Virtual Influencers in Gaming
What if Cayde-6 streamed Destiny 2 on Twitch? Imagine watching Captain Price co-stream Call of Duty Warzone with Soap. What if Captain Price’s social media accounts were about how friends and fitness have played an important role in his battle against PTSD? Virtual influencers have been making headlines since 2018, but in no other industry are both influencers and virtual personalities as common in marketing than in the video games industry. It’s not uncommon for streamers such as Lachlan or Authentic Games to use virtual versions of themselves as their profile pic to communicate something about who they are and what they do. Memoji and Bitmoji democratized the virtual persona among a generation with hyper-advanced views of personal branding, that treat their digital personas like their own personal brand. According to the wearegenzreport.com, 60% of cross-cultural GenZ (13-21 y/o Hispanic/Latino, Asian, Black, White, and Other) think everyday people can be brands, and roughly 40% consider themselves influencers. Using a virtual influencer to reach a generation defined by the virtual version of themselves is a natural next-step from the typical influencer strategy.
Seraphine
Riot Games’ virtual influencer is a songwriter and producer with 462K Instagram followers, 368K Twitter followers, 23K SoundCloud followers, and 273K monthly listeners on Spotify.
Anthropomorphizing your brand as a virtual influencer is an identity exercise. It’s about defining the beliefs that motivate your brand’s behavior, being able to articulate a purpose (not the Corporate Social Responsibility kind) and then giving that purpose, or “idea,” an identity in the form of gender, age, race, body type, blemishes, personality traits, hobbies, clothes, and friends. It requires a set of skills that would be like combining a brand consultancy with a screenwriter and movie director. Social media was never designed for companies, it was designed for people, so virtual influencers/streamers could be how brands finally find the right way to fit in. Imagine a day where Apple and Amazon just rebrand as Siri and Alexa on social media…
