This month saw the publishing of one of perhaps the most comprehensive book to date on professional Influencer marketing - Influencer Marketing Building Brand Communities and Engagement Edited By Sevil Yesiloglu and Joyce Costello
We were asked to contribute to the chapter on Virtual Influencers, written by Scot Guthrie, and explain how we have utilised Machine Learning to help us to understand the audiences we were creating Virtual Humans for, and then use that information to determine character, narrative and story line.
The book itself is a pretty good overview of Influencer marketing and we have put a link to it in the heading.
(Nevill-Spencer, 2019). Nevill-Spencer explained the process his agency takes when building
'‘When we are building a virtual influencer on behalf of a brand: “First, we ask who the brand is targeting. We use machine learning tools to understand the tribes that the brand is currently communicating with. We then determine who else they should be nurturing relationships with. From there we can work out the personality type and the type of content which the virtual influencer will create. We take audience age into consideration but it’s really about the tribe’s psychographics – their interests, their opinions, what they value in society. We then build a full background for each virtual influencer giving them a family, a backstory; and a life arc.”