Like it or not, Influencer Marketing is here to stay. According to Influencer Marketing Hub’s “State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2022”, “a staggering 18,900 firms offer or specialize in Influencer Marketing services” in 2021. Its RoI is sweet too: Every one dollar spent on influencer marketing earns more than five dollars.
When it comes to the Communications and Public Relations Industry, ChatGPT and similar AIs have their own advantages. The AIs can help the sector to grow significantly-and possibly could take it to the next level.
One such AI advantage acts on influencer engagement. AI’s can scale down a very difficult to manage service offering in influencer engagement: Accuracy of targeting.
AIs such as ChatGPT can accurately identify the most relevant influencers for a product being promoted based on customer personas, type of content, influencer types and a clear budget (provided the prompts are accurately structured). Geri Mileva, writing to influencermarketinghub.com says that AI’s can help in preventing influencer fraud, deep analysis of influencer audiences, matching content for the right influencer, and analyzing campaign metrics and performance.
This is accomplished by accurately identifying the most relevant influencers for a product based on customer personas, type of content, influencer types, repvention of influencer fraud, deep analysis of influencer audiences, matching content for the right influencer, and analyzing campaign performance etc. But this is not the news here.
The news is that while we in Comms and PR calculate the effectiveness of
“nano/micro/macro/mega” influencers Vs message reach in our campaigns (etc), the virtual influencers are rapidly coming into the driving seat by becoming powerful influencers of their own.
There is a teen influencer from Tokyo whose popularity keeps growing: Ms
Imma.gram.
She has 400,000+ followers on Instagram and another 445,000 on TikTok. (Ms) Imma.gram is not an influencer in the sense of the influencers we are used to..
Despite the human resemblance, she is not human at all. She is a virtual
“personality” created online. She is not even an actual 3D robot but an “influencer”
rendered by AI CGI.
Most importantly, Imma represents a new tech sector that keeps growing day by day. It’s the meta-human idol industry.
The meta-human idol industry. in its early stages, was littered with crude, CGI
rendered anime characters. Then the “characters” gradually began morphing into
avatars. From here, discussions (and development) of today’s “metaverse” (later 3D avatars and 3D metaverse) sprung up.
The iterative development of the “avatars” took a serious turn by 2020/’21 when their appearances became more and more human-like.
(Ms) Rozy, South Korea’s first virtual influencer of gen-z look, cannot be
distinguished from a real-human easily. So is Imma.gram.
Their skin and eyes are almost natural, and may not be comprehensible to anyone
that they come from the meta-human idol industry.
Rozy, for instance, shocked everyone when she showed that she was capable of
autonomous, human-like responses of her own.
This is complemented by their 24×7 availability, versatility, almost zero-cost, having their own high-tech capabilities (such as self-publishing, self-monitoring of
engagements, self-analysis of metrics and generation of own reports) … which may not be readily forthcoming from the human influencers!
The global meta-human idol industry is at its early stages. Still, its rapid growth is
unmissable.
Estimates are that it will reach $5.8 billion by 2025. In the fast-growing Chinese
market alone, it is expected to surpass $40 Billion as early as 2030.
We, who have been in such awe of our present influencer base, are now faced with the new prospect of the rise of slick and urbane Rozy’s and Immas!
