The Wild West of Virtual Influencers
Image source: Jakob Owens on Unsplash.
On Miquela Sousa and the dystopian future of influencer marketing.
Even if the term “influencer marketing” doesn’t mean anything to you, you do know what it is. We all know what it is. Influencer marketing is marketing a product or service to users through an “influencer” instead of marketing directly to the target demographic.
In simple terms, it’s seeing someone you admire say “I smoke Red Apple cigarettes” instead of seeing a billboard or TV ad for the product. Influencer marketing seems relatively new because it has become extremely common on social media, which itself is new in the grand scheme of things. In reality influencer marketing is just a modern version of the celebrity endorsements of yore where you would see your favourite athletes, musicians and actors wearing or using certain products in pictures and commercials.
Virtual influencers are an entirely new breed of social media influencers. They are not like the common influencer who has a lot of followers on Instagram and therefore occasionally posts sponsored content. By virtual influencer, we mean accounts like Lil Miquela on Instagram.
Lil Miquela’s full name is Miquela Sousa. She is 20 years old, half Brazilian and half Spanish, and lives in Los Angeles where she has a rich social life. First and foremost, she is a model, but has also ventured into making music, including collaborating with record producer Baauer on the surprisingly good track “Hate Me”. She’s also not real.
Lil Miquela. Image source: Lil Miquela/Instagram.
Virtual influencers like Lil Miquela are on the bleeding edge of technology, but they don’t bleed. They are entirely digital. They are 3D renderings who have other digital friends, post selfies, and promote fashion labels. Could this be the future of influencer marketing?
Forever young
The first obvious advantage of creating virtual influencers is that they don’t age, and, unless their creators choose to age them for purposes of authenticity, they never will. They will never have imperfections that the rest of us mortals struggle with. No pimples, no scars, no wrinkles, no bad hair days, no unwanted body fat, no eyebrows that need to be plucked. They are flawless.
With the rise of digital image retouching tools available for the masses, there has already been a huge increase in awareness of the impossible beauty standards set by men and women, both on social media and in traditional media like magazine covers, on television and in movies. This divide between beauty standards and the average person will surely only worsen as digital celebrities grow into prominence.
Another advantage worth considering is the fact that influencers like Miquela will never have public meltdowns or PR scandals. They’ll never shave their heads like Britney Spears in 2007, go on racist tirades like Mel Gibson, and they will never cause scandals of sexual impropriety, like any number of public figures have. Probably.
The thing is, we don’t know who is actually behind these virtual influencers. Someone is in control of these virtual “people”, that much is certain. Someone is taking photographs, someone is editing Miquela (and others) into these photographs, and someone is writing on her behalf. That person could eventually crack under pressure. Although they do have the luxury of not being recognisable in public, so that seems rather unlikely.
Image source: Lil Miquela/Instagram.
Big risks for big brands
The public’s knowledge of - and interest in - virtual influencers like Miquela hasn’t even begun to peak. As the public catches on, so to do journalists, and there will eventually be a large number of people trying to put the puzzle together and find out who the creators are. We all want to peek behind the curtain.
We might not like what we see when we find out who the creators are, though. Miquela describes herself as a feminist and supports the Black Lives Matter movement. While “Miquela Sousa” seems to lean left politically, this might be a shrewd marketing ploy to make her popular with younger generations.
If the people running these accounts turn out to be rather unsavoury, it could have big implications. Not only for the accounts themselves, but also for real artists that have collaborated with them, and also for companies that have advertised with them.
Remember the viral marketing campaign “Kony 2012”, which intended to raise awareness of - and eventually capture - Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony? That campaign gained an incredible amount of traction in record time, but it all took a nosedive when spokesperson and founder, Jason Russell, had a mental breakdown and was apprehended naked in the streets of San Diego.
If you were in charge of marketing for Prada - a brand Miquela recently featured on Instagram - would you not have to ensure that the people “running” virtual influencers are stable people who won’t one day decide to go off on a racist tirade? If the people decide to stay under a cloak of secrecy, would you still want your brand endorsed by them?
The authenticity of a fake human
As Heather Nolan at Adweek writes, there could also be problems related to Intellectual Property ownership when you choose to advertise with a virtual influencer.
Nolan goes on to point out that the Federal Trade Commission has yet to make any rulings on virtual influencers, meaning that it is still very much a wild, wild west. When you are paid or compensated to promote a product in America, you are legally obliged to disclose that information. You don’t have to say how much you were paid, but it is illegal to promote or advertise a product without telling your audience. We still don’t know if the same rules apply to creations like Miquela. Maybe we should assume they do.
In any case, why should we care what clothes a fake human wears? After all, they can’t try the clothes on. They can’t form an independent thought or opinion. How can Miquela promote clothing brands? And how can we, as a society, care about what she says?
A fading fad?
In philosophy, there is a concept known as “Uncanny Valley”. It refers to how we humans feel about objects around us. It is used to study how humans react to faces. It’s generally on a rising trend, but then you get into “nearly human, but something looks strange” territory. We really dislike faces of human imposters: almost human, but definitely not human.
Uncanny Valley visualised. Image source: medium.com.
Lil Miquela is deep inside Uncanny Valley, and I personally can’t say that I find her very easy on the eyes at all. I do, however, understand the appeal. There is something intriguing about her Instagram account even though I know that they are just photoshopped images with captions written by smart (real) people. I keep thinking about it, and I keep going back to have a look. I don’t know why.
Can this last forever? Will Miquela keep going on in the same way forever? I don’t know. But I also don’t think that virtual influencers are a quickly fading fad which will pass right away.
As artificial intelligence improves in the coming decade it will become not only incredibly smart and sophisticated, but also much cheaper. At that point will likely see a sudden growth of Miquela-esque virtual influencers.
In the future, there won’t be a human behind the keyboard, and no man behind the curtain.
