PUBLIC RELATIONS
Thursday 4th October 2018
Performance art or cynical manipulation? How avatars are taking over Influencer Marketing
Miquela Sousa is a Brazilian-American fashion influencer and music artist from Downey, California.
Better known as Lil Miquela, she has acquired 1.3 million Instagram followers organically since starting out two years ago. In that time she’s modelled clothes for brands including Prada, Chanel, Diesel and Moncler. She has released a Spotify top 10 track and launched her own clothing range.
She’s appeared on magazine covers for Highsnobiety and King Kong. This year she went to Coachella and watched Beyoncé.
Like many successful Instagram fashion influencers, Lil Miquela is in high demand among brands that want to pay for access to her audience.
But, unlike almost all other successful Instagram fashion influencers, Lil Miquela doesn’t exist.
She is computer-generated: an avatar influencer.
M@RCH ØF THE AVATAR$
Lil Miquela is the best known of a wave of new virtual influencers. Others include Shudu, Bermuda and blawko22.
Are these fake influencers as influential as their human counterparts?
Investors in the company behind Lil Miquela think so. Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup, SV Angel and others recently ploughed $6m of funding into Brud, the Los Angeles-based start-up that specialises in “robotics, artificial intelligence and their applications to media businesses”.
These investors see the potential for computer-generated creations to become mainstream influencers. And Lil Miquela provides proof of concept.
There’s a precedent too. Avatars are not new within the creative industries.In music, for instance, Damon Albarn created the virtual band Gorillaz in 1998. Hatsune Miku, a singing Japanese hologram, was released more than a decade ago, in 2007. After Miku came Aimi Eguchi, a convincingly human-like CGI composite of several members of Tokyo’s female pop supergroup AKB48.
ALL TH3 FASH!ON
The fashion vertical is, perhaps, the natural space for these CGI influencers to inhabit. They’ll always look Insta-immaculate – there’s no need for these CGI models to undergo perpetual dieting, gruelling beauty regimes or cosmetic surgery.
Avatar influencers help with the influencer activation process, too. Influencer marketing effort is often front-loaded. It takes time – and therefore money – to identify the most appropriate influencer for your brand. But brands that work with avatar influencers can save themselves the effort, time and cost involved in carefully identifying and vetting influencers, nor need they fret that a CGI influencer will produce a controversial video that will tarnish their brand by association.
Avatar influencers can also be placed in any context and dressed in any sponsoring fashion house’s garb.
They will always turn up on time to the creative shoot, too.
TH3 SECRETS ØF SUCCE$S
But what makes Lil Miquela in particular so successful? Her power as an Instagram influencer seems to lie in her rounded ‘personality’ and her relationship with her followers.
Lil Miquela is more than a clothes horse. She shares stories of British schoolboys helping to avert a suicide attempt. She writes letters to US Congress in support of the transgender community and builds awareness among her followers of the 1.4 million transgender people living in the US.
The URL in her Instagram bio links to Black Girls Code, a charity that aims to increase diversity in the digital space.
Such elements are expertly curated to reflect what it means to be human: a set of values and ethics overlay the commercial imperative of brand sponsorship.
Compare Lil Miquela to real-life British teenager Leo Mandella, known as Gully Guy Leo, for instance.
He’s brilliant at what he does. And what he does is streetwear. His 690,000 or so Instagram followers aren’t specifically interested in him as a personality. They do, however, want to see his vast collection of hyped clothes. So, in a certain sense, Lil Miquela is more ‘real’ than many human Instagram influencers.
TH3 RE@L D¤AL
Lil Miquela’s ‘reality’ is something that her creators are keen to stress.
“I keep getting asked if I’m real or fake,” said Lil Miquela in a rare 2017 telephone ‘interview’ with YouTube personality Shane Dawson (who he was actually speaking to is a mystery). “But I’m really here; I’m really talking to you. I’m really DMing people. I’m just trying to make some great art and make the world hurt less… Can you name one person on Instagram who doesn’t edit their photos?”
And, in response to her thoughts on virtual celebrities in a BBC interview conducted via email, Lil Miquela said: “I think most of the celebrities in popular culture are virtual! It’s been disheartening to watch misinformation and memes warp our democracy, but I think that speaks to the power of ‘virtual’. Eventually, ‘virtual’ shapes our reality and I think that’s why I’m so passionate about using virtual spaces like Instagram to push for positive change.”
But some, like Richard Wong, believe these CGI influencers undermine existing models of promotion. In fact, Wong, in his Adweek article ‘Virtual influencers lead to virtual inauthenticity’, claims that artificial personalities pose a huge risk to the future of culture and media.
Wong cites three reasons: CGI influencers create unrealistic expectations about what beauty, style and culture look like; companies running internet personalities are driven exclusively by profit; and virtual influencers lack authenticity – how can an avatar influencer try on a Prada outfit?
None of these concerns appear to be negatively affecting the stellar growth of influencer marketing, though.
Brands currently spend around $1bn a year on Instagram influencers. And, according to CampaignDeus*, an independent influencer benchmarking company, 35.5% of all posts on the platform sit within the fashion vertical, making it the most popular subject segment by far.
FAKING IT AUTH¤NTI¢ALL¥
Advocates of virtual influencers might argue that the fashion industry has a long history of manipulating images to make models seem perfect anyway.
And, in 2018, what does ‘authenticity’ really mean?
As social beings, humans have always sought to connect with like-minded people. Social media has just scaled this, making our networks global, constant – and more competitive.
In a bid to become ever more popular, we create content designed for instant gratification: content to be shared and ‘liked’, not pondered. We have learned to use lens filters and editing apps.
Our Instagram feeds have been professionalised. If we fail to get sufficient engagement in the first half an hour, we remove the post. We agonise over creating the perfectly crafted caption and selecting the most suitable hashtags.
From this viewpoint, Lil Miquela and her like are far more than just mannequins for fashion houses. They are a mirror reflecting today’s society and encouraging us to question what it means to be human in a digital world.
Instagram images have become so common that we no longer see them for the hyper-reality they represent. But CGI influencers jolt us out of our blind spot.
YØUR 8IGG3ST INFLUEN¢ER
So is Lil Miquela performance art?
The latest manifestation of broken social media? A PR stunt? A machine for making money out of the influencer marketing boom?
She is, of course, a little of each. But she’s also an influencer in the truest sense. After all, real influence is the ability to change behaviours. And, increasingly, digital influence is about how you trade the currency of a specific audience’s attention.
Lil Miquela is doing both.
*Disclosure: I am an adviser to CampaignDeus
This article was originally published in Influence magazine, Q3 2018.