Tom Augenthaler explores virtual influencers like Lil Miquela, who has 1.7 million followers. They're cheap to produce and always available, but raise concerns about transparency, impossible body standards, and potential for political manipulation or deception.
Hey everybody, Tom Augenthaler here. Welcome to this next episode of Influence Unpacked. Today I'm going to talk about virtual influencers. It's something that I've been mulling over in my mind quite a while and I have not yet talked about it. I don't write about it a lot. If at all, other than comments on platforms like LinkedIn. The reason being is that I'm still a little conflicted about these things. I'm not really quite comfortable with them, to tell you the truth. But what prompted today's episode is the fact that HypeAuditor, a tool, an application that's used to evaluate influencers on platforms like Instagram and YouTube, came out with some findings about virtual influencers and the fact that they are growing in popularity and that there are a lot of people now engaging with them on platforms, specifically Instagram at this point. So it's worth talking about purely from— because of that. The people that tend to be following the Corona Hype Auditor are younger women between the ages of 18 and 24. That's more so than the males. Also, people in the USA tend to be following these virtual influencers more so than in other regions of the world. I wouldn't have expected that, but that evidently is the case. However, I would like to hear from people in other regions. Are these things, you know, are these virtual influencers gaining in popularity over there too? in your region. Evidently the leading virtual influencer right now is one called Lil Miquela. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name correctly. I hope so. I wouldn't want to offend the virtual influencer. They have 1 point— or she has 1.7 million followers evidently. I follow that one only because out of pure curiosity. I could care less what it has to say about anything. But I do follow it just as a marketer and an influencer marketer in particular. I need to stay on top of these things. Some of them are not as lifelike looking as her, they're more cartoonish looking. I'm not surprised by that. I think that even as little children in our culture we're groomed to look at cartoon characters as things to follow and pay attention to. Think of Tony the Tiger on a box of Frosted Flakes or on a TV commercial. They're great. Right? I mean, so we all are conditioned to follow some of these things. But so I understand what the pros are. You know, they're pretty inexpensive to create. I think they'll get more— the expense will come down as time goes on, as the tech gets better. They're on tap 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They're as biased or unbiased as you want them to be. It's whatever you want to program into them. You know, you could, as an agency, you could create a cadre of them and then gain followers for them and then hire them out. I understand how that can be lucrative as a brand. Maybe it warrants creating a virtual influencer to represent your brand to some extent. I could understand that too. But what are the cons to these things? You know, right now all of these virtual influencers for the most part are upfront about being virtual, but what if they hid that? What if they didn't, you know, what if they weren't forthcoming about that? To me, that's unethical, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen. What about their, you know, the way that they're depicted, their body type or whatever? What if they're perceived as being like a Barbie doll and they're too perfect? Does that create problems for followers too? We see that already in the influencer marketing space with these idyllic photos that people publish about themselves on their Instagram feeds of eating croissants with sipping some coffee on some bedspread with rose petals all over it. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? But I mean, that is, there is a certain visual attraction to that. Do these virtual influencers, do they exacerbate that at all? I don't know yet. I think we're gonna have to, the jury is out on that. We're gonna have to see what happens. What if these virtual influencers started taking political stances? What if political parties started building virtual influencers to even run for office? I don't know. Crazier things have happened and continue to happen in our day and age. So the jury, as I say, is still out on this stuff, but it'll be interesting to watch and to pay attention to. What I'd like to hear about in is from you guys about virtual influencers. What do you think about it? Is it something that is disturbing or has it got a lot of potential or whatnot? I'd love to hear about it. Please chime in. Thanks. Thank you.
