In classes with my university students I usually tell them to forget to think that we only deal with numbers or with data from a Target Audience or target that we even turned it into a buyer Person as if it were a paper doll (one of those that you can cut out and put on the clothes and accessories to your liking), but we must always keep in mind that our communication is directed to human beings, to real people, who have needs , tastes, feelings and ways of being and thinking that make them unique. Precisely because they are human.
For this reason, the ideal is that all our decisions to create marketing strategies always go in search of exploiting and communicating in the most humane way possible and, then, really reaching our objectives for having motivated them through the stories that we tell them. and your relationship with our products and services.
In other words, never lose the sense of what people (regardless of whether they represent brands, companies, institutions, etc.) communicate to other people.
But, for some years now, the rapid development of technology and its increasingly effective application in advertising media, has made the world of virtuality (including, of course, artificial intelligence) begin to take the place of people, even if we are the ones who feed and define them, based on the parameters that we give to the “little machines” (computers) so that they work and receive what we want from them.
In all this advancement of technology and its application in marketing communication, and while there was a great explosion in the use of influencers in many categories of products and services (and who, precisely to make themselves known and communicate with people, use especially digital tools, such as social networks, to work and generate followers) it was necessary for this to evolve. Above all because, unfortunately, there are cases that have not been very favourable, either due to bad practices or bad decisions by a particular influencer, which have generated, contrary to the purpose for which they were hired, a bad image, not only personal, but for the brands of which they are spokespersons.
The risk is precisely that, like any human being, they can make a mistake that costs the contracting party a lot because, probably, their online and offline behavior is not appropriate.
According to a study done by Krolla division of Duff and Phelps (New York City-based American multinational financial consulting firm), indicates that more than 80 percent of companies have used the influencer marketing strategy at least once, while 39 percent of companies consider that a bad campaign carried out by these characters will affect their image before the audience (in addition to indicating that more than half of the business leaders surveyed see this type of communication as a risk).
Faced with this risk, the trend is to use influencers who are not human, but virtual.
The virtual influencers. Those digital characters designed to resemble real people or animals, which do not have a physical body or real-life identity, and which have various modalities, such as CGI characters (Computer Generated Imagery), 3D models, deep fake avatars (or Deep Fakeas in the campaign of Soriana and his Deep Fake de Cantinflas), hybrid influencers and virtual pets, among others, that are here to stay.
The trend marks that they are becoming more popular thanks to the fact that they can be customized to adapt to specific needs or themes, to the fact that they are more profitable since they do not require payment for their work time. Also because virtual influencers can maintain the aesthetic that the brand wants and, above all, because with them you have control over the content that they will communicate, without being influenced by any belief or personal opinion, maintaining the reputation and brand image.
According to the agency “The Influencer Marketing Factory”58% of people follow at least one virtual influencer and 35% have bought something promoted by one.
And an interesting point in this trend: these virtual influencers do not only appear at times when there is an advertising campaign, but a whole storytelling is created around them that allows them to be active all the time, generating careful content and in accordance with your profile, fueling the interest of your followers.
Here is the case of the virtual influencer “Lil Miquela” (with appearances in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Balenciaga, Prada and Chanel), who currently has more than 3 million followers on Instagram and almost 300 thousand subscribers on her YouTube channel, and that she came to be “photographed in public” with a real “boyfriend” (although news of her other boyfriends had already come out in the digital field).
Now, to take advantage of this “new wave” of influencers, it is the turn of Maybelline New York of The realwhich has already recruited its first digital avatar, called May.
May will help the brand with the launch of the latest mascara (Falsies Surreal Extensions Mascara), supported by Maybelline’s global ambassador, Gigi Hadid, and will also assist them in other makeup campaigns for the brand.
His main message, related to the use of his digital avatar, is that the technology in his new mascara is so impressive that only an avatar could bring it to life, and the product will have people asking: “Are your lashes real?” (Oh, right! How was the eye?).
In the not too distant future, in the advertising ecosystem we will no longer only have the traditional influencer presence of Kimberly Loaiza, Juanpa Zurita, Yuya, Domelipa, Rod Contreras or other famous instagramers or tikokeros, but many other virtual influencers will also come to join Lil Miquela, Shudu, Bermuda either Imma (I recommend you look for them in Google).
And, perhaps, in the not too distant future, it will not be Luisito Communicates whoever talks about how great the AIFA is, otherwise it will be a influencers virtual made especially for the 4T. How scary, right?