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this podcast is brought to you by knowled of [Music] warten brands have long used celebrities
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athletes and social media influencers to pitch their products now they're getting
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endorsements and driving sales in a different way no humans required virtual influencers these are computer created
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personalities and they are gaining immense popularity around the world I'm Angie basini and I'm here today with
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Wharton marketing Professor Jonah Burger he's bringing us some of his research on
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Virtual influencers and what he discovered companies are doing that actually boost the effectiveness of
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these avatars Jen welcome back thanks for having me let's just jump right into
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this what is a virtual influencer why are they so popular and why would a company choose to use one is in as
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opposed to a real person what's the advantage yeah so a virtual influencer they really started out um as almost
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online abot and some right so uh think about an image of someone it's a it's
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not actually real person a a fabricated image of someone that looks real uh maybe initially they might have taken a
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real person's body but put uh superimposed a face on top of it that would have been consistent across images
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this isn't an actual human being it's a sort of an online avatar that is run
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potentially by a design company or by a brand or by a media company um and uh influencers are interesting right lots
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of interest in this space obviously companies want to get people to share word of mouth about the products and
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services and ideas um and so many companies organizations started paying traditional human influencers to do this
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um but there's some challenges working with human infl right you may not be able to find uh someone who has the
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exact mix of characteristics that you're looking for maybe you're looking for
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someone who's from a particular country and has a certain set of hobbies or a
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certain set of interests um and has some other set of characteristics and finding
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that masch between geography and uh and demographics and sort of psychographics and interests might be might be
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difficult to do um and second uh working with these virtual influ really gives companies organizations a lot more
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control right when you work with a human influencer you get some say and exactly
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what they say about the brand uh but you don't always get full complete sign off
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on everything that they do they may have some leeway in what they get to say or you may be concerned you know maybe if I
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work with celebrity and they get in trouble in the future is that going to hurt or have some blowback on the brand
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uh and so the benefit of working with these virtual influencers is Media companies or the individuals that run
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them have a much more control over what these influencers virtual influencers say and do obviously they're not going
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to get in trouble with the law because they're not real people and and so that
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ability can uh diffuse Word of Mouth uh and influence in a different and know way I know there's something I I saw in
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your paper about that regarding that and it said that you know people consumers don't necessarily believe that a real
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social media influencer has tried the product but you're sort of disabused of
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that notion when it's a virtual influencer you already know that's not possible so you sort of you get past
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that worry yeah I mean what's also changed so much in the past few years even the time we've been working on this
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paper is the way the virtual influencer space has changed right originally it might have been an image superimposed on
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a a real person's face um someone else's face imposed on their phase but now
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think about everything going on with llms and all these different models things going on now they can create
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images and create videos and uh and do things through AI that were not possible uh two three four five years ago and so
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we're not just seeing images now or seeing more things with video and other things and so there's going to be a lot
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of more content that's created by people other than humans um already some of
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it's going on and there's only going to be more in in the coming years you had
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some great stats in your paper I want to share with our audience uh you had that
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58% of American consumers follow at least one virtual influencer that 40% of American consumers have purchased
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something that was promoted by a virtual influencer and that VI Market is going to reach 11 billion do this year which
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is huge so is the message that if you're a brand or a company just make an avatar
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stick it online watch the money roll in well I think there's there's not just
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one choice there's a couple choices brands have right one is should we create our own virtual character I think
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the challenge there is they can't just like any sort of uh online sort of thing
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they can't only post about you right most people probably wouldn't want to
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follow a virtual influencer if they only talk about I don't know coca colola or
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Delta Airlines or Nike all the time um and so one reason people want to follow these virtual influencers they seem like
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regular people right yes sure they do some collaborations with Brands but they also post some unbranded content they
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also might talk about someplace they're going this weekend or show a picture of
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them doing something with friends that has nothing to do with brands that makes them seem more like a real person as
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we'll talk about in a couple minutes and so for Brands to create one that may not
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be the thing that most brands want to do I think many brands that are considering
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might want to work with one they want to collaborate with virtual and lots of uh
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big brands have started collaborating with virtual influencers just like they might with a regular human influencer um
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and I think the question that really becomes is it going to work right so just like as you work with a regular
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influencer is working with this person is paying them right this is a form of paid media after all is paying them GNA
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have that return on investment or we get more from working with this person than
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doing something else with our with our marketing dollars there is a main takeaway in your paper that I would like
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for us to talk about and that is the presence of virtual influencers online and what boosts their effectiveness
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let's talk about that yeah sure so just I think this nicely ties to the question
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we just talked about right but the question is not just should I work with a virtual influencer but what makes
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virtual influencers effective right if you look at their posts some of them get a lot of attention uh get a lot of likes
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get a lot of comments get a lot of shares others not so much right some get a lot of Engagement some don't why and
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you could say the same thing about regular influences as well right certain posts get more engagement certain don't
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why as we talked about already though it's really important in this space of
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virtual influences is trust and it's it's already important in the space of
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influences more generally but particularly true in this virtual influencer phase because uh a virtual
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influenc can't have actually tried the product that they're talking about right
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because they're they're not real they can't have been to that restaurant they
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can't have gone to that soccer game they can't have worn the shoes um and so it's
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it's unlike that they actually engaged with that product and so why would you
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want to follow them why would you want to engage with them and so we started looking at this across a number of
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different projects we looked some of the language uh that influencers and virtual
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influencers use but we also started looking at the images um and there's a lot of interesting work going on in
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computer vision and other things in this space content analytics moving not just
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from text you I've talked about many times before and sort of analyzing language for insight but think about how
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to analyze images or video or audio feature other types of content Analytics for insight so we did here is we looked
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at a whole bunch of different influencers we looked at a whole bunch of posts they made and we analyzed
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aspects of the photos they posted to see what about those photos might increase engagement and what did you find yeah so
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we found something quite interesting so it turns out that appearing with someone
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else in an image so if you're a virtual influencer appearing in an image not
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just by yourself but with someone else particularly someone else who seems human is much like more likely to to
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lead to positive engagement on that post so post where I'm going to photo but
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it's not just me I'm appearing a photo with other people particularly those
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that look human get get more engagement and so whether it's you know being at a
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restaurant with some folks that look like your friends being at the gym with uh somebody it looks like that you know
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and and so on and so we dug deep but we found something quite interesting which is these posts essentially humanize the
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virtual influencer so as consumers when we look at posts online we're trying to
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figure should I trust this whether virtual influence or regular one should I trust this post and with virtual
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influencers trusted low to begin with one thing I I look for I'm trying to figure out do I trust them is well do
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they seem human because the more they seem human the more likely I am to say okay well this is more like a regular
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person I can trust what they're saying I'm gonna be more like we engaged with
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this post and so appearing with someone else appearing like you have a friend um
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a social tie a relationship with a real person um seeming like you do even though you're a virtual influencer makes
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the individual viewing that post go wow you seem more like a human you seem more
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anthropomorphic seem more like human you have human characteristics now I'm going
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to trust you more it as a result that post is going get so it's this idea that
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this Avatar is not really an isolation that it has a social network a community a tie um does it matter if the Avatar is
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appearing with other people that are also other characters that are also avatars or is it better that they appear
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with real people real humans yeah great question and I think I think the question is really we don't know as as
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viewers of these posts exactly who they're appearing with right um but but uh the more human that person seems the
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more human that image seems um if I'm appearing in a photo my face is there and there's another face more it looks
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like that other face is an actual real human being the bigger the impact is why because if I'm showing up with someone
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who looks like a cartoon or it doesn't really look like a real person then the
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consumer viewing is go wow this isn't really really a human and so if it's not
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really a human I'm not going to trust it and I'm not going to trust it I'm not
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going to engage with it and so um engagement is higher in these posts when it looks like that person you're
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appearing with is actually really a real human looks like a real human rather than some other Avatar that you might be
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connected yeah one of the the important threads I think that I read in your paper is that you really emphasize that
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customers consumers are smart they will not be duped into purchasing something just because there's a cute Avatar or
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puppy or what have you and I think that gets back to this issue of trust that you're talking about with with VI
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influencers so as we're moving deeper into AI generated content as we discussed before um how you see Brands
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dealing with that trust Factor you know it it's been interesting I mean I've
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been working in the word of mouth field now for probably almost 20 years thinking about sort of issues related to
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Word of Mouth and um uh initially um when work in this space St started people said wow we trust word of mouth
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because we know it's diagnostic we know that person's objective compared to
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let's say a piece of paid or owned media piece of earned media some friend telling me they like something that's
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really useful information they're not getting paid going to tell me they like
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it if it's actually pretty good and so I can trust them and that information is
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going to be more targeted and so it's going to have more impact as we Mig graded online that was still the case at
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least to some degree um but today things have gotten more complicated right not only is their AI content out there but
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there are influencers who may be getting paid to post things well should I trust
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that influencer or not and when should I trust them and when should I not trust them and what's going to make me be more
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likely to trust them and so I think this is a really interesting space both for consumers as individuals sort of
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thinking about how should I consume content uh online and what should I trust and what should I not trust and
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also for Brands Brands thinking about how do we get the word out about our products and services and ideas should
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we work with these online influencers should we work with regular Joe's and Janes and really have them sample the
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product that way that word of mouth is much more organic and probably more trusted maybe they don't have as big of
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an audience right um you know if I post about something online compared to an online lincer my post May as big reach
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as their post does but hopefully my friends and colleagues trust me because they know I didn't get paid and so maybe
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they're going to be more likely to listen to that message and so it's certainly an interesting space but with
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lots of interesting changes going on yeah it's definitely evolving because social media platforms themselves are
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evolving so who knows what they're going to look like in five to 10 years so
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definitely yeah interesting space to watch yeah thank you so much for being on with me your paper is titled what
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drives virtual influencers impact you can find it online along with all of Jonah's books and papers and content
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about persuasive communication uh his website is called Jonah it's Jonah burger.com I'm Angie B un for knowledge
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at Wharton thanks for joining us for more insight from knowledge at Wharton please visit knowledge. Warton up.edu
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