Courtesy of BoSacks & The Precision Media Group 

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BoSacks Speaks Out: Archive

You don't have to be a 'person of influence' to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.

Scott Adams

Dateline Charlottesville, VA

In This Issue

• Milla Sofia Creator Believes Age Of AI-Virtual Influencers Upon Us
• New Tool Lets Consumers Reject Ad Targeting Tied To Phone Numbers

Milla Sofia Creator Believes Age Of AI-Virtual Influencers Upon Us

by Laurie Sullivan

https://www.mediapost.com/

https://bit.ly/3YjbYHK

Milla Sofia -- a "virtual influencer" born in Finland two months ago at age 19, was created from several artificial intelligence (AI) tools, but her creator says the two most important were Stable Diffusion and self-taught AI models.

Her creator -- who goes by the anonymous name “agent,” at least for now -- told Search & Performance Marketing Daily in an email that she was created as the face for an advertising campaign to support a Finnish online store brand.

“I thought of trying to create her face with the help of artificial intelligence, because I was interested in the possibilities brought by the technology,” the agent wrote. Some of the most successful creators have an agent.

The creator economy continues to grow exponentially, without any signs of slowing down, according to Forrester Research. Younger audiences say creators are the primary way they discover new products.

More than 300 million creators and growing. In Forrester’s Q1 2023 marketing results surveying business to business decision makers nearly three-quarters said they would partner with creators and influencers this year.  

While it is unclear exactly who created Sofia and her multiple social-media accounts, followers interact with her as if she were a real person. 

She has more than 100,000 followers on TikTok and more than 14,000 on X. The comment sections on her videos on YouTube and social media posts are filled with compliments.

No doubt this trend will continue as the technology becomes easier and less expensive to make interactive versions of the influencers.

Sofia is now 24 and a fashion model, according to her bio, who brings “unparalleled and futuristic perspective to the realm of style" with a passion that showcases the latest trends and pushes the boundaries in the ever-evolving fashion industry.

The goal is to develop Milla as a fashion model and influencer that can be taken seriously, the agent explains, which is the reason the agent changed Sofia's age from 19 to 24, because after thinking about it, the agent thought “it seemed that a 19-year-old didn’t have enough experience for the tasks planned for her.”

Virtual influencers like Sofia are not common, but also not unusual. Rozy, another AI influencer created by Sidus Studio X in 2021, offers advantages over human influencers. The savings is considerably lower, the agent said, but stopped short of providing a cost.

“With the help of AI, virtual model marketing can be done by one person at short notice,” the agent wrote. “While it takes many people and a lot of work to cooperate with the human model.”

Most of the tools are free, helping to keep costs low. The biggest contribution required to create the AI-generated influencer is expertise and time, the agent said.

Having the influencer move like a real human will be possible in the future, but at the moment technology doesn’t exist that would enable to keep cost down and quality high.

The cost to higher a human influencer varies greatly, between $100 to $1 million per post, depending on the influence and following of the creator, said Forrester Principal Analyst Kelsey Chickering.

“Other inputs beginning to go into the cost, is what the influencer delivers in sales,” Chickering said. “I’ve talked with brands that say while working with mega influencer is great for driving awareness of a product, it doesn’t necessarily drive sales. Mid-tier influencers may not have the biggest following, but the following they have trust them and drive sales for their products.”

Chickering views virtual influencers similar to creating a television or movie character created by a series of artists or writers that consumers may follow on social media. It will be important to be transparent as to whether the influencer is human or created by AI.

Futurism lays claim to initially breaking the news last month.

New Tool Lets Consumers Reject Ad Targeting Tied To Phone Numbers

by Wendy Davis 

https://www.mediapost.com/

https://bit.ly/3OFTJsN

The advertising industry self-regulatory group Digital Advertising Alliance is launching a tool that aims to allow consumers to opt out of behavioral advertising techniques that rely on consumers' encrypted phone numbers.

The new mechanism builds on the organization's two-year-old “token-ID based tool,” which enables people to opt out of the use of their encrypted email addresses for behavioral advertising.

The phone number opt-out mechanism comes as ad-technology companies appear increasingly interested in drawing on identifiers such as email addresses or phone numbers for targeting.

Companies that deploy this strategy typically ask users for their email addresses or phone numbers, and use encryption techniques to convert those addresses or numbers into alphanumeric strings (or “tokens") that are used to track people and serve them with ads. 

The ad-technology companies participating in the initial Digital Advertising Alliance program include Adstra, Foursquare, IQM, Knorex, LiveRamp, Merkle, GroupM’s [m]Platform, and Tapad.

Consumers who go to the Digital Advertising Alliance's opt-out site can enter their phone number. Participating companies will then match the phone number to its encrypted identifier, and refrain from using that token for ad targeting.

The Digital Advertising Alliance plans to delete the phone number and encrypted identifier after 30 days.

The opt-out mechanism only allows consumers to reject receiving targeted ads tied to their encrypted phone numbers (or email addresses), and doesn't prevent companies from using those identifiers for other purposes, including measurement.

Privacy advocate Justin Brookman, Director of Technology Policy for Consumer Reports, expressed skepticism about the new control.

“This incremental tweak will go unnoticed and will do absolutely nothing to stem consumers' privacy concerns or the continuing tide of new regulatory proposals,” Brookman said in an email to MediaPost.

He adds that regulators are “demanding simpler and more powerful controls” than the self-regulatory group's AdChoices icon -- which aims to notify consumers about online tracking and offer links to sites where people can opt out of receiving targeted ads.

Twelve states now have privacy laws that require companies to allow consumers to opt out of targeted advertising, and at least four of those states -- California, Colorado, Connecticut and Montana -- require companies to honor opt-out universal signals that consumers send with mechanisms like the Global Privacy Control. That tool, developed by privacy advocates, transmits an opt-out command to every website consumers visit.

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