Someone holding a phone displaying TikTok's logo (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
In the city that never sleeps, Broadway influencers might soon be able to take a nap, and let virtual influencers take center stage.
Last month, the popular social media platform TikTok announced that it will soon help brands and content creators create digital avatars using artificial intelligence to pitch goods and services. The digital avatars can be created using a collection of chosen actors or built from scratch to look like other real people.
“Digital Avatars help breathe life into branded content with generative [artificial intelligence] avatars of real people, which will enable new ways to scale creative strategies on TikTok,” proclaimed a spokesperson for the platform. “With 58% of TikTok users saying they are more likely to trust brands after learning about them from TikTok creators, avatars help scale and globalize branded content with a personalized, human feel and wide variety of gestures, expressions, nationalities, ages and languages,” the spokesperson continued.
Digital avatars have already appeared on TikTok and other social media platforms, and some of them have amassed millions of followers. For example, the Brazilian retailer Magalu created a virtual influencer named “Lu,” which has attracted more than seven million followers on TikTok. Another virtual influencer named “Miquela” now has over three and a half million followers on TikTok, as well as a record deal and a talent agent.
Meanwhile, the leading human theatre influencers on TikTok have fewer than fifty thousand followers.
Nevertheless, “TikTok is an enormously important part of theatre marketing, especially on Broadway,” observed Trevor Boffone, the author of a new book named TikTok Broadway. The popular social media platform and its influencers have helped some Broadway shows reach different demographics and attract new audience members.
“TikTok was a game changer for Beetlejuice, because it allowed our original cast recording to reach millions more young people than Broadway marketing campaigns usually allow,” confirmed Jennifer Graessle, who managed the musical’s social media accounts. Luring new and younger theatergoers to the spooky show, over 54 percent of Beetlejuice audience members had never bought tickets through Telecharge before, and over 70 percent of them were between the ages of 19 and 54, which was well above the 49 percent benchmark at other Broadway shows presented at the time.
But, while virtual influencers might look like human influencers, it is unlikely that virtual influencers will be able to promote Broadway shows as well as human influencers.
“[W]hat makes TikTok marketing so effective is the [‘do it yourself’], grassroots feel of it,” explained Boffone. “For instance, there is a nice cohort of #TheatreTok creators who see tons of shows and offer their perspectives,” he said. The human influencers all have “unique voices and followings who trust them,” he continued, and they “have the potential to market shows more than AI does at the moment.”
