FAKE INFLUENCER, REAL INFLUENCE
Perfect skin, enchanting eyes, and never sleeps. China's virtual influencers are becoming a rising trend in China.
His name is Chuan 川, and he's a social media influencer. He's not real, but that doesn't stop him from doing ad deals to promote products on his social media platforms. Chuan 川 is the first male model in China's metaverse.
He debuted on 3 September 2021, and as of today, he has more than 150,000 followers on his social media accounts!
Chuan has eyes of different colors, and he likes long walks at night. His MBTI test showed that he's INFP — the fact that he took the test shows how close he wants to be to his real followers.
Chuan's already worked as a spokesperson for the South Korean brand LANEIGE, promoted Chinese clothing and jewelry brands, and even recommended Beijing's M Woods, one of China's largest and most prominent contemporary art museums.
During the last few years, a crucial part of marketing in China has been Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) — they're the people consumers can trust.
But Chinese social media users don't just want trustworthy influencers.
There's also a growing demand for exciting new technology amongst Chinese consumers, so a different kind of KOL is gradually taking center stage in China.
They are highly-realistic AI virtual KOLs! The first-ever Chinese AI virtual influencer appeared last year.
Bearing a close resemblance to humans, Ling was co-created by Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Shanghai Xmov Information Technology and Beijing Cishi Culture Media Company.
The emerging virtual idol sector, backed by China's younger generation, has been on a fast track in recent years, with more domestic internet firms increasing investment in this nascent sector.
Virtual idols are fast becoming a billion-dollar industry in China. Bloomberg reported last October that Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer with 3 million followers on Instagram, makes around $8,500 for a sponsored post.
Chinese marketing research firm iiMedia Research estimates the virtual idol industry pulled in $540 million in 2020 from brand endorsements alone.
The research firm charted the industry's growth from 2017 to 2020 and projected a 70% year-over-year growth rate.
The reason for the success could be that virtual KOLs connect with their fans through a broad, complex social media web. They use platforms like Weibo, Bilibili, and Douyin — China's versions of Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok — and similar platforms like Xiaohongshu or Taobao.
These primarily e-commerce-driven platforms, not available for the western market, provide virtual KOLs with diverse possibilities to monetize their connections with fans, strengthening their online presence.
Be the Smartest Person at Work Today,
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Expert Insight
with Allison Fitzpatrick
Marketing & Advertising Attorney
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Virtual Influencers sometimes run afoul of federal regulation:
How to Regulate the Metaverse?
In recent months, the metaverse has become an increasingly popular buzzword. Companies are building metaverse platforms and exploring unique ways of engaging consumers within these new digital landscapes. Influencer marketing likely will remain an important tactic to grow engagement within the metaverse.
An important precursor to full immersion in this space is the gradual rise of virtual influencers–lifelike personas that CGI artists, digital agencies (and sometimes even artificial intelligence) create and manage.
The most well-known example is Li’l Miquela, though there are several others.
Some brands are embracing virtual influencers. They can command as strong a following as actual human influencers, while presenting much lower risk and expense. After all, virtual influencers do not need to be flown across the country, put in hotels, fed meals or given per diems.
However, brands and agencies still must be cautious. They should understand legal issues that arise during both human-driven and virtual influencer campaigns in the metaverse.
Morals Clauses
In addition to sponsored posts, virtual influencers frequently create organic social content for themselves. As such, some have established more risqué personas than others. As with human influencers, companies considering working with virtual influencers should carefully vet their prior social media activity. In addition, companies should check the virtual influencer's previous endorsements, ensuring there is no image-tarnishing material.
In addition, while it is easier to manage a virtual influencer’s behavior than a human’s, it is still a good idea to include a morals clause within contracts for virtual influencers. This allows the company to terminate if the virtual influencer engages in unexpected behavior that might cause reputation damage.
Social Engagement
As brands venture deeper into the metaverse, the prevalence of virtual influencers likely will increase. Some brands may create dedicated virtual influencers. When considering this strategy, communication professionals must consider how virtual influencers will organically accumulate sufficient followers to meaningfully benefit the brand.
Certain companies purport to sell ‘followers’ to social media accounts. However, be warned that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and multiple state regulators have shuttered much of this activity in recent years.
For example, in a high-profile case against Devumi, LLC, regulators stopped the company from creating thousands of fake accounts and selling them to influencers. The influencers used them to fraudulently inflate their followers, view counts and other engagement metrics.
Disclosures
The driving force behind all influencer marketing regulation is the principle that influencers must disclose when they have a material connection with brands they promote. For instance, influencers are required to disclose this information through clear and understandable disclosures–such as #ad or #sponsored.
Effective disclosures will continue to be a defining requirement for influencers, human or virtual, who create content on behalf of brands within metaverse platforms.
Transparency
Brands also must consider transparency with respect to disclosing that the influencer is not a real person. For years, Li’l Miquela posted as a real person.
Today, it is common for virtual influencers to prominently identify themselves as being robots or otherwise artificial creations. The FTC has not issued guidance on this issue, but it seems a good bet that regulators would expect virtual influencers to disclose that they are not real people. Such information could sway consumers’ perceptions or conclusions about the influencer’s endorsements.
Since a robot cannot taste, how reliable is its opinion about the taste of Brand X’s new snack product? Wouldn’t such a post be deceptive? For this reason, it is recommended that virtual influencers disclose not only their material connection with a brand, but also that they are not real people.
Bottom Line
Until new influencer marketing regulations emerge that focus specifically on the metaverse, brands must continue to be cognizant of and apply present-day marketing regulations to the metaverse.
Allison Fitzpatrick is a partner in the Advertising + Marketing practice group and Samantha Rothaus is an associate in the Advertising + Marketing practice group at Davis+Gilbert
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ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW, CONDENSED ('CAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE THE TIME!)
1. Twitter has new rules to prevent duplicate tweets, making "copy and pasting" a thing of the past? The new policy outlines a range of potential penalties, including: Making Tweets ineligible for amplification in Top Search results and on Trends. Not recommending Tweets in timelines of users who don’t follow the
Tweet author/ Downranking Tweets in replies. Excluding Tweets and/or accounts in email or in-product recommendations. The purpose of this? To prevent bots, and also people "stealing" other tweets to make them their own. Quite often larger accounts will steal tweets!
2. Premium blockchain agency CoinPoint Group’s network top-billed by BestBitcoinCasino.com has been acquired by SpeedMedia, a digital marketing company owned by JKR Investment Group. Founded in 2013 as the first consultation and marketing agency focus on blockchain technology and crypto solutions, CoinPoint Group has created a
wide network of websites, including igaming websites BestBitcoinCasino.com and BestBitcoinSlots.com as well as cryptocurrency and blockchain website CoinChoose.com.
3. Casual Sex site Grindr on Monday said it has hooked up with a special purpose acquisition company to become a publicly traded company valued, out of the gate, at $2.1 billion. Los Angeles-based Grindr expected to raise $384 million when it combines with Tiga Acquisition Corp and becomes
Grindr Inc. They've try to rebrand as a "social media network" but everyone knows its a hookup site.
4. Actofit, a connected device and fitness management company, has acquired Bengaluru-based affiliate-marketing startup Adkitty, for a deal value of $1M in a cash and product mix, and is set to launch an online fitness management platform for fitness
coaches within Adkitty, called Coachpro. Adkitty enables experts, trainers, institutions and establishments to create virtual storefronts and display discounts on things their users need.
5. Roku says that TV streaming devices have finally passed legacy Pay-TV in weekly reach among adults between the ages of 18 to 49. It’s also allowing retailers to pair shoppable ads with Roku Pay to remove friction from the customer journey.
6. A former Facebook employee is taking legal action against Meta over accusations of human trafficking, reports Business Insider. Kenya-based Daniel Motaung worked as a moderator for the social media platform in 2019, having been employed by tech-outsourcing company Sama, Meta’s largest outsourcing partner in Africa. Motaung stated that his job involved viewing
distressing content, including images of child sexual abuse and beheadings, which he had not been warned of prior to his employment. The South-African national also revealed that Sama intentionally hid that he was applying to work for Facebook, asserting that the San Francisco-based firm utilized a recruitment process "designed to trick unsuspecting applicants into unknowingly becoming Facebook Content Moderators."
7. Less than a month after revealing its stagnating growth and receding subscriber count, Netflix is accelerating its transition to an ad-supported streaming service, reports the New York Times.
8. Speaking virtually at the Financial Times Future of the Car summit, Musk shared that he disagreed with the social media platform’s decision to remove Trump from the platform and will add him back, stating, “I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country, and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a
voice.
9. NBCUniversal unveiled its fifth-annual lineup of new commercial innovations, which among others include leveraging AR for immersive metaverse-type experiences and sequential ad storytelling that pulls
consumers through the purchase funnel throughout the day. Their AR Portal, which uses NBCU’s augmented reality (AR) technology is an entry to the metaverse. It’s a mobile-led initiative that takes consumers from popular content they love into a more immersive environment via a QR code where brands can connect further.
10. More than a third (36%) of UK consumers would cancel their Netflix subscription if it became ad funded, according to research by LoopMe. Netflix could introduce its lower-priced ad-supported subscription plan by the end of the year, earlier than originally planned, the New York Times reported.
11. Lego Gonna grow fast: Atul Bhardwaj, Lego’s chief digital officer, said that one new capability the company had was “to start building our own games — that could be a possibility”. Lego outsourced its video game development shortly after 2003 and has enjoyed some hits with individual titles but not with some of its bigger projects. People close to the toymaker say there
was long-held frustration at Lego that it had not developed Minecraft, the hugely popular digital building game created by a Swedish start-up and now owned by Microsoft.”
12. TikTok is rolling out a new advertising program that lets brands put ads next to the top 4% of videos on the platform — and for once, creators get a cut, too. The short-form video app launched TikTok Pulse on Wednesday. The feature also allows creators with at least 100,000 followers to participate in a revenue-share program, the first ad product of its kind to do
so, though it's unclear how many creators it will approve for the program in its initial stages, TechCrunch reported.
13. While entitled to trademark and copyright protection, virtual influencers may actually be liable under various states’ right of publicity laws for misappropriation. The right of publicity is the legal right of an individual to control the commercial use of their name, image, likeness, and other unequivocal identifiers. How, though, could a virtual influencer violate a
human’s right of publicity? Despite the relative novelty of virtual influencers and supermodels, case law over the past few decades cautions the creators of such CGI to avoid references to the name, image, and likeness of famous and well-known individuals.
14. Regulators in 5 states concurrently filed emergency orders Wednesday towards a digital online casino they are saying has ties to Russia and that has been working within the metaverse, a digital world the place members can work together with one another, buy merchandise and even gamble. State regulation enforcement officers say Flamingo On line casino Membership’s
operators did not disclose its Russian ties and claimed it had partnerships with reliable companies when it did not. The civil submitting represents a brand new and coordinated effort by state regulators to police a few of what’s going on amid the explosive development of the metaverse, the place innovation and hypothesis have additionally supplied fertile territory for criminals engaged in alleged fraud, theft and deception.
15. Virtual events in the metaverse present a new platform for sponsorship opportunities for alcohol beverage companies. Concerts, games, and other events in the metaverse all provide venues for alcohol beverage companies to market products. The popular online video game, Fortnite, for example, hosted a digital concert with rapper Travis Scott that
attracted more than 45 million viewers over five performances, while Roblox hosted a virtual concert experience with Lil Nas X that attracted more than 30 million viewers.
16. There is already a significant amount of commercial transactions in the Metaverse and this is only projected to rise as the concept catches on. While online transactions involving sale of digital assets/items have been around for some time, the stakes appear to be much higher in case of the Metaverse. For instance, real estate sales on various Metaverse platforms exceed $500 million, according to MetaMetric Solutions, a provider of Metaverse data and insights. In light of this, it is important to have in place a redressal mechanism to ensure that buyers of digital assets are not defrauded
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The Watercooler
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All About Us & Advertising
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ADOTAT.com is the product of over 20 years of online marketing publications and articles by Pesach Lattin & many more experts that have contributed!
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