The metahumans are here.
If you’re a gamer, an avid movie-watcher or hang out on social media or in the metaverse you’ll have seen the metahumans – high fidelity digital characters that look, move and act (almost) like real people.
If you’re a marketer as well then you may be starting to see the incredible potential this new technology offers us – to tell stories, make an impact – and get hyper focused and personalised in our messaging and content, leveraging the power of AI to do it at scale.
And the good news? The tools and technology to create these experiences is now much more accessible than ever before – and marketers can start to harness the capabilities that previously were the realm of movie makers and game designers – and build personalised, engaging and interactive customer experiences.
Consumer brands are leading the charge.
Brands like PUMA and Adidas, Samsung and high-end luxury brands like Balmain, Louis Vuitton, Tommy Hilfiger have been innovators in this space. But the potential for marketers goes way beyond – and we’re only at the start of the journey.
From our work with marketing teams in enterprise and high-growth tech businesses we see several common marketing drivers.
In a world where people are bombarded with information, we need to stand above the rest by creating the unique and memorable experiences they crave. For marketers, video and visual content is just the start of meeting that challenge, which is perhaps why the top content marketing-related area of investment for 2022 was expected to be video.
Customers no longer accept being treated as a number or a commodity. Nearly a third of CMOs rank customer experience among the top three priorities for B2B success and they emphasise intensive marketing touch points and experiences to achieve it.
Human and personalised experiences are essential, which includes translation and localisation. For marketers, the challenge is to automate the creation and deliver this at speed and scale.
Control and self-service are paramount. Our research tells us that 62% of millennials and 75% of Gen Z buyers want to have control over how they engage with us. For marketers it’s more important than ever to create highly relevant – and highly personalised – experiences that get people to the information they want and need faster.
We can perhaps encapsulate all this by saying the overarching challenge is that the age of one-size-fits-all in marketing is gone. We need to stay relevant – a challenge that’s as important to B2B as it is to B2C. We need to capture attention and engagement, tell stories, and make more one-to-one connections on which to build lasting relationships.
Metahumans, the metaverse and AI give us the opportunity to address some of these challenges and create and scale the stories we want to tell in a highly productive and efficient way.
For campaign creative, digital humans are an exciting new frontier that help us create the memorable moments we need.
To take a B2C example, Prada developed Candy, a virtual muse, to be the face of its new fragrance.
In B2B, it’s very easy to imagine how the Intuit QuickBooks’ adverts featuring miniaturised humans could harness digital human technology. And Xero’s robot also presents possibilities (and a reminder that metahumans don’t actually have to be human).
Many B2C brands have developed their own metahuman brand ambassadors, a move that gives them full control over what they say or do. Others team up with virtual influencers such as Miquela.
Until recently, these metahumans were limited by their inability to interact in real-time. That’s no longer the case. Developments in AI mean machines can now learn, interact and engage.
At SXSW22, entrepreneur Mark Cuban was interviewed live by Zero, a digital human. Zero also recently hosted Samsung’s live shopping event to promote the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S22.
The technology offers new avenues of information delivery, brand positioning and brand engagement – reviews of interactions with characters like him all share a sense of wonder and astonishment, completely cutting through the noise.
Metahumans have exciting potential to unlock localisation and personalisation at a stroke. For example, Sophie, Deloitte’s digital human, shows how they “recreate natural human interaction at scale” and “provide client support and coaching, while still enabling a human emotional connection”.
To take things further, rather than PDF user guides or email series during the onboarding process, could a digital human be an alternative, talking customers through the things they need to know? The same is true for customer community engagement, whether that’s at live events or to replace chatbots.
When it comes to giving customers control over their interactions with brands, Qatar Airways’ QVerse is one example. It’s an interactive service that showcases its premium class services. Rather than watching a video, users can take the lead on what they want to explore, with a digital human acting as their guide.
In a B2B setting there are interesting opportunities to use metahumans to help personalise user training during product roll-outs. Similarly, they could be used to take people on tailored tours of buildings or factories, whether they already exist or are still in blueprint form.
It’s true to say it’s mainly B2C brands that are leading the way in the use of digital humans and the metaverse at the moment.
But it’s likely this will change quickly.
The presence of metahuman marketing in the B2B technology sphere is on the rise. Social media giant Meta has been paving the way for the uptake of technologies that allow you to blend with the metaverse. And with companies like Deloitte, Lenovo and LG leading with way with virtual brand ambassadors – it’s a matter of time before tech giants are utilising the potential of scalable digital humans to address marketing challenges bigger than the brand awareness battle.
We recently hosted a webinar with CIM around the rise of metahumans and their relevance in the B2B technology space. Our session discussed relevant use cases, as well as showing the capabilities of both AI and video to enable your business to implement a metahuman strategy no matter the size or scale.
You can watch the webinar on demand using the button below, or if you’d like to explore the opportunities for metahumans in relation to your business, or receive a demo of the products themselves, register for 'The rise of the metahumans - imagination made real'. It’s a 1.5 hour free workshop where we’ll showcase the technologies used in getting you started, as well as answering questions and looking at actionable insights for you to take forward in your own business.
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