Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Tokyo by the Japanese studio teamLab
Weaving digital characters into our real digital lives.
In the late 1990s, the Gorillaz — a virtual music band made up of four animated characters — introduced the concept of digital avatars to the general public. A decade later, in 2013, artistic director Marc Jacobs designed costumes for Hatsune Miku, a virtual pop singer who collaborated with musicians Lady Gaga and Pharrell Williams. More recently, the emergence of Lil Miquela, a 19-year old Instagram star, social influencer, and recording artist who happens not to be real, has reignited a broader conversation about digital avatars, so much so that Time magazine featured a digital avatar in its 25 Most Influential People on the Internet line-up. Today this technology has begun to appear in a wider array of business and personal applications, beginning to blur the lines between the virtual and real worlds in a way that was envisioned by sci fi writers of previous decades.
Much has been written about the origins and landscape of this phenomenon, and I won’t cover that ground in this post. For more on the digital avatar market, this blog post by Michael Dempsey stands out as an excellent overview and analysis. Instead, this piece seeks to outline what I see as the first instantiation of companies built around this emerging ecosystem. There are a myriad of potential applications for which digital avatars can be useful, but for investors, some applications are better suited for long-term sustainability, while others seem more akin to flash-in-the-pan fads.
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In assessing this sector, I break the digital avatars ecosystem into three major areas (in chronological order of development): digital influencers, digital celebrities, and the digital self. For each, I will assess the opportunities to build a business and highlight companies working within that space, then discuss my expectations of how the market will evolve in its early stages.
Digital Influencers
We live in an age of authenticity whereby millennials and Generation Z consumers don’t want to feel marketed to. They regard authenticity as more important than the content itself, caring more about being able to relate to the source of the content than the information being presented. Especially with the rise of misinformation in social media platforms like Facebook, we’re starting to see increased skepticism in young people who worry that their personal information is being collected to sell them things. People want authenticity, but the advent of the digital age and social media has turned people into brands, and in many ways brands are becoming more like people. Just look at Twitter and Instagram.
What has made Lil Miquela so successful, in my opinion, is that a team of people is crafting a narrative around her and her friends that makes her life feel authentic. The “influencers” we see online are curated carefully to garner attention and monetize likes; therefore they are inherently inauthentic. Lil Miquela, on the other hand, makes no claims to authenticity: by revealing herself as a robot, she is showing all that she has, without the Instagram filters and saturated colors.
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Lil Miquela’s big reveal, Brud’s response
Ironically, it is the fact that she is completely manufactured and managed that enables her to be an influencer. While she isn’t herself real, she’s created to touch on the authentic needs, desires, and interests of her target audience, so she represents an authentic expression of the group’s gestalt.
“We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but its genuine. It’s a life.” — Christof (Ed Harris), the director and creator of The Truman Show
Just like any great character in literature or opera or the stage, the character is made up, but the issues it touches on are not (i.e. Lil Miquela helped amplify and give a voice to Black Lives Matter, immigrants’ rights, and encouraged young people to vote). Indeed, as Dr. Tama Leaver, an associate professor of internet studies at Curtin University, notes, “She is all the influence without all the stuff we are not supposed to see.”
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Truman Show, WestWorld
The storyline of Lil Miquela unwinds on a path between reality and imagination, much like the Jim Carrey film “The Truman Show” and HBO’s recent hit “Westworld.” A command center-esque digital agency where humans plot out the storyline, introduce the story beats, and craft the characters’ personalities makes the characters feel real. Unlike chatbots today, which feel like thousands of people’s personalities are sandwiched into one, having a single virtual character with a consistent voice gives a digital entity a real feel, infusing it with a more genuine attractiveness in this age of authenticity.
Ultimately, I’d love to see how jobs might be created within this space. So much of AI has been about displacing jobs, e.g., “service jobs are going to evaporate because you can replace them with bots.” But what if, instead, those same people can become ghostwriters behind influencers or become part of a team that helps build these digital characters’ personalities to make them more human? These displaced workers might now take on the role of creating a Mechanical Turk for digital influencers.
Digital Celebrities
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Source: Hackernoon