Virtual Influencers and Intimacy

Résumé

Social media influencers are pieces of successful online marketing campaigns. As they have become more expensive to employ and harder to exploit brands and advertisers have ceded power over the field of advising to them. In a bid to recoup some of that power and lower marketing expenses, some brands now work with virtual influencers—computer animated characters used as replacements for human influencers. However, for virtual influencers to be successful product spokespeople they must first be able to develop the kinds of intimate relationships with their followers that make human influencers so effective. To do this, virtual influencer creators make use of pre-existing genres of influencer content. These genres give virtual influencer creators a platform to build their characters off of and represent a set of user expectations for what influencer content is. If virtual influencers appropriately meet or subvert these expectations, social media users will see them as viable replacements for human influencers. Further easing users’ development of intimate relationships with virtual influencers is a generalized understanding of digital avatars as representatives of singular human users. Though corporate teams operate most virtual influencers if users associate the digital avatars they see in online social spaces with single individuals, then users may assume, tacitly or otherwise, that virtual influencers also represent a single human and are thus someone users might have a relationship with. Here, I examine the role of genre and user preconceptions in encouraging social media users to develop intimate relationships with virtual influencers. To do this I analyse four of popular virtual influencer Lil Miquela’s Instagram posts through the lens of literary criticism and affect theory.