they feel inspired by them.

Are virtual influencers effective at their job? Well, of the survey respondents, only 35% admitted that they had ever bought a service or product that a virtual influencer was promoting. 

Now, you’d assume that Gen Z would be the target demographic for trusting virtual influencers to sell them on products, but it turns out the most trusting age group was older Millennials between the ages of 35-44, then younger Millennials, and then Gen Z. Not sure what it says about the 35-44 age group that they scored highest when it came to feeling like virtual influencers are relatable!

The survey did find that most people think that virtual influencers will grow in mainstream recognition and influence over the next year, but we’ll have to wait until next spring to put that prediction to the test.

Trends Aside, Can We Trust Robots To Represent Us?

Another question I’m left pondering is whether or not virtual influencers can actually sympathize with our hopes, dreams, and values or if their personalities are just patronizing.

As digital arts blogger Elizabeth Harris points out, Miquela “tells her followers ‘Wash ur hands, don’t be xenophobic’ – COVID-19 isn’t a real concern for a cyborg, but her abandonment of the previously rigid boundary between the physical and non-physical mirrors our own perennial discomfort in an increasingly hyperreal world […] Self-isolation provides near-perfect conditions for experiencing Miquela and her world. She’s in self-isolation too and captioned her invitation for us all to watch her new music video together with ‘when I say “together” I obviously mean we’ll all be at our own houses … That’s how we doin’ “together” right now’.”

Sure, the feelings might be coming from someone behind the keyboard of a virtual influencer persona, but in cases where these avatars are AI, it’s disingenuous to post social statements and cultural commentary because it’s not coming from the heart, it’s coming from an algorithm.

For instance, during the #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, up to 35% of virtual influencer accounts made posts showing support for BLM. They posted the infamous resource aggregates, they captioned photos with statements of solidarity, and they posted black square images, like Imma, a Tokyo-staged virtual influencer.

Imma is one of Aww Inc’s virtual humans, a Japanese company that prides itself in being the “first virtual human company in Japan.” Japan is no stranger to the idea of virtual avatars, with the “VTuber” or virtual YouTuber having been a trendy staple since the mid-2000s, but what was first just online entertainment is now a vehicle for advertising revenue.

For example, Aww Inc has partnered with IKEA, Disney, Valentino, Dior, Porsche, Burberry, Nike, Puma, KFC, Unilever, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Longchamp, and many more brands. Part of their mission is “to create new concepts that can be part of culture, even if it’s a little twisted, we hope to share our message and get people thinking.”

Does it feel genuine when marketing companies like these, led by publicists and creative teams, align their influencer content with activism, or does it feel more like they are trivializing social justice movements by creating canned statements for social brownie points and better optics?

It’s not just race relations either. Virtual influencers speaking out about mental health feels beyond paradoxical, yet the World Health Organization used a virtual influencer named Knox Frost to address the loneliness and anxiety that people were feeling during the lockdowns. Similarly, LilMiquela caught outrage over a story about experiencing sexual assault that was fabricated to feel relatable but ultimately people felt it was insensitive to real human victims.

The influencer marketing industry is projected to reach a $16.4B valuation this year. There’s no denying just how much cultural currency an influencer can have over a celebrity since consumers feel more trusting of “authentic” people in lieu of those who might seem out of reach. But if “authentic” influencer content is now being fabricated, how can the consumer be expected to trust anything that they post?

Ask yourself: Can you really trust testimony about a product if it’s being reviewed by someone who has never used it? Never laid eyes on it? Would you accept a review of a necklace, for example, from a real human being who has never felt the piece of jewelry? Never put it on their neck? Never seen how the metal reacts to their skin? Never worn it for days or weeks to see how it stands the test of time?

What about articles of clothing? Do you find that things you buy online without being able to put on your body fit you the exact way they fit the dress form in the product thumbnail? What about how the fabric makes you feel when you put it on in the warm sunlight versus how it looks on a hanger, unworn?

What I’m getting at here is that virtual influencers can be a marketer’s dream: No one needs to fly to partake in a photoshoot, no one needs to be sent a product, no one needs to go through any trial periods to discover how it actually holds up. It’s a marketer’s dream, but it’s a consumer’s nightmare.

Closing Thoughts

The thing about hysteria and fear over technology is that there’s only so much we can do to push back when it’s already here. Clearly, the virtual influencer is our generation’s sketchy new marketing mascot, but the idea of them is nothing new. Tony the Tiger and Snap, Crackle, and Pop have been getting kids hooked on sugary cereal for years now. That said, hyper-realistic CGI technology has been around for a long time and AI is becoming increasingly good at creating art, to the extent that some artists and actors fear that AI will render them obsolete. While it’s unrealistic that society will ever fully replace the human touch with computer-generated replications, if we’re not comfortable with robots representing our values or selling us products, the best thing we can do is to continue supporting real people whose hearts beat like ours.

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