Virtual influencers are fast becoming a strong genre amongst content creators. They often serve the same purpose as any other influencer, namely, to influence their audience with content and marketing, but are behind some sort of virtual disguise. This disguise can be a simple potato filter like TikTok gamer SparklyWenis, an anime character like commentary YouTuber Nux Taku, or some photorealistic CGI like Instagram influencer, lilmiquela.
But are they really so popular? Have you ever seen one? And are they actually influential? We’re exploring this new phenomenon and its marketing capabilities.
What is a virtual influencer?
Virtual influencers are content creators who have created a character to fill the purposes of an influencer. Sometimes they are a real person hiding their face and other times they are AI-controlled entities of their own.
There are two main types of virtual influencer styles. The first is influencers who just trying to hide their face. They don’t want to deal with the negativity that comes with being an online creator and have created a whacky character instead. Most of the VTubers like Nux Taku come under this category. The VTube genre on YouTube in particular is known for its anime characters, but you can also get furry characters and original stylized characters, etc. Others, like SparklyWenis, use a filter.
Going in the opposite direction, there are CGI virtual influencers, who are designed to look as realistic as possible, so that it becomes a source of conversation as to whether they are a real person or not.
Virtual influencers can be split in another two ways: those who are one influencer like any other, and ones who are the creation of a team of marketing executives. This latter one is suspected of lilmiquela, for example, and a lot of other CGI virtual influencers, as it would take a lot of work to create a photorealistic fake person.
Rather than the purpose of the influencer to make a living for themselves using marketing, the point of creating a virtual influencer for a brand becomes more along the lines of a modern brand mascot. The influencer has loyalty to one or a few brands and is consistently marketing them. They can be made by a brand to represent them, like the red and yellow M&Ms, or created by a team running the virtual influencer to represent multiple brands like any other influencer.
To the audience, the difference comes down to whether they are “real” or not. The irony there is that an influencer with a cartoon face is more likely to be real than an influencer with a photorealistic face when it comes to virtual influencers.
What is there to know about virtual influencers?
The Influencer Marketing Factory put out their own infographic about the statistics of virtual influencers, showing that they are far more common than you would think.
58% of the users surveyed said they are following at least one virtual influencer (that they know of), and cited various reasons including their content, the avatar aesthetic, and storytelling. Of those who didn’t follow any virtual influencers, roughly half of them simply said they weren’t interested, but the other half was equally split between “I prefer real human influencers” and “I didn’t know they existed”.
That might well change in the future since even the users surveyed agreed that it was very likely that virtual influencers are going to become mainstream in the next 12 months.
Virtual influencers are fairly equally split between TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with the question of where users find their virtual influencers coming out at 20.5%, 28.4%, and 28.7% respectively, with outliers of Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify.
Of course, when it comes to breaking down the ages of these users, the influence of virtual influencers degrades with age, with 75% of 18–24-year-olds saying that they follow a virtual influencer and 74% of 55+ saying they don’t.
What does this mean?
Virtual influencers could be the next big thing in social media. The original point of them from a marketing standpoint is still there, but with a few added perks. For the influencer, it means a degree of privacy that is not common otherwise on the internet, it means greater engagement with a whacky personality, and it opens up the options of what an influencer can market, for example, they don’t have to adhere to gender norms, depending on the avatar.
For marketers, there is the option of creating their own influencer, whether they go the CGI route or more of a brand mascot route. It is the natural next step from mascots like Microsoft’s Clippy or Duolingo’s Duo Duo to have their own social media accounts. It’s a tried-and-true concept getting its turn in the digital age.
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