How’s it going, gorgeous email friends. I keep a list of topics I want to write to you about. But the scant forward-planning that goes into these emails was upended this week, when I saw a paid promotion on Instagram.
The platform’s algorithm seems so ham-fisted that the adverts it stuffs into my feed are pretty ignorable. But the post in question was from an account I already follow. An influencer, if you like, even though that has overtones of disingenuousness. But surprisingly, there was nothing wrong with it. It made no misleading claims, it was clearly labelled as a promotion, the product was good and fair and its endorsers brought forth a positive message. It’s not even a new campaign.
Yet while the promotion was neither fraudulent nor false, it is entirely fake and phony. But nobody is mislead: neither anyone participating in the ad itself nor those who view it. And while it draws upon some long-standing advertising techniques, but it couldn’t possibly have existed five years ago.
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Artificial influence: You’d not been long on the internet before you realised it’s mostly nonsense. So whenever you’ve found out that something is disingenuous, such as someone on social media buying fake followers or monetising their popularity by quietly taking payment to plug products, you’ve never been particularly surprised. You just felt bad for the kids taken in by it. These modern marketing techniques are poorly regulated, and this has cut their credibility to ribbons: only a tiny minority claim to trust what influencers say.
But that’s where the fun begins, because there’s a lot of conflicting information about influencers. For example, it’s through influencers that a quarter of Gen Z women learn about new products. Even though the age of the influencer has peaked, in the US 86% of young people would be willing to try out as an influencer. And although influencers apparently face a backlash by brands tired of them overstating their clout, their popularity, and income, continues to soar.
So here’s the ad. Tech giant Samsung’s range of Galaxy smartphones has a long-running campaign to draw the attention of the young and fashion-conscious, using a group of well-known faces including 15-year-old English actress Millie Bobby Brown and computer-generated ‘virtual’ influencer Miquela Sousa. The ad is a couple of posed shots from a photo-interview Brown and Sousa gave to teen fashion magazine Seventeen about self-care and using social media for positive ends.
Okay, back up. Virtual influencer Lil Miquela has already featured in several high-profile campaigns, including kissing supermodel Bella Hadid in a Calvin Klein spot earlier this year. But that lent clumsily hard on queerbaiting shock-tactics; fashion brands know that all press is good press. By contrast, this Samsung ad caught my attention because it’s entirely pedestrian. Two ambassadors giving their views on a subject close to their hearts, and a sponsor bankrolling it.
Of course, it never happened. Millie and Lil Miquela don’t hang out and have fun. You know this. They can’t, even if they wanted to, since one isn’t real. Maybe neither is real, since their public persona is managed by an invisible team. But you go along with it knowing it’s all fictional. This ad isn’t trying to shock a reaction out of you; rather, it’s inviting you to participate in its narrative, like any novel, play or movie would. It represents an inversion: a pure form of the influencer trend towards authenticity, except the only thing that’s real is the advert itself. The narrative wrapped around it is as fictional as the Milk Tray Man or Tony the Tiger, but we’re okay with that. 🎭
🎸 When a Guitar Lesson Becomes Controversial: when a teacher and student sit alone in a room, nobody gets too excited about the copyrights of the teaching material. Take that lesson to YouTube, and ‘fair use’ gets stretched to breaking point.
💻 Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley: or why few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor. A really insightful exploration of mindset inequality.
🎶 On ‘Mellotron Variations,’ A 1960s-Era Instrument Makes A Comeback: the Mellotron has enduring appeal for musicians wealthy enough to get one and not maintain it themselves.
🎭 This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad: this New York Times journalist is disappointed to discover that Tom Hanks is as nice as everyone says, and begs you to read this non-salacious article anyway.
💿 Jean-Michel Jarre launches ‘infinite album’: Suffering Christ. I feel about Monsieur JMJ as I expect some/most of you feel about Morrissey, i.e. why didn’t you have the decency to shuffle off while you were still interesting, as opposed to embarking upon these escapades of ever-compounding banality. One can only hope there’s a Stevie-Wonder-esque second wind of redemption. Don’t @ me.
👾 This is how AI bias really happens, and why it’s so hard to fix: bias can creep in at many stages of the deep-learning process, and the standard practices in computer science aren’t designed to detect it. So trying to weed it out involves going back… way back.
🚂 Slow travel: Travelling by train, rather than plane, is attractive to the environmentally-conscious. But it’s also a better all-round experience; an opportunity to slow down and be more engaged with the world.
♻️ 101 ways to live more sustainably: matters of the climate can feel at once overwhelming and remote; that you should be changing what you do while also nothing you do will make the difference. That’s what I like about this guide: simple, tangible and above-all practical steps.
Aspirational fakeness: Lil Miquela is the most instafamous virtual influencer. Not only does she sell you stuff, she lives her life: chilling with famous pals, modelling for magazines, peddling merchandise and even putting out records. She is by all accounts the perfect celebrity, complete with complex inter-‘personal’ relationships.
Last year her Instagram was hijacked by a Trump-supporting white-supremacist influencer named Bermuda, who is also not real. Both are (now, if not then) the product of an enigmatic LA-based studio named Brud that enjoys considerable investment from venture capitalists and employs around 50 people. Each twist and turn of this complex narrative acts as a PR for Brud’s creations, ratcheting their reach ever-upwards and in turn making their work even more effective.
Either by accident or design, virtual influencers have several advantages. They don’t draw a salary, and they can’t get addicted to anything. But more significantly, while ‘real’ influencers struggle to balance the aspirational with the credible, virtual influencers are unashamedly fake. What is real, and in the end most valuable, is our reaction.
But ultimately, all influencers—virtual or otherwise—operate within similar constraints. The benefit of influence is hard to quantify beyond popularity alone, although there are some indicators. Even then, influencers don’t effectively build brands which remains the currency for trust behind many purchases we make.
Just as our reaction is the most authentic part of any act of influence, so we also should decide how we want to be influenced. For influencers can be used for great ill, such as to sell firearms, or for good, such as debunking online misinformation. Are you listening, Brud? 🤖
💥BLAST! continues to grow only by word-of-mouth. Know someone who’ll appreciate it? Invite them to join in. 😘
Finally: How a simple if/then ritual can help you achieve your goals: strategic thinking, in this case borrowed from poker players, aids predicting future events and in turn contributing to achievements. 🥅