Grime’s gestation lasted more than a year. In November 2018, the Canadian techno star registered a Twitter account called WarNymph. It wasn’t until January 2020, though, that the account received a matching Instagram stream and its first post. WarNymph, the world learned, was a winged baby with pixie ears and a bow and arrow. She grew up quickly. A few weeks after recording a message predicting the end of the world, the character transformed into a bald teenager in futuristic clothes demanding the inclusion of Overwatch in the Olympic games.
Asked what WarNymph was all about, Grimes explained that the character was her digital avatar. “The avatar allows us to play to the strengths of digital existence rather than be a human trying to navigate a world that isn’t made for us,” she told The Face. “For example, the digital body can age, die, respawn, change her face… There’s so much identity potential! My human self is much more limited.”
By creating a virtual version of herself, Grimes was able to put a barrier between herself and her audience. She could keep working while she was pregnant, and she also had a way to share opinions and spread influence at a distance from her human persona. After tweeting about the fall of oil and the attractiveness of a “capitalist-socialist technocracy,” WarNymph noted that she couldn’t “debate like this in the grimes account due to simplified and bad takes ending up in the media.”
What Grimes had done was create her own virtual influencer, a digital persona with greater development possibilities than her own human personality.
“Humans have a harder time creating an entirely second social media account on the same platform,” explains Christopher Travers of www.virtualhumans.org, a creator of virtual influencers. “By ‘going virtual’ she can now bring her fans two storylines: one of human Grimes, and the other of virtual WarNymph.”
Grimes wasn’t the first brand to see the benefits of creating a virtual influencer. Other brands and agencies have now created about 125 digital personalities, many with seven-figure followings. Miquela Sousa, better known as Lil Miquela, is the work of Brud, a Los Angeles technology start up. According to her bio, Lil Miquela is a 19-year-old, half-Spanish, half-Brazilian musician. Despite being entirely digital, her Instagram page has almost three million followers, an audience big enough to land her work with brands including Prada and Calvin Klein alongside Bella Hadid. A single released in 2017 has generated more than 15 million streams.
Lil Miquela launched in 2016, which makes her young in comparison to Hatsune Miku, the role-model for virtual influencers. Created by Japanese firm Crypton Future Media, Hatsune Miku started life as a voice synthesizer in 2007. Personified as a 16-year-old, anime-inspired girl with turquoise hair, she has now released more than 100,000 songs and has more than 2 million followers on Facebook, not all of them from Japan, where she is now a leading pop star. She’s worked with brands including Sega, Toyota USA, and Google, and has also sold out concerts around the world, appearing and performing as a hologram. Top virtual influencers can now secure multiple six-figure branding deals. Spark Capital led an investment round for the creators of Lil Miquela that generated $125 million. Investors increasingly see virtual influencers as the future for advertising and online marketing.
The Cost of Being Human
For brands, working with a virtual influencer offers a number of advantages over a human influencer. The influencer market is now saturated, with thousands of young, fashionable types battling for the same audience, using the same kind of appeal, and suffering the same shrinking engagement. According to one study, influencer engagement on Instagram fell from 4.3 percent in February to just 2.4 percent by June 2020, a decline powered in part by changing social media algorithms but also by influencer fatigue. A survey in 2018 found that 47 percent of customers were concerned by the repetitive nature of influencer content, and 23 percent were concerned at the declining quality of that content. At the same time though, more than half of the 4,000 respondents said that they were watching more influencer content than the year before. There is a demand for the entertainment that influencers can deliver but the influencers themselves are struggling to deliver content that stretches beyond beautiful faces in beautiful places, showing off their sponsors’ beauty products.
Virtual influencers offer brands something new, and they can more easily adapt to changing fashions and customer tastes. Grimes has pointed out that WarNymph is still in Beta. As the technology underpinning the avatar develops, she can kill her off, rebirth her, and grow her again.
“Virtual influencers live forever, and look how you want them forever,” says Christopher Travers. “Virtual influencers innovate on human beings.”
They’re also better behaved than human beings. Feliz Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, lost both his sponsorship with Disney’s Maker Studios and his YouTube show after making anti-Semitic and racist comments. With 60 million subscribers, he had been one of the most popular influencers on the video platform. In July 2019, the failure of a beauty filter revealed that young Chinese vlogger Her Royal Highness Qiao Biluo was actually a 58-year-old woman. And in 2018, YouTube suspended all advertising on leading influencer Logan Paul’s channels because of his “pattern of behavior.” He had participated in the Tide Pond challenge, removed a fish from a pond to give it to CPR, tasered a couple of dead rats, and during a visit to Japan, filmed the corpse of a suicide victim. He’s now been reduced to taking part in boxing matches with musicians and former fighters looking for an easy payday.
Human influencers do have the ability to build a genuine relationship with audiences. They’re a similar age, share their interests, and can talk their followers’ language in a way that brands often struggle to do. But they’re also young and irresponsible. Brands who work with human influencers have to understand that when they sponsor a channel or ask an influencer to show off their products, they’re taking a risk. Should the influencer act unprofessionally or launch a racist rant, their brand risks taking damage.
A virtual influencer that manages to gain an audience can bring all of the benefits of human influence with none of that unpredictability. The digital avatars are often created and managed by an agency with their clients’ interests in mind, not by a twenty-something with too much money and an addiction to attention. They’re not going to suddenly rant against ethnic minorities or say something rash. They’re less likely to fake popularity by loading up on fake followers. And they won’t outgrow and lose their audience. Hatsune Miku has remained sixteen for the last thirteen years. She’s been able to retain the attention of her previous audience, who can now look on her with nostalgia, while adapting just enough to attract the attention of a new generation of fans. Virtual influencers are the social media marketing equivalent of a boy band.
“Virtual influencers are fresh, PR-worthy, higher engaging, and with more freedom/control than a human,” says Christopher Travers.
How to Build a Virtual Influencer
Creating a virtual influencer isn’t straightforward. The list maintained at VirtualHumans.org shows a broad range of character types, including many that aren’t human at all. Alongside Lil Miquela and Hatsune Miku are Barbie, a chill pill, and the Geico insurance company’s digital gecko. Human influencers might come in a range of Kardashian lookalikes but virtual influencers have been cats, birds, and even a sausage.
The place to begin then is not with a look that attempts to find an audience but with the identification of an audience that the brand wants to influence. “Once you understand the demographic, you can work with storytellers to flesh out a virtual influencer’s look and story in sync with the demographic’s interests,” says Christopher Travers.
The brand can then bring the influencer to life in a style that appeals to that audience. It’s a process that requires a combination of careful design and good storytelling, and of course, the regular production of the kind of entertaining content that audiences will want to share.
Human influencers arrive largely formed and with their personalities and styles already in place. Their only work is producing content that attracts and holds an audience. The creators of virtual influencers need to both invest effort and resources into planning and building their digital persona, and only then engage in a long-term commitment to produce content. It took Grimes’s team a year to go from registering their Twitter account to being ready to produce content for it. Over the next four months, WarNymph’s Instagram page produced eighteen posts and hasn’t added new content on either platform since April 2020. Constructing a virtual influencer, complete with image, style, and backstory is only the first step; the brand or the agency behind the influencer still needs an ongoing content plan.
The Limits of a Virtual Influencer
Having put in that effort, virtual influencers are still left with some important limitations. Hatsune Miku is unusual in going as far as creating holograms so that she can perform live. Most content created using digital personas is still imagery. It’s the work of digital artists who create the pictures and pose the character, often in their sponsor’s branded clothes. Human influencers, though, will also often use video to capture a deeper engagement. They can broadcast live and take viewers with them into their activities. Platforms like Facebook Live and Instagram even allow influencers to engage directly with followers, answering questions and taking suggestions from viewers that determine their actions. That’s currently much harder for virtual influencers to do. Animating a digital personality is a bigger technical challenge than producing stills, and significantly increases the cost of the content. Christopher Travers points out that teams are developing video solutions that aim to help virtual influencers appear more personable, “but most of these solutions exist within a vacuum and fail to emulate the experience a human influencer creates on video.”
And while a virtual influencer is less likely to go off-script and fake a traffic accident or hold a party during a lockdown, they can still generate controversy. Lil Miquela has political opinions. She’s posted liberal views, supported transgender rights, and called to abolish ICE. That taking of a position could divide audiences, driving away some of the supporters a sponsor might be trying to attract. But Nike has shown the value of brands taking a stand, and Brud, Lil Miquela’s creators, have made sure that they can appeal to everyone. They also created Bermuda, a Trump-following virtual influencer with a grudge against Lil Miquela. They used politics to create conflict and generate more drama.
But the biggest limits of a virtual influencer may be not their difficulty of appearing live or their inability to interact directly with followers (there are no meets-and-greets for virtual influencers) but their lack of authenticity. Love or hate influencers, they’re real people sharing a life that they hope their followers will enjoy watching. Virtual influencers might be fun and creative but they’re the work of teams. They’re planned by creative directors and their stories are written by professional copywriters and storytellers, but they’re still a committee’s idea of a teenager.
Human influencers are unlikely to have anything to worry about just yet but they might want to think about virtual influencers can do for them. Justin Bieber has already rolled out a virtual version of himself in collaboration with Amazon. More human influencers may well find that it pays to take Grimes’s idea and create their own virtual versions.
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