Influencer Marketing in the Metaverse: Prada, Puma and Yoox are creating Avatars.

Prada, various fashion brands, including Puma and Yoox creates an avatar to stand alongside Shudu and Lil Miquela. What is their common goal? It is intended and communityized.

Influencer Marketing in the Metaverse: Prada, Puma and Yoox are creating Avatars.

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Dressed in Prada with an incised head and adorned with logo triangle earrings from the Spring/Summer 2021 collection, Candy looks like  another influencer wearing one of the season's trendiest pieces. Except she's not real because she's not physically real. Prada's New Muse is a computer-generated avatar designed to advertise a perfume collection, also known as Candy. First unveiled in a luxury Italian home in 2011, Candy was relaunched this year by L'Oréal, under a new beauty license.

Introduced as an invitation to "Rethink Reality" at Prada in October , Candy appears in a variety of ad formats, including an ad campaign shot by Valentin Herfrey. a series of short films directed by Nicholas Winding Refn; And on social platforms like Twitch, Snapchat, and Tiktok,  she interacts with a real perfume bottle designed by art director Fabien Baron, who, according to a Prada press release, is "a world first".

This isn't Prada's first venture into the virtual avatar. Lil Mikela, a virtual model and musician created by Los Angeles-based Brud (acquired by Dapper Labs in October), "attends" the show at Milan Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2018 and uploads previews and behind-the-scenes to Prada's Instagram account. took over. -Scene video... ... Since then, Prada has  continued to "dress" Lil Mikela as well as other virtual influencers like Nunuri. But Candy is the first time  the brand has created its own virtual muse. According to marketing firm Mediakix, 4,444 brands are expected to spend up to $15 billion per year on influencer marketing  from $8 billion in 2019 to 2022. There are more and more virtual influencers. More than 50 of them made their social media debuts before June 18, 2020. According to Virtualhumans.org, there are more than 150 sites today that track the posts of virtual humans. 
 

But traditional virtual influencers  now face competition from brands willing to launch their own computer-generated avatars. Yoox, a luxury online site discount site belonging to the Yoox NetaPorter Group, launched the fictional influential person Daisy in 2018. She continues to engage in multi-brand campaigns using Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger products. In March of this year, the German company Puma for sportswear production creates a virtual leader Maya opinion for the Southeast Asian region and promotes the new sneaker Future Rider. This month, Yasmine Sewell unveiled Ræ, a new member of the virtual team at British wellness brand Vyrao. To be added: Production company Dimension Studio says it's currently working with fashion and beauty brands on a virtual project. 
 Dudley Neville Spencer left her debt trader job in 2017 to start a Virtual Influencer Agency, but was turned down by many luxury brands. According to investment banking firm Morgan Stanley, this changed in anticipation of the explosive growth of Metaverse and NFTs. This market is expected to account for 10% of the luxury goods market by 2030 and generate revenue opportunities of €50 billion. “Avatar has become a fashionable area of ​​digital technology, and brands are recognizing it. Neville Spencer says many of the people we've communicated with over the years have  come back to us in the last six months. 
 

New Meta-fluencer

The Metaverse is already producing impressive results for some luxury brands. For example, the Gucci Garden Show at Roblox in May attracted over 19.9 million visitors. Influencer marketing can play a huge role in bringing consumers into the metacommunity, but  Simon Windsor, co-founder and co-managing director of Dimension, who worked with Balenciaga and Simone Rocha, said that brands should say there is yoox launched Daisy, now exclusively on Instagram, to make clothing look "more familiar and personal" to users who frequently see ads on the platform, says Manuela Strippoli, director of Brands and Communications at Yoox. Daisy's capabilities are built using Yoox user data and customer preferences, Strippoli said. In the future, Daisy could be represented in a broader metaverse. "Gen Z and Millennials don't make a distinction between the digital world and the physical world," she explains. “We want to get closer to these consumers.”

When marketing Vyrao, Yasmine Sewell did not intend to partner with an established influencer. “We wanted to create something that would personify what Vyrao stands for,  a brand based on movement and energy boosts,” she explains. Ræ was created in collaboration with digital artist Wujin Lin. “We see R as a kind of digital energy healer  in the metaverse that radiates good energy  like our scent. Going forward, we will see  more opportunities for Ræ to represent us and  connect with people outside of our channels,” Sewell says. 
 

Strippolee points out that virtual avatars like Daisy are "much cheaper" than regular influencers (100 each). Managed by cents, the company can appear in multiple places at the same time and is the ideal Yoox spokesperson  when you want to speak your mind on topics like diversity, inclusion or sustainability. 

4 Yoox declined to comment on Daisy's development costs, but the cost of creating a budget virtual influencer ranges from £5,000 to £10,000, depending on how personalized the design is and whether the brand needs help distributing avatars across multiple channels. It can grow to millions. Windsor said there is an ongoing cost to maintaining a character, and that's an important part of the process.

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