The Vergecast - The creator of the future is smart, attractive... and animated

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

As we spend more time in digital spaces, our avatars are becoming part of our personality. And digital creators and influencers are becoming part of our culture. Producer Gina Pollack join's The Verge's David Pierce with stories about why advertisers love digital creators, why a dancing hot dog will never leave your brain, and what the creator industry is learning from mascots. Next time you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed, keep your eyes peeled — not everyone’s as human as they look. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Uncanny Valley. I'm your friend David Pierce, and for the next three weeks in this feed, we're going to be doing a mini-series that we made,

all about the creator economy, emphasis on economy. We're going to look into how all kinds of influencers, the brands they represent, and the people who manage them, make and spend their money. Today, we're starting with a story from producer Gina Pollack about a topic I know nothing about and am super excited to get into, which is virtual influencers. Maybe you've seen them out there. They look just like the other models and cool kids posing and promoting brands on Instagram

or TikTok or wherever else, but there's something different about them. And then you look a little closer and you realize they're not human at all. They're actually these hyper-realistic 3D illustrations. designed to look like humans, ish, but not exactly. Managers, artists, and tech companies are making big, big money with these digital characters. And they could become an even bigger deal as virtual realities like the Metaverse become more mainstream. And this phenomenon brings up all kinds of questions.

Could digital influencers change the future of the creator economy or replace human influencers entirely? Or is this just a passing trend? So, Gina, I don't need. Let's just get into this here. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm very excited to talk about this.

So at the very beginning, this story was about humans. And you came back and said, actually, humans, that's old hat, passe. Tell me how you found out about this phenomenon. Yeah. So a couple of years ago, I was doing another story about Instagram influencers. And I talked to this agent named Jennifer Powell. She was showing me like her roster of clients. And one of them looked a little different to me.

and her name is Shudu. Okay. And I want you to open and look at her page because I feel like you have to see it. Okay. You sent me her Instagram link. She's 237,000 followers. Good for her.

Mm-hmm. And I would say to describe her, she's very tall, she has very short hair, she has really dark, perfect skin, emphasis on perfect. And I think the celebrity that she reminds me of most

is Lupidin Yango. It's exactly who I was about to say, 100%. She's like Lupita Njango, but somehow even more symmetrical, which is shocking because LePita is perfect looking already. It's a high bar. Yeah. So when I was first working on that story, I was surprised that she wasn't a real person and also confused, like, who is making her.

And I ended up talking to Cameron James Wilson, who is her creator. and he was a fashion photographer for a long time. He was going through a difficult time in his personal life and was kind of stuck at home. This was way before the pandemic. And he started playing around with virtual imaging and creating these 3D models. And he said he just wanted to create the perfect woman. And that's how he landed on Shudu. I think Shudu represents what I see as beautiful.

And eventually she kind of became almost heroic. own personality, her own individual self, and became the world's first digital supermodel. Yikes? Like, interesting and yikes simultaneously? Is that a fair response to that? Yeah. It's weird because it was this white man who wanted to create this perfect, beautiful black woman. So that created some controversy, of course. All of that aside, I'm kind of, like, if you had just shown me this Instagram and not given me any other information ahead of it, I would have 100% just believed this was a real person and moved on. And even I'm like poking through the comments on her page now and people are responding like

she's a real person. This is kind of blowing my mind. So when he actually first created her, it didn't say in the profile that she wasn't a real person. And he made this image where there was this orange background and she's wearing this orange lipstick and he matched the shade of the lipstick to a Fenty beauty lipstick. And Fenty reposted on their Instagram and it went super viral. People were like, who is this model? This is amazing. She's beautiful. And then people started commenting, wait a second, this is this a real person? This is not a real person. And then Fenty Beauty actually took it down because they didn't

know it wasn't a real person. Oh, wow. Clearly real or not this thing. is working, right? She has tons of followers, lots of comments. There's a lot of engagement on it. Everybody, like, treats her like they would be fans of any other supermodel. Like, real or digital Shudu seems to be working on Instagram, which is kind of nuts. Yeah, and Shidu has worked with huge brands and fashion magazines. Shudu was actually paid to model for Vogue Australia, El Harper's Vogue, Cosmopolitan. She's worked with all these major luxury brands. Lubiton, Balma, Lexus, Tiffany's, Todd's, Farragamo, the list goes on. So if she was a real model, she would be considered very successful.

Wow. So how much is this a totally new thing? I talked to actually a guy named Christopher Travers, and he runs a website called Virtual Humans, which is kind of like an encyclopedia of digital influencers. And he was talking about how he was actually inspired by the early Internet. like the late 90s. When I was a kid, there was no social network that was focused on being yourself. It was all using handles and pseudonyms. So for a good 10 years, I was playing video games, browsing forums, and engaging in chat through pseudonyms.

He was just really into this idea of inhabiting another body. So you're pulling the strings, but the body isn't yours and the personality isn't necessarily the same as your personality. Totally. But the next wave of social media was really more encouraging. us to be ourselves, like Facebook and Instagram. I'm creating an image of myself, and then I'm supposed to, you know, like, update my friends on what I'm really doing. And Christopher says this whole trend of digital models is kind of like a rewind back to the beginning of the internet where we could all be different people. Now the internet is coming full circle to this idea because avatars are taking form and they're competing with humans now in what was supposedly this human media feed, right?

people are now leveraging the same technology that is used to create video games and characters in video games to now create characters outside of video games for all sorts of purposes. That could be modeling. That could be influencing. That could be live streaming. So the form could be a digital model. But if you take this digital model and you post it redundantly on social media, that starts to look like a virtual influencer. That transition actually makes complete sense to me in that sense. Now you're making me wonder, like, do I go on Instagram every day?

and half the things I see are digital characters that I don't even realize are digital characters. Like, how big is this space right now? I wouldn't say it's at that level yet. There are definitely a lot of these, but you kind of have to look for them. And I didn't happen to be following any of them. I just, once you kind of look into it, then you find more and more and more and they're all over the world. So the first one that I saw was a character called Lil Michaela.

and her creators basically looked at what influencers were doing. They took Lil Mikaela and mimicked that entire lifestyle and that entire ethos of being an influencer. And that made her go super, super viral. Like, oh, they're hanging out with their friends. They're shopping. They're at the pink wall taking a picture. Yeah, whoa, she's almost three million followers on Instagram. She's kind of like the most Gen Z optimized cool girl that could possibly exist.

Like she is ethnically ambiguous. Apparently she's 19 years old and she has these two buns that she wears on top of her head. And you're kind of like, ooh, I want to hang out with her. I want to be her friend. And Michaela's been around for a while, right? Yeah. Like I'm impressed how she remains as popular as she has been for what it looks like a long time. I mean, she's posted 1,250 times on Instagram, which is not a small amount of work.

She was created in 2016 by an L.A. company called Brud. It's B-R-U-D. It might be brood. We'll never know because they don't respond to emails from journalists. Unclear. But I think they kind of created this persona for her where she talks about being a 19-year-old robot living in L.A. If you're late to the party, hey, I'm Michaela. I'm a 19-year-old robot living in L.A. making music.

Well, I guess just keep watching and catch up. It's got to be tough. It's hard out there for a 19-year-old robot. It's hard out there. But she's actually not a robot because she's not artificially intelligent. She is just voiced by an actor. She has a YouTube page where she does the kind of confessional videos that you'd see on a YouTube page. Wait, I'm dead at the fact that my mind just made me the person being broken up with.

Does that mean I'm the toxic friend? Note to self. Discuss the next Tuesday's therapy session. And she even has a music video. She's a very complete being as far as a not real person. Yeah, she's a real like multi-hyphenate over here. She became really famous because the media loved her because she was the first digital influencer.

She was the first one to be doing exactly what human beings were doing. And she followed that playbook exactly. And by she, I mean her creators. But again, it's like hard to not personify them. Right. Because it's easier for me to say she than to say it. Yeah, I'm struggling with this too because it's like, Michaela is obviously not a person. and so saying she feels wrong, but also I'm looking at her Instagram, and it is the Instagram

of a 19-year-old girl in L.A. Okay, we're done here. Send me your questions for next time. And what? That's right. Don't forget to recharge your hearts. Okay, so let's get back to the economics of all of this, because I'm assuming, like, Shudu and Lil Makela don't have bank accounts, and there's no them to pay for their services.

So how do these virtual... humans actually make money? Right. For example, Jennifer represents shoe do, but really she's representing Cameron. So that's a little different from another influencer that she represents named Sincerely Jules. Sincerely Jules is her client. But here you have her client creating another client and the first one is not appearing as themselves. Aside from that, it's very similar. As Christopher explained, when you think about virtual influencers, how does it work that they can also do brand deals. Well, the playbook was written exhaustively by human influencers and by brands who are willing to pay. Honestly, human influencers to a lot of brands are just mannequins. And so I've

met brands who say they really care about working with, you know, the right influencers and all of this. What they really mean is I care about reaching your fandom in the right way. And I will pay you to do it for me. So when you think about how a human influencer set the playbook and built the pipeline for brand dollars to flow through to them. Now when you simulate a human influencer, the infrastructure is already in place and brands can now flow their dollars in through virtual influencers and achieve the same end. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade, no code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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pro annual plan that's framer dot com slash verge for 30% off framer dot com slash verge rules and restrictions may apply brands know how to work with them they pay them a certain amount of money for a post they have marketing tools that tell them what the return on investment was. Jennifer says the way it's generally calculated is there's no great way to quantify, but if I was going to, it'd be like a thousand for every hundred thousand followers, perhaps. I mean, that's kind of a rule of thumb-ish, but then people can ask for whatever they want. For Sincerely Jules, who I was talking about, she has seven million followers. So the minimum that a brand would pay for a post from her would be $70,000.

But it varies because they might be like, oh, we want five posts or we want one post and an Instagram story or we want a tweet and we want you to appear at the store. But that's kind of the baseline that Jennifer told me. I really did put the same sort of like price tags on Shudu as a human talent. But the difference is the production costs. And so I have to factor that in. And that's almost like how I figured out a day rate and then I figure out a usage. And it's the same, like a human model when you thought of them shooting a fragrance,

then you have to talk about exclusivity and you have to talk about a term that they're going to be associated with the brand and such. And we do the same thing with Shudu. We don't want to create conflicts or anything for Shudu because she is intellectual property. She is, her image is very much like an actual human. But you were saying Cameron has like a whole, this is like an agency thing now, right? So just like Brud, the company that made Lil Michaela, created Bermuda to be her like arch rival friend, that's kind of also what Cameron did.

And we just have to listen to him explain it for himself because he's the best at doing it. Danny is a Caucasian model with red hair and freckles. Kofi is a gorgeous, tall, muscular black model. He's very athletic into bodybuilding. I imagined when I created him that him and Chudu would be kind of like the Adam and Eve of the digital world, the new Barbie and Ken.

An alien model called Galaxia and she's really tall with blue skin. Boyce is non-binary and is a virtual drag queen. Another character that we created is Bren. She's a mixed race plus size model with stretch marks. And then Jay Young, who is a Korean male model, and we're currently developing him even further.

There's just a lot going on there that I need to spend a lot of time sorting through. But he really sees them as people with personalities and imperfections. And, you know, he talks about stretch marks and the different features that different versions of them have. It's like, it's really interesting that the goal here is to go sort of extremely human, rather than like kind of science fiction futuristic robot, which I would think would be one way a lot of people would go with this. The trend now in marketing for female clothes and female products has gone from, okay, everybody has to be really skinny and look like a six foot tall 100 pound woman

to now like we want to see real women. Brands like Dove or like Airy, for example, have different sized models and models, again, with stretch marks and they're not photoshopping. And so he can then create a character, this character brand that he's talking about, who's perfect for those brands. And then he can create a non-binary virtual drag queen. So it's like whatever the trend is in the larger culture, he can kind of roll with that and create the perfect person in air quotes to represent that trend. And I guess it's true that if the audience is going to respond to these characters in roughly the same way that they would respond to actual human. human influencers. You've basically like replaced central casting with a bunch of animators in a way that

like it's a little bit cynical in a way. Yeah. But it's it, it almost makes total sense to me. It's like you're cutting out the middle man and the middle man is the human. The literal man. Yeah. The literal man in the middle. You're like, we, we just don't need you. It's so much safer in so many ways. Like your virtual influencer is never going to have a rebellious phase. That's not like a thing. A real model, you have to fly her from Milan to New York. I mean, that's time-consuming. You have to coordinate all of that and pay for those expenses. And you can't have somebody doing two photo shoots at once.

But obviously, with these digital models, you can. Brands can now work with this character over a lifetime because that character's never going to age out. It's never going to die for all these various benefits from a technological standpoint, all the way down to the fact that you can better control what a virtual influencer says. over a human influencer. Your model will never die is honestly, it's a really good sales pitch. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and we will be back with more on digital influencers. Support for the show comes from Grammarly.

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How do you do one of these virtual photo shoots? It's definitely a production. Cameron told me all about this, and it's like when you think about a regular photo shoot, you would probably have hairstylist, a makeup artist, a clothing stylist, a photographer, a photography assistant. You'd have the model. You'd have to hire the studio. It's a physical shoot that's happening, especially when you're talking about modeling. Doing that digitally, it's this whole other process, and it's kind of hard to conceptualize

because it's not an actual shoot. The problem with virtual shoots is time. It might take two weeks or more to kind of work on a 3D editorial. In the studio, we might have to buy certain digital assets. The one where shoe do is wearing Louis Vuitton and standing in New York on Broadway. That background was a panel created by an illustrator that was given to Cameron, who then takes shoe do and puts her on the... that background. And he uses a real model to pose in the same pose that Shudu's doing.

If you imagine an influencer receives a product and they can just pop that product on and take a photo with it, when it comes to us, you know, we have to get a model involved. We have to put that product on. We have to do a whole photo shoot. Then we have to replace the model with Shudu and kind of match her in 3D to the real one. In some circumstances, we have to recreate all of the clothes virtually. There are these companies that create digital clothing based on photographs. So I thought maybe Louis Vuitton is going to send their jacket to this company and they're going to just digitize it. But it's actually just a photo of the jacket.

You're taking the jacket. You're taking a picture of it. And then the company is recreating that jacket digitally. And then it becomes a digital product that then can be put on to shoe do by Cameron. Wow. In his digital software. And that was really surprising to me because I was like, I can't believe there's not only one company that does that, but multiple companies do that. Cameron also works with a stylist named Tom.

His speciality is a digital fashion. He's actually a virtual stylist. I coined that kind of term a couple of years ago when he was working constantly on these kind of photoshoots, styling them in 3D. That is very specific to working with digital fashion. Instead of a regular stylist where he's working with the brands and finding the right clothes that match the right jewelry, Tom is getting those assets from the digital fashion companies. This is the dumbest thing to have just thought of, but there's the moment including, where she's standing there looking at her closet.

I mean, I get up. I brush my teeth, and I pick out my school clothes. And she basically scrolls through all of the available different clothes, find something that's going to match, and then basically hits a button, and her closet spins until it finds the right stuff. She pulls it off and puts it on. And I feel like you're describing that exact process,

but it all happens digitally for a virtual influencer. And then someone in the Metaverse could buy that digital clothing item using cryptocurrency and put it on their avatar. Oh, wow. Or they could just buy it to have it like an NFT. A person could buy a digital dress that they can put on their avatar and they can also buy the same physical dress

so they can put on their human self. It just keeps going, you know? Yeah. Well, and it kind of comes back to that same point, right? where if we are in a time where we treat these digital things and these real world things the same. And if I'm being totally honest, I am like deeply suspicious of the idea that people are going to like care about their metaverse Louis Vuitton jacket the way that they care about

their real world Louis Vuitton jacket. But it does seem like we're headed in some version of that direction. And if the metaverse is going to be a thing, if buying, you know, clothes in Fortnite is going to be a thing like that's where a lot of this is going to head in some way, perform. Yeah, and Jennifer mentioned that, too, because she was like, my kids play Fortnite all the time, and they're always buying these skins. I think the skins are like different costumes. Yeah, they're basically costumes. Not everybody is going to buy into it, and that's okay, but there are people that are going to be engaged in the metaverses, no matter what they are. I mean, my kids live on

Fortnite, and that really is, in fact, a metaverse. And the kids, this generation that's coming up, that's what they know. They can buy things within the metaverse and they get sold to, in Fortnite all the time. So I think it's just going to continue happening. And that's like actual cold money coming out of Jennifer's bank account. So she's like, it is real. They are buying these things. Yep. Again, like, you're right. Who's going to buy a $3,000 Louis Vuitton bag that's digital? I'm not really sure. But it's not as crazy in ideas. Maybe it sounds. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And speaking of the expense of this all, one of the things you're making me think of with this process is this feels like it's such new behavior that it might be both like more efficient and way less

efficient. Like what does this cost? Do you have a sense if I wanted to do a virtual photo shoot or a real life photo shoot? Is it the same price? Is it more one way or the other? I think it definitely depends on the digital character. You're using like shoe do for example is so intricate that she would be more expensive than a human because then you know you're working with a digital stylist and it takes all these different teams of people to make that happen. So there are all kinds of ways that you can make this even more expensive if you want to. And is it the same on the other end too? Like I feel like the big sort of unasked question through all of this is like, does this stuff

work? Does it work more than having human models? Does it work less than having human models? But it's worth it for the other stuff. Like what do you hear from these folks? The difference is actually in the shock value. It really is more about the novelty. It's about the click factor.

What Christopher and Jennifer both explained is that if you want to have a simple, like, person posing with a product and you want to generate foot traffic to that store or you want to sell that product, you're probably going to go with a human influencer. If it's about those purposes, they're going to filter that money down into agencies who are capable of delivering foot traffic and delivering app installs in a very scientific way. you know, a tract way, a very return on investment mindset. However, often with virtual influencers, the real spend they activate is on PR on the back end. Now journalists are going to say, wow, did you know she's not real? That's still so many years later, a huge story. Totally. It's just like a different kind of advertising. It's still surprising. I don't know how long that novelty can last. It's possible that it could wear off. But it's just, definitely right now seems to still generate enough PR for it to be worth it for these brands to do

it because they are doing it. And like as we get into more animation and more metaverses and video games kind of merging with those spaces, it's possible that this will become even more lucrative. And whether or not that's going to happen remains to be seen like a lot of the metaverse. We don't really know yet. It also leads towards the kind of other questions of what other kinds of digital influencers are there going to be, right? Because I feel like we're at a moment now where everything, at least some of those you've been talking about are very like human looking. And it makes sense that that would be a place we would start. But then I think about like the, remember the dancing hot dog that Snapchat released a bunch

of years ago that everybody got really excited about? Like that's just a digital influencer. That's like one Instagram page away from making millions of dollars. When you say dancing hot dog, it's funny because I was going to bring up an example of probably my favorite non-human virtual influencer, nobody sausage. Oh my God, is there another dancing hot dog? Yes, there's another dancing hot dog. This is the best news. Maybe technically a sausage, not a hot dog.

He doesn't have a bun. He's just a hot dog by himself. Oh, yeah, I'm getting his TikTok page where he has 18.2 million followers. Yes. I'm getting a lot of like claymation kind of vibes here. He comes in many colors. He kind of reminds me of Gumby a little bit, who is really good at dancing. and also does comedy sort of videos where he's like falling on the ground.

It's very entertaining and people seem to love it. That is really something. This now gets into a weird mix of things where it's like we used to have Tony the Tiger with Frost Flakes. There was like snap crackle and pop for the Rice Krispies. Are virtual influencers just the new brand mascots? Can you sort of draw a straight line from one to the other? So all of those characters are just mascots.

if you put those characters on Instagram and then give them a personality and a backstory, that's when they become digital influencers. So, for example, the Geicokego actually does have an Instagram account and a TikTok. And another one is Barbie, actually. So, you know, we all know Barbie as the toy, but kids would know Barbie as a 3D character who has a personality and talks to them. And Barbie on Instagram has two million followers. Amazing. What does the like next five years of this look like, do you think? I think in terms of saying if this has staying power, a lot of these companies are actually becoming very profitable. So the fabricant, which is one of the companies that makes virtual fashion designs, just raised $14 million in investments to build the wardrobe of the

metaverse and then sell those clothes as NFTs and bread. And bread, the company that created a little Michaela was recently acquired by Dapper Labs, which is an NFT startup. And they value bread at $125 million. Wow. So these companies are actually making money and have created a little mini ecosystem. That Cameron says it's just going to keep getting bigger. I think this industry is growing exponentially. And every year it matures, it's kind of proving itself.

It's sticking around. It's not just a fad anymore. it. I think we're going to see lots and lots more businesses being created in this space, lots of different job opportunities. I think we're going to see a lot more digital fashion houses, digital modeling agencies, different characters, different avatars. So you really have this growth coming from all directions. I've seen so, so many people becoming instantly successful and and busy because these skills are so in demand. They definitely believe that this is where the world is going.

Like, in the next five years, 10 years, the near future, we will be living more in digital spaces. We will be living more in digital worlds. And the line between real life and digital life is going to be blurrier. We'll be able to interact with these characters in the metaverse. And we're all going to have our own avatessen. avatars. And that's where they feel the future is going. So I think the creators of them are very aware of that. They're like, whatever technology comes out, that's where we have to be. If the

metaverse is the thing that's cool, we got to be in the metaverse. If people want to talk to us, we better animate. Like, they have to keep evolving to stay relevant and to stay desirable if they want to keep making money. Another extremely human desire, stay relevant or the modeling industry forgets about you, I think, is something a lot of real humans can identify with. Eventually, this is coming for us, too. You and I are going to be replaced by AI versions of us who make podcasts together. Yeah. I'm actually okay with that. Even as I say it out loud, that sounds great. I'll just, I'll be around. It's no problem. All right, Gina, thank you for exploring this deeply bizarre world with us. This is incredibly fun. Thank you so much.