According to a recent survey conducted by something called “The Influencer Marketing Factory”—no whiff of self-interest there—58% of American adults are now following a “virtual influencer” on social media.  

Yep, you read that right: if the poll is credible, some 6 in 10 of our fully grown neighbors say they’re keeping up, Kardashian-like, with a computer-generated character for the stuff they’d get from, say, a Kardashian. Although, in fairness, “virtual Barbie” is being deployed as a puppeted doll which means Mattel is either too cheap to spring for the CG, or they figured the Barbie hive wants to see the real plastic, no damned pixel substitutes accepted.

So, okay, if this was about kids and cartoon characters, I could buy it. But landing on top of the whole field of influencer marketing, which I tend to view as the sewer-pipe end of celebrity commerce, it really makes me queasy. Ill-conceived as a regrettable way to monetize the old “famous for being famous” Barbara Walters trope, the vast majority of what spews our way from this source strikes me as a very quick way to separate the susceptible from their marketing money.

And it’s not just that the field has spawned a fingernails-on-chalkboard lexicon like “collab” and “creator”; it’s the impact of artifice on advertising as a whole. After all, we’re not exactly operating with a surfeit of client trust in the first place—in 2018 the big national advertiser’s group, the ANA, reported that 27% of marketers rate their trust in agencies as “fair” with 21% as “poor.” Methinks that’s unlikely to have improved much in the intervening years for a variety of well-earned reasons, overt duplicity about digital and the oversell of “influencers” among ‘em.

This, by the way, isn’t to say that having an endorser who makes organic sense for a brand or a product, animated or otherwise, can’t have utility. Obviously, it can, and for the very same reason that both celebrity and native advertising, done right, can get legitimate traction—as a way to win attention.

But when the influence peddlers start selling discount fame with formulaic, crappy, deceptive, and otherwise efficiency-killing social tactics (“micro-influencers,” anyone?) I’m in the old, old, old-school socialites’ camp:  “if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.”

P.S. LOL