Editor's Note
Today is the day of the fifth day of the Chinese New Year to welcome the god of wealth, and the workers will have to start working in two days to "make money".
However, some "people" not only did not rest during the Spring Festival, but became more inward-looking, they are virtual people who claim that human design will not collapse and will never tire.
When it comes to "making money", there may not be any celebrity who fights harder than these virtual idols.
Cooking Chinese New Year's Eve meals, setting off firecrackers, issuing money, keeping the new year, and watching the Spring Festival Gala were the fixed processes of our Spring Festival in the past. Of course, as people's entertainment methods become more abundant, coupled with the strict implementation of the firecracker ban, the fixed process is also being subtracted one by one.
For the virtual people, this may be the second, or even the first, Spring Festival they have experienced. To them, everything is fresh.
Ar avatar in Alter Ego
Holidays, homecoming, and the New Year are the main themes before the Spring Festival for workers.
But what about virtual people? The answer may be the opposite, it is work.
Do workers want to buy something before they go home? Merchants that capture this kind of user demand also began to try their best to attract users to the store to buy New Year goods before the Spring Festival. After all, there is no goal in buying New Year goods, and I don't know what I want to buy, which means that there are many things I want to buy. In order to seize this period of strong shopping demand, it might be nice to invite a virtual person to attract young users to the store?
Shanghai Qibao Vanke Plaza is just that. In the New Year's Eve flower market before the Spring Festival, the virtual person Gina came to help the mall attract customers. The promotional copy given by the mall is "out of the meta-universe and touch your reality", which is also the hottest hot spot this year, virtual people + meta-universe, directly rushing to the forefront of the trend.
Virtual man Gina's business
The setting of the virtual person Gina's own window puppet also makes her more adaptable to the business activities of this mall. The brand not only made a small video of the window doll becoming a person for her, but also had the first exhibition of virtual idols offline, and customers who visited could also take photos with her offline "twin".
There are not only Gina with business tasks, liu yexi, Ha sauce, Su Xiaomei these virtual people also carry a lot of business and performance tasks, need to start work during the Spring Festival to make money.
Liu Yexi, who is currently ranked in the first echelon of the Chinese virtual person camp, sent a short video of the third episode before the Spring Festival, and the video seems to be very relevant to the Spring Festival. In this video, there is not only a traditional pot throwing game, but also a scene of everyone eating a reunion dinner together, and this time The person that Liu Yexi tracks is named "Yin", which also echoes the zodiac sign of the Year of the Tiger.
The video of the third episode of Yoo Ye-hee is very old-fashioned, but it is also business
The video content of the third episode also tells a very Chinese New Year's future story. The old man missed the child, but could not bear to disturb his child's work, so he invited someone to summon a virtual relative to eat a reunion Chinese New Year's Eve meal. But what the story tells may not be so important, what is important is that the vivo phone that appears N times in the video from beginning to end is not too obvious.
Obviously, this is also a business video, but the focus of the melon eaters is also different. Below this video, the most liked comment is that Liu Yexi is really busy, and she has to work across the Chinese New Year's Eve.
Virtual man Liu Yexi
Look, whether you are a virtual person or not, whether you want to work overtime before the Spring Festival is the most concerned thing for onlookers.
Even if you open a red packet, you can see the virtual person sending blessings. This year, the red envelope cover continued to be popular, and the virtual people also caught up with the opportunity to appear on the cover, and the virtual people of iFLYTEK aijia and the virtual spokesperson of Baixin Bank came. Every time you open the cover of a red envelope, you can see that they give you a New Year's greeting.
The Spring Festival Gala is naturally indispensable to the figure of workers. In the past, the star artists who made a lot of money performed on the stage at the Spring Festival Gala, and now virtual people can also. It is not the virtual person Teresa Teng Lijun or other well-known artists who appeared in the Zhejiang Satellite TV New Year's Eve concert, but the original virtual person "Su Xiaomei". The virtual person, launched by BlueFocus, completed a cross-dimensional reality stage show with Liu Yu during the Spring Festival Gala of Beijing Station on the first day of the Chinese New Year.
Su Xiaomei's Beijing Satellite TV Spring Festival Gala performance
Thinking that more and more idol artists now have their own digital virtual people, perhaps we can also think of the future stars can also go home for the New Year, the virtual people on the stage of the scene - anyway, are exquisite light plus filters, virtual people will not roll over, no one doubts whether they are fake singing in the end.
In addition to the Spring Festival Gala, another major event during this year's Spring Festival holiday is the opening of the Winter Olympics. To this end, the meteorological service AI virtual person "Feng Xiaoshu" also had to wait online, broadcasting the Winter Olympic Meteorological Index in real time for participants and viewers at various venues in "China Weather".
Meteorological Service AI Virtual Man "Feng Xiaoshu"
It's just that these virtual people's Spring Festival migrant workers are all paid, and there is no need for the workers to feel heartache for them, and their "appearance fee" may be more than your salary for a year.
It's just that in addition to these virtual people who spend money on the battlefield, there are many virtual people who are not idle during the Spring Festival and want to send you blessings.
Chen Shuiruo in Microsoft's Xiaoice framework did not "go to the cave to find gold" during the Spring Festival, but linked up with Li Yugang and sang a cover song "Huaxia" to congratulate the New Year. The difficulty of this blessing is relatively not so great, after all, Chen Shuiruo only has a "real body" at the beginning, and the back is all edited to the content, and the entire production difficulty moves from virtual to reality, and the cost is much less.
Chen Shuiruo's "sister" Xia Yubing is more famous, although he did not cover the New Year's song, but with a cover song of "Passing by the World" on the CCTV "Dialogue" program, not only showed his cover singing strength, but also wrote poems for the Winter Olympics, sent his paintings to Dubai to participate in the exhibition.
Summer Rain Ice works
The virtual idol group A-SOUL released a song "Wishing you prosperity" on the B station before the New Year, with more than 1.04 million views. Five youthful and beautiful virtual people not only contributed voices but also filmed the MV, jumping from beginning to end, and the New Year's greetings did not stop.
This is not the end, Chinese New Year's Eve released on the same day of the new group song MV "Chinese New Year's Eve" has 125W+ views. MV also has not only a set of shapes, from MV cover to song production, it is the standard of mature girl groups. As a 2022 B station to pay respects to the age of the piece, it can be said that it is very in line with the aesthetics of young people.
"Chinese New Year's Eve" MV
Music blogger Ha Sauce did not have any works online during the New Year, but the day before the Chinese New Year's Eve, he had to fulfill the contract he had signed earlier, as a "Yuan universe New Year Goods Street Surprise Officer" to send Weibo goods. Before that, you should also interact with users on Weibo, so that everyone can share some new year in the comment area, and maybe it will appear in their next new song.
AYAYI, a virtual person who ran a business and a virtual person who burst into flames with a face ID photo, also opened before the Spring Festival, one Chinese New Year's Eve fireworks at night, and the other was a tiger head to welcome the New Year.
Don't underestimate these business photos and videos, they can be much more expensive. Lil Miquela, the originator of virtual people and Internet celebrities, distributes a large number of materials to suck powder every day, and it is said that the input cost of projects related to her is in the tens of millions. You can send a circle of friends and a small red book with a single shot, but for virtual people, the cost may be tens of thousands.
Supermodel and Lil Miquela
Snow claws that have developed several virtual person IP introduce to Aifan'er that the cost of virtual people is very high, and the initial investment is very large. Snow Claw a hyper-realistic virtual person Ou Xin debut video cost is about a few million, snow claw another beautiful realistic virtual person Gina costs a lot less, but the production cost of the material is also about 1W.
As long as it is not a simple face-changing technology, the more human-like virtual people cost the higher. This also leads to many virtual people after a little fame, followed by a variety of business cooperation, endorsement projects, because the cost is too high.
But the reason why virtual people want to do this is also because they need more people to accept and even become fans. This truth is actually similar to the shaping of Internet celebrities, before no one pays attention, you are just a vegetarian, when you accumulate a certain amount of fans, you can use your own traffic to complete the monetization. Fans will not come out of thin air, your photos, videos are the key to attracting fans.
Two virtual people are open for spring festival business
From this point of view, the virtual people have obvious advantages over real Internet celebrities, after all, although the number of virtual people is growing rapidly, the group itself is small, and the freshness is still for the public. But their drawbacks are also obvious, real people can produce a lot of photos and videos a day, which is far from the productivity of virtual people.
It can even be said that the "productivity" of ten virtual people may not be able to beat a real person. Snow Claw's virtual anchor Gao Tianpeng needs a team of nearly 20 people to broadcast a PGC live broadcast, including director, script planning, live broadcast technology, motion capture of the middle man, dubbing... In contrast, the cost of real people is actually lower.
In this process, virtual people need more cost management, more likely to be popular overnight, as long as there is no long-term output capacity will soon be forgotten. AyaYI's first photo released in Xiaohongshu that year received 100,000 likes, but it has not broken through this number since then, and the recent photos that have exceeded 1K are getting less and less, and the least is even less than 100.
Virtual human AYAYI
But AYAYI is actually not small in this process, but once users see it as a virtual person, there is no ordinary interaction. Some people will judge whether the light and shadow of this photo is natural, the head is not crooked, and some people are discussing the post-processing technology of the picture, but few people see them as "people".
This is also a problem that virtual people need to face. Lin Yan, the head of commercialization of Snow Claw Technology, told us:
I think one of the important things about virtual exploration is what is the purpose of virtual people? Are you trying to get him to help you make money; or to make him make a bigger emotional connection for you; to let your emotions have a sustenance in another world. There are now all kinds of virtual people in the world. But you find that there aren't that many stories to tell behind them, and that's one thing we're good at and sticking to.
For virtual people and the operating companies behind them, there are technical difficulties, but the opportunities are also real.
What kind of endorsement can a real person receive today when he accumulates tens of thousands of fans in Douyin and Xiaohongshu? Most of them are business cooperation that directly brings goods. But a virtual person is completely different, as long as they accumulate tens of thousands of fans or even thousands, they all have the opportunity to receive millions of endorsements, and even become the spokespersons and promoters of big brands.
The virtual man Gina
Perhaps standing on the outlet, virtual people can be expensive.
In the case of high operating costs and fast endorsement money, the operating company of the virtual person chooses business cooperation is also a very smooth path. Lin Yan said that virtual people are like children, on the one hand, you need to treat him as a child and raise and operate, on the other hand, you also need to rely on it to make money and strive to achieve self-circulation.
In this mode, virtual people act like child stars. But under many uncertain factors, whether these virtual child stars can give birth to the next superstar still needs to wait for the answer of time.
Visual | Xie Guijie
Written by | Cold Thoughts
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