“Why hire a celebrity, a supermodel, or even a social media influencer to market your product when you can create the ideal brand ambassador from scratch?” – Tiffany Hsu
❓ What You’ll Learn
- How to speak unlimited languages?
- How to avoid key-person risk?
- How to use virtual influencers in the real world?
- What do virtual models have that humans don’t?
- How to create custom digital characters?
- How to build a pseudonymous personal brand?
- What interactive experiences to offer?
- How to minimize business costs using virtual influencers?
- What are the most successful virtual influencers?
- How do virtual influencers affect the relatability of your brand?
- How to use voice cloning tools?
💎 Why It Matters
Virtual influencers have unlimited time and speak unlimited languages.
They can produce endless content.
🔍 Problem
Human influencers make mistakes and have constraints.
💡 Solution
Virtual influencers remove key-person risk.
You can choose how they look, what they do and where they are.
🏁 Players
Virtual Influencers
- Squeaky and Roy • Virtual ‘brothers’ of the D’Amelio family.
- Beefluencer • The first bee influencer raising money to save the bees.
- Body by Ralph • A fitness influencer that can’t take his own advice.
- Lu do Magalu • The most followed virtual influencer in the world.
Virtual Influencer Tools
- Alethea AI • Generates interactive AI Characters from a description in natural language.
- VSeeFace • Free, highly configurable face and hand-tracking VRM.
- Reface • Create realistic face swap videos, GIFs and memes with just one selfie.
- Avatarify • Pick a song, apply it to your photo and share singing portraits.
- Hologram Labs • Create and play with your ‘digital self’/virtual avatar.
🔮 Predictions
- Human influencers will create virtual avatars to scale their time and reach.
- Deceased singers from Whitney Houston to Frank Zappa have performed concerts with music holograms.
- Luka Dončič created Luk.AI on his TikTok to give his fans an immersive and interactive experience.
- Grimes’ virtual alter-ego goes by WarNymph. She’s in Beta.
- Ariana Grande went on a virtual tour in Fortnite.
- Fashion and skincare brands will use virtual models to sell their products. They are faster, cheaper and easier to work with.
- AI Model Agency is an AI fashion agency that lets brands and models choose from a wide range of styles to create the perfect photo.
- L’Oréal launched a ‘virtual idol’ in China named Mr. Ou. He’s a 24-year-old eco-activist who works in the fashion industry.
- Metaverse Architects’ AI model agency offers scalable, customizable and highly accurate virtual models for brands.
- Tiffany partnered with a virtual influencer AYAYI to model and promote its Knot Collection.
- ASOS used a virtual model for its augmented reality catwalk.
- Deep Agency lets you hire virtual models for your project.
- Virtual influencers will participate in real-world events. They don’t need breaks and can perform in more than one place at a time.
- Xinhua News is a Chinese media outlet that unveiled an AI news presenter who can cover news 24/7.
- Miquela debuted a song at Lollapalooza. Her top song has 63 million listens on Spotify.
- Jared Leto was interviewed by Fubuki on his press tour for Morbius.
- Cinder appeared at SXSW as a host and mixologist.
☁️ Opportunities
- Create AI-generated podcasts and videos with customized characters and voices.
- Cherie Hu generated an audio version of her newsletter read aloud by an AI clone of her own voice.
- Noah fed an AI his LinkedIn profile. It wrote and recorded an entire podcast for him in his own voice.
- Ramsri created a personalized guided meditation generated entirely by AI.
- Matt created an AI clone of himself so that he could conduct an interview.
- CoffeeVectors generated voice acting entirely based on a written script.
- Build a pseudonymous personal brand using virtual influencer technology like voice changers and VTuber skins.
- Charlotte Fang is the pseudonym for the founder of Remilia. She plans to turn profile picture NFTs into avatars that can replace faces and bodies.
- Pacman is the founder of Blur, a 1,400,000,000-dollar NFT marketplace. He uses a virtual avatar for podcasts and interviews.
- CL207 live streams trading and podcasts with a cat character VTuber.
- Build interactive experiences that let audiences interact with “you” whenever they want.
- Serah Reikka’s audience can chat with her whenever they want via a Telegram bot.
- Caryn Marjorie will be your virtual girlfriend for $1/minute on Snapchat. You can invest in her technology.
- Raelice uses VTChaos to let Twitch Chat control his VTuber avatar in real time with chat commands.
🏔️ Risks
- Lack of Authenticity • People demand authenticity and relatability from brands which virtual avatars may not have. TikTok requires virtual influencers to be tagged as such. Kyle Vorbach faked his luxury Instagram life with AI.
- Anonymity • It can be hard to hold anonymous virtual influencers accountable for their business or ethics.
🔑 Key Lessons
- You can minimize costs. Virtual influencers have minimal recurring production costs and can appear in many places at once.
- Virtual influencers are easier to control. A human model might feel uncomfortable being used as a virtual assistant on your website. A virtual influencer won’t complain.
🔥 Hot Takes
- Virtual influencers are not new. Mickey Mouse and Superman share many of the same qualities. They’re 100% controllable, can speak different languages and are “immortal”.
- Humans and computers will become one. It will become near-impossible to distinguish between robots and humans on the internet.
😠 Haters
“We want to connect with real people. Human influencers are more effective at building emotional connections.”
While authentic human connection will always be valuable. Sometimes it may not fit your budget or schedule. This is when virtual influencers are a good option.
“Virtual influencers create a false sense of reality. They create distorted perceptions of what is possible or desirable for humans.”
Virtual influencers can be used for good or evil. If a creator has deceptive intentions, the virtual influencer will amplify that. Creators are responsible for what their virtual influencers say and do. Platforms are also responsible for holding creators accountable.
“Virtual influencers will be biased by default. If they are trained on unethical data, how can we teach them to be ethical?”
This is a valid concern. Systemic biases will affect how virtual influencers “think” and act. Creators need to make efforts to adjust for this societal flaw in their training data. This article says that virtual influencers will use their ability to mimic human influencers to exploit our emotions.
🔗 Links
- Anyone played with Synthesia or D-ID yet? • The tweet behind this report.
- Who is Virtual Music Artist and Dancer, Polar? • An interview with the creator behind viral virtual musician POLAR.
- ElevenLabs AI Voice Cloning is the Future • A written guide to voice cloning and the ElevenLabs API.
📁 Related Reports
- Personal Brands • You can scale your personal brand by being or creating virtual influencers.
- Influencer Marketing • Virtual influencers unlock massive new opportunities for influencer marketing.
- The Creator Economy • The creators behind virtual influencers are well-positioned to monetize their audiences.
- Audience-First Products • Virtual influencers will build and sell products within their niche.
- AI-Generated Content • Most virtual influencers rely on AI-generated content to scale their brand.
🙏 Thanks
Thanks to Meiko S. Patton, Vajresh Balaji, Thomas Sorheim and Uwe Dreissigacker. We had a great time jamming on this report.
✏️ Harry researched and wrote this report. Dru and Emin edited this report.
📈 What else?
Trends PRO #0114 — Virtual Influencers has more insights.
What you’ll get:
- 11 Virtual Influencers (175% More)
- 14 Virtual Influencer Tools (180% More)
- 7 Predictions (133% More)
- 7 Opportunities (133% More)
- 5 Risks (150% More)
- 4 Key Lessons (100% More)
- 4 Hot Takes (100% More)
- 9 Links (200% More)
With Trends Pro you’ll learn:
- (📈 Pro) How will social media platforms enable virtual influencers?
- (📈 Pro) How to use a virtual influencer as your brand mascot?
- (📈 Pro) How to humanize your brand?
- (📈 Pro) How to profit from selling NFTs?
- (📈 Pro) How to start a virtual influencer talent agency?
- (📈 Pro) How to sell tools for VTubers?
- (📈 Pro) What are the benefits of joining a VTuber agency?
- (📈 Pro) How to use virtual influencers in the metaverse?
- (📈 Pro) How to sell a virtual influencer?
- (📈 Pro) What new jobs do virtual influencers create?
- (📈 Pro) What legal risks do virtual influencers pose?
- (📈 Pro) How can the appearance of your virtual influencer help you?
- (📈 Pro) How to go viral on TikTok?
- (📈 Pro) How will virtual influencers change our online identities?
- (📈 Pro) How are virtual influencers growing on Twitch?
- And much more…
Get Weekly Reports
Join 65,000+ founders and investors
📈 Unlock Pro Reports, 1:1 Intros and Masterminds
Become a Trends Pro Member and join 1,200+ founders enjoying…
🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.
📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.
💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.
🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.
💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.
