They will recommend products, from makeup to clothing to headphones. They model for fashion campaigns, vlog, & make music. You can hear about their daily stresses and celebrations on their Twitter, or find pictures of them cooking and relaxing on their Instagrams. They would have you believe that they’re just like anybody else — except they’re not real people at all. 

These are virtual influencers — digital personas that emulate human features & personalities. Some of them have gained a sizable number of followers, like any other human influencer, and the most popular ones even attract partnerships or feature in ad campaigns for companies.

If You’ve Missed Out On The Influence… 

But first: what even are influencers?

Companies have long partnered with celebrities for advertisement. But tremendous growth and innovation in the virtual sphere, especially on social media platforms, has created a new type of stardom: that of the online celebrity.

Popular content creators and personalities on platforms like Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok can gain massive online followings. And as everyone increasingly consumes and engages over the internet, companies are partnering with these highly connected, highly watched individuals in order for their brand to reach broader audiences and to cross-promote across platforms. 

Leveraging these internet celebs for advertisement is called influencer marketing, and they have proved to be successful because the effectiveness of an advertisement lies in authority and authenticity — and online influencers have the latter in spades. Their constant, casual, and often much more personal stream of social media content can foster feelings of personal attachment, making online influencers feel more like a close friend than a paid advertisement whenever they are recommending a product to viewers.

Welcome to Hyper-Reality

So where do digital creations enter this realm of online marketing?

Digital mascots and personalities have already made for terrific branding strategy, as fantasy creations can rapidly gain fans and take on a life of their own. Take the iconic Geico gecko, or Barbie’s Youtube channel (with 9.8 million subs!) for example. 

However, the line between real life and fantasy was always clear — Barbie might live in a mansion, but it isn’t a real one. And part Geico’s appeal is that it is an imaginary mascot, and maybe the idea of a talking financial gecko is funny.

So what happens when a creation crosses that line, and tries to take on a hyper-real, extremely human life? Can an imaginary image and narrative successfully pose as a dimensional person?

Enter virtual influencers: digital “people” who have hyper-realistic human features & behaviors. 

To create a hyper-real appearance, many of these influencers are computer-generated & animated. The photo-realism makes them marketable as viable substitutes for models: they not only look the part, but are touted as more flexible in terms of time and needs as well. Shudu is one example, and she is considered the “first digital supermodel”. 

She can look so convincingly real that Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty makeup line even briefly reposted a picture of the virtual Shudu wearing their makeup, because the beauty company mistook her for a real human customer. 

Beyond appearance, many of these virtual influencers also try to emulate human behavior. The “influencer” side of their role means that they also output content that builds a character. For instance, the virtual influencer I’m Miquela brands herself as a rising singer. She also talks to her audience as if she is a regular teen. 

Another example is Seraphine — who is really a playable character in the massively popular game League of Legends. Framed as a pop star, she has her own Instagram, Twitter, and Soundcloud. You can find pictures of her eating pastries, learn about her job at a bubble tea shop, and listen to her dreams of joining KDA (Riot Game’s virtual K-pop girl group, which is a whole 'nother can of worms). With lush, gradient-pink hair and saturated blue eyes, Seraphine does not look as realistic as I’m Miquela, but her online personality is still calibrated to seem realistic, teen-y, and relatable. 

Know Your Space

So the line between company creation and person has become more blurred. Miquela and Seraphine are really company products that roleplay as humans, and those agencies want their audience to emotionally invest in their characters and their storylines.

That sounds familiar, since many forms of entertainment, i.e. movies and books, also hope audiences invest in the story. And companies have also taken to social media to interact just like a real human, with Wendy’s Twitter being a good example. However, it doesn’t seem that every story is okay for virtual influencers to tell — and rather ironically, it may be the most human ones that are off-limits.

When Miquela was posed as kissing supermodel Bella Hadid in one Calvin Klein photoshoot, there was rapid online backlash: the public viewed the campaign as queerbaiting, and also criticized the Miquela’s place in the shoot. Couldn’t an actual gay model have been used for real representation, rather than Miquela? Simply stating that Miquela could be bisexual/gay felt exploitative rather than representative.

Similarly, the entire premise of Shudu has been criticized, as she is in fact the artistic product of a white man, Cameron-James Wilson. Wilson claims that he hasn’t actually made any money out of Shudu, and that everything he has done with this persona so far has been a labor of love and creativity. However, especially as Black models are an underrepresented demographic in the modeling and beauty industry, the existence of Shudu is tense — when she is featured in a photoshoot, is her creator benefiting from Black skin and features? Does she help the acceptance of Black beauty in society, or does she really just propel unrealistic standards of beauty and fetishization?

Most recently, Seraphine tweeted about her mental health struggles: her storyline has culminated in her finally being about to achieve her dreams of creating a song with KDA. Still, she is anxious and self-conscious, and asked fans to send tweets with support.

The immediate response was of disgust: people were quick to condemn Riot Games, and to hammer in the fact that Seraphine is not real. 

The attempt at portraying mental health issues came across as exploitative and in poor taste — like the writers were simply trying to score “woke” points, and to evoke pity and engagement while not actually supporting real people with real mental health struggles at all.

What all this suggests is that virtual influencers cannot bring representation in the same way that books, movies, or other real & diverse influencers do. After all, Miquela, Shudu, and Seraphine are carefully curated and manicured personas — and their biggest selling point, which is that they can be made into anything anyone might desire, is also the biggest check to their authenticity. 

They don’t have a real existence, and so they don’t actually feel the weight of what it really means to experience a certain human aspect. Ascribing certain features onto them feels like an accessorizing tag, rather than something that adds meaning to their story.

They can pose any way you like. They can wear and do anything you want, and be available any time of the day. But as long as they are associated with the ludicrous industry of influencer marketing, they might never be able to truly represent or speak on some of the things that are the most human-like race, culture, and sexuality. That leaves virtual influencers as curiosities caught in the middle: human-aspirant, but fatal for them to ever get too close.