How we create a virtual Influencers personality matrix
Well I didnt really, but..
One of the many questions we get asked about creating Virtual Influencer personalities is how do we communicate to the client, or the developer, the type of personality we want for the VI. It's fine to say an Influencers personality is say "tough", or "defensive" etc, but to what level, how do we come up with a way of defining the LEVEL of toughness so everybody understands and is aligned so that the client is happy or the Dev gets it in a way that's easily understandable - after all these are unique personalities, they can't be perfectly described and defined can they? Well, they can.
About four years ago we came up with a tool called "The Influencer Match Tool (TM)" - see below. It was a way for brands to show the type of Influencer they wanted by using a graph to outline their values and personality, it replicated their own personality, and we then overlaid the Influencer on top of it and gave it a percent brand match.
The system was called the "Personality and values overlay". It is has been used as a way of describing personalities by Machine Learning tools but that was very much in its infancy at that time (infact we didn’t even know it was going on when we developed our tool back in 2014). Psychiatrists use a version of it and it was used in HBOs Westworld, to display the profiles and personalities of the "Hosts" - the AI driven robots that have sentience in the TV show - and its used by IBM Watson for similar purposes.
We now use a version of it to create create Virtual Influencers personality matrixes.
The outside of the circle displays the different personality attributes which we plot, the further to the outside, the more extreme that part of the personality, the closer to the centre, the less extreme. It has proved to be incredibly valuable in aligning our teams and clients when creating our characters.
We illustrate each point with a response to the same questions, adjusted for each level of the personality matrix to illustrate the differences in degree.
It blew me away when I saw it on TV, the thinking of the Producers matching the direction we were looking at taking Virtual Human character dev into, it’s just exciting to see something we created for brands, now using it to create Virtual Influencers, aligning with something used on TV to create AI beings of the future.
Art imitating life, life imitating art - and on it goes.
Dudley Nevill-Spencer