The very weird world of “Virtual Influencers”

Seraphine’s flowing pink hair and cat-themed Instagram posts had attracted thousands of fans when the news that she was created by Riot Games Inc. — the studio behind smash-hit esports game League of Legends — sent her account viral.

Now her Instagram follower count is nearly 420,000 and she’s making appearances in Shanghai to promote her music, while most flesh-and-blood social media stars are stuck at home. Despite not being real, she still sometimes wears a mask. By the time Riot Games admitted Seraphine wasn’t actually a real person, her luscious pink locks and cat-infused Instagram posts had already attracted a few thousand fans.

But Riot, the studio that made the blockbuster esports game League of Legends, did not make a false step by letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak. Far from it. At the last count, Seraphine was chugging along with 423,000 followers. She went viral AFTER it was revealed she was the construct of a corporate entity.

How did that happen? A report on the enigma of Seraphine in Bloomberg opined this: “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 to virtual influencers, and traditional marketing is experiencing serious disruption.” Previously, the established way to deal with influencers was to pay them (the human ones anyway) a lot of money to promote your brand. And it was a strategy that was prone to problems. Would they provide the right sort of impact? Would they say the right thing? Were they doing it for the money? Was their heart really in it?

And crucially, was it even worth it in the hard world of KPIs and other performance metrics. Of course, there is also the perfect scenario of getting positive mentions from unpaid-for real human influencers, ones who genuinely love your products and just want to tell the world about them. Welcome though this is, it rarely delivers long-term results.

Christopher Travers, the founder of virtualhumans.org, a website that documents this peculiar industry, says: “Virtual influencers, while fake, have real business potential. They are cheaper to work with than humans in the long term, are 100% controllable, can appear in many places at once, and, most importantly, they never age or die.” On 13 October, it was revealed Seraphine was a playable character on League of Legends.

This game can, staggeringly, host eight million people all playing at the same time. Seraphine is one of around 125 active, successful virtual influencers, almost half of which had not been invented until the start of 2019. Then there’s a whole other paradigm: the freelance virtual influencers.

Just take Lil Miquela, a model with 3.1 million social media followers and a fee of about $8,500 per sponsored post. She (it?) portrays herself as a model and names Calvin Klein, Prada, and other fashion brands as clients. OnBuy estimates Lil Miquela will make about $11.7 million for her creators this year. This is somewhat disturbing, perhaps even insane.

But then consider this: Covid-19 has led to the cancellation of product launches and sponsored travel. The humans are, by and large, stuck at home — unable to get out there with their smartphones and tell the world about new places, new things, new products. Their loss is Lil Miquela’s gain. She casually dropped a music video at the 2020 online-only Lollapalooza festival, for heaven’s sake. The trend’s real driver is Gen Z, a young cohort expected to number more than 2.56 billion by the end of this year.

As its oldest members start to hit their mid-20s, their earnings are growing, making them attractive to marketers worldwide. According to McKinsey & Co., millennials and Gen Z represent spending power of about $350 billion in the US alone.

Will SuperOne create its own branded influencers in the style of Serafina? Will it pay a variety of human influencers? Will it approach Lil Miquela? Or will it rely on the goodwill of influencers who just love the trivia games and the excitement of winning big jackpots?

All these balls are very much in play as it stands. The great thing is that SuperOne can take a nuanced view on the power of influencers — it doesn’t need to rush to make a hasty decision because it already has a large and growing foundation through its Genesis Community. The Genesis Community is populated by affiliate marketing specialists who are earning fantastic rewards for telling other people about SuperOne and sharing the love.

It’s a great way to build a network in which all the participants can make money for themselves. Would Serafina and Lil Miquela approve?

You’ll have to ask them.