How can brand digital humans that have lost their novelty break through?

Last year, virtual digital people were still popular, but this year they have all disappeared. What is the reason? The author of this article deeply analyzes the reasons for the decline of the popularity of virtual digital people, and also analyzes how brand digital people should break through in the future. Let's take a look.

Recently, at various car companies' press conferences, brand virtual digital people have almost disappeared collectively. For example, BYD's "Yangwang" in early January, Zhiji LS7, Chery Xingtu Yaoguang, and Geely Galaxy in February, and Leapmotor's new product launch in March, not a single virtual digital person was seen.

This is completely opposite to last year. During the epidemic, major companies chose to hold "Metaverse" press conferences to allow various digital people to appear, such as "Ida" of FAW-Volkswagen, "Léa" of Dongfeng Peugeot, "Axi" of Chery OMODA 5, "Cora" of GAC Honda Accord virtual owner, "Gong" of Changan Automobile digital employee, "Xijiajia" of Jidu Auto, and so on.

In less than a year, the once popular virtual digital people have disappeared drastically?

Of course, there are still other industries that are enthusiastically launching branded digital people, such as Shanghai Soap’s launch of “ALA”, Bobo, the virtual digital person of Broad Securities, launching his first live show, and Xiaoxi, the “digital employee” of China Broadcasting and Electric Group, officially joining the company…

However, in general, the craze for brand virtual digital humans has indeed waned. This article analyzes the many reasons behind this phenomenon, as well as the next step for brand digital humans to break through.

1. Reasons why the craze for brand digital humans has faded

1. People’s sense of novelty wears off

Two or three years ago, when virtual digital people who were comparable to real people and lifelike appeared, they indeed attracted a lot of attention. Some brands, such as Nayuki Tea, immediately seized the opportunity to bring their own highly realistic brand digital people to the stage, and then combined them with metaverse scenes, digital collectibles NFTs, etc., to form a three-piece set of digital people and metaverse, which really attracted a lot of attention and triggered a marketing boom.

But now, with the frequent appearance of a large number of high-definition digital people on Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, Video Number, etc., this sense of novelty has indeed been largely exhausted.

Apart from slightly different looks and clothing, the expressions, speech and movements of these high-definition digital people are actually very similar. The audience really can't tell them apart much, and it's no longer novel.

In a word: the bonus period for brand digital people who relied on novelty and uniqueness to gain popularity has passed.

2. Limited technical implementation and high cost

In fact, according to IP Egg Fried Rice’s in-depth understanding, after using virtual digital humans once or twice, most brands found that the technical bottleneck was serious and it was difficult to achieve long-term effective practical applications.

The main application scenario is still to attract attention through "show". Apart from that, many expected tasks are difficult to achieve or the cost is too high.

The best application of virtual digital humans is to serve as the front-end entrance to the metaverse. However, when the metaverse itself encounters a lot of difficulties, especially with various technical and hardware limitations, at least for now, allowing digital humans to open the metaverse is still a castle in the air, and the metaverse is not yet capable of making a significant contribution.

As news came out that META had suffered huge losses and was shrinking across the board in the development of the metaverse, digital humans naturally lost the novel charm of their bonus period. When the "show" no longer has dividends, naturally the "show" activities will decrease or disappear.

Moreover, the cost of developing a highly realistic digital virtual person is very high. Although the overall cost has dropped by more than half from two years ago to now, it still costs nearly one million to build digital assets and millions to produce digital content. In the long run, it is necessary to prepare for an investment of tens of millions. This is not a small amount. Given the current pragmatic mentality of enterprises, they will certainly consider it carefully.

According to IP Danchaofan, most brand virtual people only appear in one or two events and then retreat behind the scenes and are hidden. Of course, there are some brands that have been creating virtual people content on social media for a long time, but it is also very difficult to become popular.

3. AIGC steals the spotlight of Metaverse virtual people

The most popular ones now are, of course, various AIGC applications headed by ChatGPT. These endless AI technology breakthroughs are both shocking and truly useful. According to statistics, more than 90% of science and technology reports are now focused on AIGC, which naturally puts the originally popular metaverse and virtual humans aside.

The release of ChatGPT 4.0 a few days ago and the Baidu AIGC application: Wenxin Yiyan released today are further attracting people's attention to AIGC.

Of course, AIGC can greatly reduce the production cost of virtual digital humans and greatly improve the level of intelligent dialogue of virtual digital humans. This is beneficial in the long run, but the huge short-term impact is obvious.

Therefore, AIGC will destroy the illusion of the metaverse in the short term, but it is the key to rebirth in the long term. The real way out for brand virtual digital people still depends on AIGC, which has stolen its limelight, to solve the problem.

To sum up, brand virtual digital people are facing the first major ebb in their development life cycle. They not only need the injection of newer technologies, but also more flexible and creative ways of expression to bring out their charm.

In short, brand digital people need to break the constraints of traditional portraits and further expand the boundaries of IP creativity in order to better assist brand marketing.

2. How can brand digital people break through?

To be honest, although it seems that brand virtual people have different faces on the surface, at their core, they are still quite monotonous and homogeneous. In essence, it is still homogeneous competition rather than differentiated competition.

Sometimes I even think that brand digital people are too committed to the brand concept of "imagining the brand as a person". If it is not really made into a person, imagining it as a person may really give consumers enough room for imagination, but if it is really made into a person, it will lose the fun of wild imagination.

There is a "uncanny valley" effect here that you must know——

That is, when the level of visual simulation reaches a very realistic level, people will experience the uncanny valley feeling in their hearts, losing their sense of distance and imagination, and what follows will no longer be pleasure.

1. The first method of brand digital human breakthrough

Don’t pursue being too realistic, but rather pursue innovation and fun, and give full play to the unrestrained power of digital space…

Why can’t we use people who are not in the “uncanny valley” as brand ambassadors? Abandoning the concept that brands must be beautiful women and men, and using more original people, pets, robots or exotic creatures, perhaps it can enrich and enhance the brand experience?

Recently, the collaboration between Melatonin and "Battle of Balls" has utilized digital production technology to revive the Melatonin "White Old Man" and "Golden Old Lady" and "Ball" from Battle of Balls, and they continue to dance the classic Melatonin brainwash dance together, which has achieved unique and good results.

The "White Old Man" and "Golden Old Lady" among them continue to maintain the brand's inherent characteristics. They are still very Q-version cartoons, making people feel very friendly without falling into the cage of highly simulated digital people.

We at IP Fried Rice recently did the same thing: when we were designing an IP image for a famous cultural tourism company, we didn’t stick to the conventional routine of high-simulation digital people, but fully understood the core characteristics of this famous cultural tourism company, and brought the most essential and consensus-building things to life, turning them into IP characters and stories. The appearance presented was not a high-simulation digital person at all, but a surreal life full of imagination and cross-time and space power. Since it has not been officially launched yet, we will introduce the detailed case to our friends when it can be shown later. In short, breaking the shackles that high-definition digital people must be beautiful and handsome, as well as great and glorious, is the key to the continued development and survival of brand digital people!

2. The second method for brand digital people to break through

First, figure out the three most commonly used scenarios for this brand IP (excluding self-media content), think clearly about the three core scenarios, and find the best scenario marketing method. Then the brand digital person will be really useful ...

Many companies that create digital people or IP only think about creating self-media content. In fact, this is only external, not essential. Moreover, what if the self-media content is not popular enough? Wouldn’t it become useless?

So I often tell companies that if you want to be a digital person or IP, don’t consider external self-media first, but first consider the three scenarios in which IP can best play a role in corporate operations.

Only by finding these three necessary scenarios for long-term application in business operations can this IP have the possibility of long-term development instead of dying due to the lack of popularity of self-media content and becoming useless .

For example, high-definition digital human IPs often have a big shortcoming, which is that they are not suitable for being made into gifts or plush toys. If the company originally wanted to use interesting gifts as an important IP scenario, high-definition digital humans would be useless.

For example, why are high-definition digital humans so popular in the beauty, fashion and other industries? It is because in these industries, high-definition digital humans have application scenarios: such as beauty effects, dressing effects, etc. In this way, high-definition digital humans can be useful for a long time.

For example, many functional brands targeting middle-aged and elderly men would not be suitable for high-definition digital people. This is because this group of people has the lowest interest in high-definition digital people. Therefore, the IP that these brands should create should not be image-based digital people, but it would be more useful to IPize the functionality and combine it with celebrity endorsements.

I particularly remember a principle that Wang Ning of Pop Mart told me earnestly: The success of an IP must rely on frequent exposure to it by consumers.

In other words, only through frequent companionship can a true spiritual connection between a person and an IP be established.

The reason why most brands fail in building IPs is that they focus too much on publishing content on external social media, which consumers may not see often, nor do they need to see often, unless it becomes a big hit, but the chance of becoming a big hit will never exceed 0.1%.

So, as Xpeng Motors' marketing director told me, when doing marketing, we must first consider the scenario. How to be creative in the scenario and continuously establish effective connections with consumers are the important reasons for success.

Therefore, if a brand digital person or digital IP wants to achieve a breakthrough,

We should first find the three scenarios in which the company has the most contact with consumers in its operations, and let the IP add value and points to it, rather than just relying on the attention of digital people (which is almost gone) and social media content (the success rate is not controllable).

The scene requires content, and content is IP.

Therefore, the marketing layout of brand virtual digital people should be in the right direction to move towards consumer experience scenarios, regardless of whether it is called the Metaverse. Of course, it is better to combine the Metaverse, but this requires the maturity of technology. Before the technology matures, let us return to being pragmatic, that is, combining it with service and product experience improvement.

3. The third method for brand digital people to break through

Accelerating the use of AIGC technology can quickly reduce costs while greatly improving the intelligence of digital humans.

There is no need to say much about the benefits of the combination of digital humans and AIGC. It will definitely be the mainstream in the future. We are very confident that in the future almost all digital humans, whether they are entertainment-oriented, brand-oriented, or data service-oriented, will be greatly improved by introducing the functions of AIGC.

Of course, much of this work is not done by brand companies themselves, but by technology innovation companies providing new AI platforms. This day will soon come.

"In a recent research report, Sequoia Capital pointed out that by 2030, text, code, images, videos, 3D, and games can all be generated through AIGC and reach the level of professional developers and designers. As artificial intelligence technology continues to develop, users will be able to create their own immersive world."

In other words, AIGC will basically realize the metaverse in 10 years, and most of the current jobs will be unemployed in 10 years...

To be honest, it’s not that brand companies are no longer interested in the metaverse or digital humans, but there are too many things that cannot be achieved now, leading to disappointment and shelving.

Therefore, what companies are currently giving up are just flashy appearances and unrealistic facts that cannot be implemented.

Once technology companies break through bottlenecks and provide efficient platforms for enterprises to apply Metaverse and Digital Human, a new wave of dividends from Metaverse and brand Digital Human will emerge...

By then, people will be amazed again!

The brand digital people of the future may not all be highly realistic virtual people that are almost the same as real people, but will be a flourishing of all kinds, each with its own unique brilliance: from pets, strange people, alien robots, to the life of all things in the world.

The brand digital human creativity of the future will be very rich.

The future is limitless and will create new money and business opportunities again!

Author: Chen Gelei (Lao Xiaoge) team

Source: WeChat public account "IP Fried Rice (ID: IPCOOK)"