Creating video clones for marketing purposes is not going to age well. In the next couple of years, you are going to see the rise and fall of a clever, efficient, and possibly effective trend:
Creating video avatars of real people to help them communicate in mass.
This will be done in the name of not having to sit in front of a camera and actually talk to their audience.
I’m not talking about content that would have been traditionally been conveyed in text; like instructions, courses, chatbots, or company announcements. I also don’t mean advertising – where the product is the focus and the person in the ad has always been a planned-out avatar of a customer.
I am referring to video that traditionally would come from a real live person that makes you feel like they are talking to you and sharing their personal experience and knowledge. The kind of video that spawns para-social relationships.
Creating video avatars for this purpose will be a mistake.
You know why people are not as receptive to email blasts as they are personal emails? It’s because the recipient knows that the email was not written just for them.
Also, because the words came from a “plan” rather than a “heart.”
Likewise, AI avatars must come from a plan. Because they do not have a heart. They are the planned and pre-programmed version of us – no heart.
This is why as we begin to clone ourselves and make our own video avatars, we will inevitably create what I call Avatar Spam.
Avatar Spam is mass produced, mass distributed, and mass rejected videos of AI avatars created to make video communication more scalable – the same way we did with email marketing.
This video avatar spam will show up on websites, YouTube, internal company communications, and especially linked from the OG of spam – email.
At least for the video avatar spam sent through email, we already have spam filters in our email boxes. But for all other ways we watch video of people, be prepared to get tired of watching people say things that are from a planned script designed by their marketing team, rather than from their heart.
Gary Vee said that marketers ruin everything. And yes, we can’t wait to get our teeth into this one.
Here’s an AI Avatar of myself that I created years ago, before this technology was very good. We are far beyond this today, but as an early adopter, it showed me where we are headed. I will create a new version of this for testing purposes, but hold strong to my beliefs in this article – as not to abuse the technology and be avatar spammy.
