Future Tech China: The Next Wave of Virtual Influencers

Imagine a world where purchasing decisions are made as a result of virtual influencers having grown large, loyal follower bases on various social media platforms. Now, imagine the opportunities that would arise from this for both brands and creators. The good news is that this is the world we’re currently living in. In the upcoming years, with the ... See more

By definition, a virtual influencer is a fictional AI-generated person with realistic characteristics, features and personalities of humans. They behave just like real-life influencers. They speak to the camera, share selfies, feelings and thoughts. The only difference is the content. And, well, the obvious – they’re computer-generated with pre-pro... See more

TikTok—one of the biggest repositories of AI slime—is exploring the possibility of releasing virtual influencers to compete for brand deals against its human influencers. Instead of a brand paying a human influencer five or six figures to flog its clothes or cars (a sum TikTok doesn’t get a cut of) the platform wants to offer brands the option of u... See more

At a time when interacting safely with other humans can no longer be taken for granted, the appetite for digital spokespeople is accelerating. Brands are expected to spend as much as $15 billion annually on influencer marketing by 2022, up from $8 billion last year, according to Business Insider Intelligence. A growing slice of that money belongs t... See more

Brands are well attuned to the power of the influencer, but are afraid of getting embroiled in a scandal. As social intelligence company Influential’s founder and chief executive Ryan Detert puts it, human creators could have “a crazy night, get arrested or they have a slur of some sort on their page”. Virtual influencers on the other hand “have a ... See more

3. Influencers enable disintermediation of the social media superpowers: As Facebook matures, CPMs rise, driving up acquisition costs, often rendering the platform unsustainable or unscalable. We’ve witnessed the rise and fall of many D2C companies that competed for attention on Instagram and Facebook, and fell victim to increasingly expensive ad c... See more