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CMO Confidential
Jon Davids | CEO, Influicity | The Synthetic Influencer - Should Brands Do It Themselves? |
00:27:48
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- [00:00]
Mike Linton
The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential.
- [00:25]
John Davidson
The podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton.
- [00:36]
Mike Linton
Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being that of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, ebay, Farmers insurance and ancestry.com this show is brought to you by Props, our title sponsor. Props is a performance driven content platform. They combine the attraction of creator content with the results of paid media. Instead of focusing on poster impressions, they take responsibility for leads and customers. Check them out at Props Co. Now I'm here today with my guest, John Davidson. Today's topic, the Synthetic AI Influencer. Should brands do it themselves? Now John is the founder and CEO of In Fluidity, a company that helps other companies build communities. And he's also the author of Marketing Superpowers. Build a brand so good that Customers feel like magic. John believes that one of the keys to building brands is building the community that builds your brand for you. This is his second time on the show and he's ready to discuss the concept of do it yourself influencing. Welcome back, John.
- [02:06]
John Davidson
Mike, it is a pleasure. Glad I didn't burn the place down the first time back from round two.
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Mike Linton
Oh, your show was very popular and we're glad to have you back on this topic. You know, in our first show you talked about the marketplace for community. Remind our listeners of your definition of community and why it's important to marketers.
- [02:32]
John Davidson
So the easiest definition is to think about it as I learned it in school in marketing 101 as segmentation. So your community is effectively a segment. The difference today versus 10, 20, 30 years ago is that everybody is hyper connected. So it's not as though you're just targeting men 24 to 35 years old who live in a certain city and maybe like a certain sport. These people are not just living in vacuums, they're speaking to one another. They're on Reddit boards, they're on YouTube channels, they're on Slack communities, they're in, they're. They're physically and virtually together all the time. And so for that reason we think about it as a community and how you can use that community to self propel.
- [03:16]
Mike Linton
I think that's a really important point is the community used to be a lot more passive and now the community is a lot more active. And people can be in multiple communities all at once. Right?
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John Davidson
They can be all at once and they can be engaging in ways that they simply couldn't years ago. I mean, people can sit now on a platform like Twitch, for example, and watch one another play games. You know, 20 years ago you'd be sitting in your basement by yourself, which.
- [03:46]
Mike Linton
Doesn'T sound like that much fun either one of these doesn't sound like that much fun, but keep going.
- [03:50]
John Davidson
Sorry. They're all watching some people, but people enjoy it. It's funny. Actually a funny little tidbit there. When Twitch started, I remember hearing so many people, Twitch is a gaming platform where you watch others play games. And I remember people saying, who would want to do this? Why would anybody want to watch somebody else play a video game? And now esports is an enormous category. So what, what teenage, the funny things that teenagers do on weekends for fun kind of becomes mainstream over the course of a decade or so. So, you know, which leads us into the conversation we're having today. It's important to pay attention to these things.
- [04:24]
Mike Linton
Yeah, but I mean, let's face it, a bunch of people sit and watch people play baseball or football all the time. It's just a different medium. But so when, when you look at this market, John, how big is it and where is it heading?
- [04:38]
John Davidson
Well, influencers as a market. So when we talk about influencer marketing as a whole, it's about $26 billion that's spent on what I'll call digital influencers. So I'm not including celebrity endorsements and those types of things. So $26 billion and it's only getting bigger because we can see across the board, whether it's the podcast revolution, it's newsletters, it's obviously TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and LinkedIn. There's just more and more of this of blue sky opportunity for people to create their own audiences. And then inevitably advertisers and sponsors want to come in and be a part of those conversations. So I think it's getting bigger and bigger.
- [05:20]
Mike Linton
Well, great at CMO Confidential, we hope for that. So one more kind of stage setting question, a little refresher question. What Situations and brands are best suited to use this influencer community and also by definition what are less suited to it.
- [05:42]
John Davidson
So the most obvious ones are the categories where influencers are the dominant way people find out about things. So for example, fashion, beauty. It's just so obvious that people learn about cosmetics and new trends on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube shorts and that's where it happens. So anytime you're selling to consumer, a consumable, a fast moving product, that sort of thing is very much community driven when it comes to B2B. You know, more high ticket, more sophisticated type purchases. We have clients even in the B2B segment selling let's say AI software, generative AI software. And we are still, I would say, using a community strategy with them, but it's much more tight knit. We're looking at the know the CIOs who might be interested in this, but it's not, it's not necessarily as wide of a community net that we're casting.
- [06:37]
Mike Linton
Oh, it's a hyper focused community like CISOs or something for cyber security or something like that. Right?
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John Davidson
Exactly, exactly.
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Mike Linton
Okay, so let's move on to the key topic here. Just so everyone's on the same page, our listeners know, let's define, or actually you'll define the idea of a synthetic influencer. I know I could use the word virtual, but synthetic sounds so Star Treking to me. I just like it better.
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John Davidson
I think synthetic makes it sound so cool. Synthetic.
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Mike Linton
Synthetic influencer sounds so.
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John Davidson
Wow, it just sounds so futuristic. You know, I was thinking about this when you and I chatted initially and I thought through what is the most simple way to explain this and in terms of the evolution. So I think I would start with something as straightforward as a mascot. Because everybody knows what a mascot is. You know, Toucan, Sam, Tony the Tiger, we all understand the concept of a mascot for a brand. And you might put that mascot on the package or on the cereal box. A synthetic influencer is essentially an evolution of that. It's that same character that you create as a brand or as, you know, someone just creating characters. But you're able to do a lot more with it because now you have Instagram and you have AI and you have computer generation and so you can make it more lifelike.
- [07:56]
Mike Linton
So, so, all right. I think that what this basically says is this is just heritage influencers becoming, you know, virtual or synthetic, if you will. Right. I mean this is, it's not like it's a new brand new concept, it feels new because it's in a new medium, in a new place. But it's not, if I'm hearing you right, it's not really new.
- [08:20]
John Davidson
Right, it's not really new. So I'll give you an example. Like the. When I was doing research for this and I was looking at kind of the best examples of virtual influencers out there, one of the first ones that popped up was Colonel Sanders, which KFC animated and turned into a, you know, basically a fake character back I think this was like 2018 or 19. And they basically took the character of Colonel Sanders and made him into a young, modern 2018 type guy with all of the personality and character traits of what someone might look like if they were Colonel Sanders, but kind of 25 years old in the year 2018. And that's an example of a synthetic influencer. The only difference there, the reason it kind of feels a little more normal, is because Colonel Sanders already existed. They didn't create it out of nothing.
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Mike Linton
So tell us when a synthetic influencer makes sense and then we'll go to how consumers are reacting to it and all kinds of stuff. But I'm out there, I'm thinking maybe I need a synthetic influencer. How do I know if it makes sense for me?
- [09:29]
John Davidson
So a synthetic influencer, I have not been able to find an example of a brand that has done it really well, with the exception of those who already have characters. So a couple of big examples would be kfc, like I just mentioned Mickey Mouse, Homer Simpson, characters that already exist historically, taking them into the virtual world and turning them into kind of real people, if you will, like real influencers. That kind of makes sense. Probably one of the most high profile examples is this character named Lil Mikayla. Have you heard of this name, Lil Mikayla?
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Mike Linton
Oh, tell us.
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John Davidson
Okay, yeah, I'm sure most of you are pulling out your phones now Googling Lil Michaela. So it's L I L and then Michaela's M I, Q U, E, L A. So this is a synthetic influencer that was created about. Must have been almost 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago or so, created by a company out in Los Angeles. And essentially Lil Miquela is a half Brazilian, half Spanish Taurus. This is how they describe her pursuing her musical dreams in la. So if you went onto Instagram and looked at this profile, it's got millions of followers and you might think this is a real person. It's not. It is completely fictional, totally made up and. But they've given her this character, this personality that almost makes her feel real. And from a brand side, Calvin Klein, Samsung, Prada. Right now, actually, if you look at the links in her Instagram profile, they're running a program with BMW. So a lot of brands are latching onto this synthetic influencer.
- [11:05]
Mike Linton
So this, if I'm a brand, and we'll go to the pros and cons of this synthetic idea, I can create this character and then take this character anywhere I want to go. And with the power of all the media and AI and everything else, I can create a lot of visuals around this. That is pretty interesting. Tells us the pro. Tell us the pros and cons of this from a brand side. I mean, I've already spilled the beans on one of the pros, but, and, and, and what you see there.
- [11:35]
John Davidson
Yeah. So the, the pros would be, you know, the most obvious one is you essentially have a character that you can build up into, in this case, millions of followers. There's a brand, I found another brand that has a synthetic character with 6 million followers. So you can essentially create this large audience for yourself that you can use to sell a whole bunch of product.
- [11:56]
Mike Linton
You know, without paying any reuse fees. And you don't have any contract negotiations with your synthetic influencer.
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John Davidson
There's no rider, there's no vacation, there's no union. There's nothing like that.
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Mike Linton
You have to pull all the blue M and Ms. Out of the green room. Right.
- [12:11]
John Davidson
So definitely not. So you've got this. So this celebrity that is essentially yours to do whatever you want with that, that's the pro. And there's lots of pros that you can spin off from there, sell more stuff, reach more people, have a new audience. The con is, in my opinion, if a brand tried to do this, I think it would be fraught with challenges. Because if a, if a brand tried to do this, I think what their instinct would be would be to center it around their product and not around the audience. The reason that little Michaela works is because she has such a well defined, authentic character and that was created by a company that had, that had no product to sell. They just wanted to create this character. I think the con is a brand tries to do this and it turns into an infomercial for the brand. And, you know, you can wind up wasting a lot of time and a lot of money doing it.
- [13:03]
Mike Linton
And consumers can. If you do this, what I'm hearing you say, if you do this wrong, you'll look ham handed, disingenuous, and found out as a fraud. Right.
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John Davidson
And it turns into a joke. You turn into the butt of the joke. That brand that tried this thing, and it was just an epic disaster, which. Which could kind of leave a nasty residue on the brand as a whole. So I probably. I could see big, big synthetic influencers coming out of agencies and, you know, firms that sort of live and breathe this space. I find it hard to see how a Fortune 500 could build this in house by themselves.
- [13:42]
Mike Linton
Okay, interesting. So, but by definition, you are saying that you could create, like you and I could create a synthetic influencer, just make it into a big. A big traffic piece, and then we could use it with. With brands. Is that. Is that a better way to think about it?
- [14:03]
John Davidson
That. That is the way to think about it. And I. I think, you know, if I've got my crystal ball out here, I would say that there are many characters that exist. You know, let's just call them ip. So there's intellectual property out there, whether it's superheroes, comic book heroes, Family Guy.
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Mike Linton
Oh, yeah, you name it. Yeah, tons of them. Yeah.
- [14:21]
John Davidson
So there's tons of them out there. And I think that if a brand were to even acquire a character that existed and maybe they're not so popular anymore like they used to be and really turn that into a social media character. So don't think of Homer Simpson as a car, as a cartoon character that lives on Fox on Sunday nights, but think about Homer Simpson as an Instagram native influencer. And it's all the same stuff that we see on TV, but it happens now on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. And that. That feels to me like. Like a big opportunity.
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Mike Linton
Oh, interesting. You can see Homer Simpson selling beer, I guess, so.
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John Davidson
Duff beer.
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Mike Linton
Yeah. So, you know, one of the things with AI and everything else is that I can now personalize a lot of stuff at a pretty granular level. Give us examples of how you might take this influencer synthetically and start personalizing it, particularly if you don't have to have a million recording sessions with the real person.
- [15:29]
John Davidson
Yeah, you could have. You could. You could use AI. And there are tools that do this today. You could use AI to have the influencer provide a different experience to different customers. So somebody could actually. Yeah, so an example of that would be, you know, there's the main Instagram account, and on the Instagram account, we have the character saying things, doing things, going places. That's all cool. That's kind of your. Your main content. That's your linchpin. And then ultimately, you could have experiences where I could log into a website and I could start maybe asking this person, similar to how I might ask ChatGPT or Claude today questions. I would ask this character questions, and they would give me answers about the brand. So, hey, you know, I'm thinking of buying this. This shampoo. I'm not sure which. Which brand or which variety of the shampoo is good for my hair, which one should I use? And the synthetic influencer that the brand has created would basically talk to me in the same way ChatGPT would talk to me. So you got this really personalized experience, and everybody could have their own unique experience with that influencer.
- [16:35]
Mike Linton
So I could take the most interesting man in the world, for example, and he could talk to me about anything I wanted him to talk about.
- [16:43]
John Davidson
100%. Absolutely. And the funny thing is, this might sound like a distant reality. We could actually do it today with the technology that exists. It wouldn't be 100% clean in terms of the customer experience, but it would be pretty close. You'd have the. The avatar or the synthetic influencer, we're calling it. You'd have the AI that allows me to ask it questions and get answers. And you would essentially have a brand mascot that's able to talk to me and has its own personality.
- [17:16]
Mike Linton
And are any brands doing this really well right now? And by that I mean this personalization at scale, regardless of whether you're a synthetic influencer or not.
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John Davidson
Personalization at scale, yes. There are companies that are using AI agents and chatbots to give people personal experiences that make them feel special and make them feel like they're getting support. In fact, a lot of the services I use, especially the SaaS software that I use, I gotta tell you, speaking with an AI agent is much better in many cases than speaking to a person that doesn't have the answers handy. So I think personalization at scale, yes. I don't think any brand, I can't think of a single one in my head right now has taken a synthetic influencer and made it so that I can speak to them and that I can develop a relationship with them. I honestly have not seen that. No. I think that's a big opportunity.
- [18:12]
Mike Linton
And where do you think that shows up, though? When you look into your crystal ball, which you took out for the last question, when does. When does that show up?
- [18:20]
John Davidson
I think brands that have mascots today or characters in their arsenal, I'm thinking about Disney. I'm thinking about every studio. I'm thinking about anybody that has a mascot that's been around for 50 years. Kellogg's companies like this Pillsbury, they have such a low hanging fruit to start developing relationships and start creating the social channels where it's not about the brand, it's really about the character. The funny thing is, if you look at a lot of these characters, if you go to Mickey Mouse's handle on Instagram, Disney is sort of using it as though it is just a promotional platform for Disneyland. That's fine. I understand why they're doing that. But what about turning that into an actual character? So that If I'm a 6 year old and I go to Instagram and I follow Mickey Mouse, it almost feels like Mickey Mouse is a completely real person. Because that relationship. Yeah, that's going to last for decades.
- [19:15]
Mike Linton
It's more than an imaginary friend, as Tony the Tiger said, it would be great. So speaking of this, when we were talking earlier, and I want to just go back to this a little bit, you drew a parallel between cartoon characters and virtual influencers, but you also drew the parallel about how the cartoon character has emerged as so much more than the cartoon and a brand unto itself. I know we've touched on this, but I want to make sure we get everything out on it because I thought your observation here was so interesting because it spun on decades of development.
- [19:55]
John Davidson
Yeah. I have always been in a situation. When I founded Influicity as an influencer marketing company back in 2013 14, I remember going into all the agencies, all the kind of, you know, marketers offices, and I had to explain why you would want to watch somebody on YouTube and this was a totally foreign concept trying to explain influencer marketing. So I basically have this history, for better or for worse, of having to explain where marketing is going. Cause I've always been a few steps ahead and that's just kind of where my mind has gone. So what I'm trying to do is I'm always trying to take a thread of today and, you know, kind of build a bridge to tomorrow. So the examples I use of mascots, cartoon characters. Think about how powerful a cartoon character is. Think about the things that Peter Griffin on Family Guy can say or do and get away with because he's a cartoon character. And get away with a lot. On Family Guy you can get away with a lot. You cannot cancel Peter Griffin.
- [20:58]
Mike Linton
Yeah, you can't mention south park either. So I mean, south park gets away with everything they want.
- [21:02]
John Davidson
So, yeah, anything they want. And then they've been doing it for decades. And so when you think about the power and the global universal appeal of these characters and now think about, okay, so when we have the conversation about virtual influencers, which sounds so foreign and so strange, again, the bridge there is. We already have it. We already have mascots, we already have cartoon characters. We know they work. The next evolution of that is going to be marrying that with the world of social influencers. And it's going to be, my prediction is it's going to be totally normal in five to ten years from now that you would go onto social media and you would be interacting and watching and engaging with cartoon characters.
- [21:44]
Mike Linton
And we can't even go back to the, just the beginnings of like MTV and VH1, when everyone's like, who's going to, who's going to do this? Right. Is that another example?
- [21:57]
John Davidson
I mean, I think every medium, I mean, MTV with music videos, like, if you think about every media evolution over the last hundred years, which, you know, certainly that's a long time period to look at, everything looked and seemed crazy at the beginning. Yeah. Who'd want to watch music videos? Who'd want to watch reality tv? Why would I want to eavesdrop on somebody selling houses on Sunset? Like, everything seems strange until you experience it and say, oh, I get it. And so I think, I think there's, I think there's a lot of blue sky opportunity here, but you've got to get around the weirdness of it.
- [22:34]
Mike Linton
Thank you. In one of our previous shows to this one, we discussed the concept of your best customer may be an AI bot. And the concept there was when AI becomes prevalent and search disappears. If you're not in the answer, the AI bot returns, you are not in play. I'd love your take on that.
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John Davidson
If you are not in the answer, the AI bot returns, you're not in play. And so what you mean by that is, if ChatGPT doesn't recommend me when.
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Mike Linton
I say, give me the five best restaurants, you know, in, in Indianapolis, and I don't come back in that five, I'm not playing. Or give me the 10 best colleges for this. And, and I want to talk about that. And also the second part of this question would be, is your best marketing tool your own influencing creations because you can put them in so many places.
- [23:35]
John Davidson
Well, on the first part, I agree with you 100%. I think brands need to be. Brands are obsessed and have been obsessed with Google for the longest time, which is of course important. You got to show up high on the search result pages. But when I ask ChatGPT for a local restaurant, you better be in the recommendation that gives me. And so yes, I 100% agree with that. Because people are moving from traditional search to AI search very, very quickly. And also, frankly, YouTube search, TikTok search, these are all very powerful search engines. The second piece of the question, can you just repeat that for me, this.
- [24:11]
Mike Linton
Is a game where I have to have a lot of presence. Is one of my best marketing tools going to become my own influencing creations? Because if I'm good at it, I can put them in a lot of places and I can be found not just by customers, but by bots.
- [24:31]
John Davidson
I think there's a correlation there. I think that any time you can create something like that that is synthetic and that spreads and has a lot of kind of mass appeal, it just has the ability to go further. So if you think about creating a character that has the appeal to different generations, different ethnicities, different, you know, you can sort of translate what it's saying and it appeals globally. You know, we've seen this happen in Hollywood. The best, the most profitable Hollywood movies are the ones that you can run in America, in China, in Europe, in India. And they sort of have this appeal all over the world. I think influencers have a bit of that, but I think virtual influencers, yes, they have the ability to kind of appeal to these large swaths of audiences in a way that it's hard to see how anything else could match that.
- [25:23]
Mike Linton
Right. I felt I had to go out on a Star Trek final frontier there. So any other observations on this topic before we go to our traditional last question?
- [25:34]
John Davidson
I would say I would encourage brands to explore some of the names we've dropped here and just be open to the idea that this is happening and it's hard to see how you could avoid it. If you want to be relevant in the consumer conversation, and especially as we were talking about a second ago, you want to be showing up in all the places that people are looking and trying to discover you. You've got to think about different ways to get there.
- [25:58]
Mike Linton
Okay, great. Thank you for that. We are now to our traditional last question. It's a two parter, as, you know, funniest story or piece of practical advice to our listeners we haven't discussed yet. You can take both of these or one, but you have to take at least one of those two. So knock yourself out.
- [26:17]
John Davidson
Okay. Practical advice. I'll sort of. I didn't, I didn't invent this, but there's an expression that goes something like this. What nerds do for fun on weekends is the stuff that we're all going to be doing in five to 10 years from now as a regular part of our lives. And this, you know, I always think about this when I see people who are frankly, a lot smarter than me doing things, exploring things, trying things. There's an instinct that I think a lot of us have to say, like, I don't know what that person's doing. I don't get it. I don't understand it. And so it's not important to me. And then years later or months later, at some time in the future, you say, oh, I should have paid attention. And listen. I can think of many examples. I mentioned one earlier, the idea of Twitch, watching people play video games. Bitcoin. I'm sure a lot of us wish we had listened in 2013 when people were screaming about this thing called bitcoin. So I think it's important for brands and brand leaders to pay attention to this kind of stuff because I think it's going to creep up on you a lot faster than you might think.
- [27:18]
Mike Linton
I love it. Watch what nerds do on weekends. I want to make a joke, but I'm not going to. So thank you, John, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential and thanks to Props Co, our sponsor. If you are enjoying the show, please like, share and subscribe. Look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and the I Hear Everything network, which include It's a Bird, It's a plane, Holy shit. It's AI Is your next best customer. And AI Bot the case for customer lifetime value. Why is this so hard? And is artificial intelligence an extinction event for agencies? Also, check out John's first show as well. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Lindsen signing off for CMO Confidential.