OK, I could run TechToSee, but that doesn’t mean I can write whatever I want, when I want – but there’s something weird going on with LG’s virtual influencer and I just need to talk about it. .
A quick overview: mid-2020, LG brought virtual influencer Reah Keem to life on Instagram, and used it to present part of his CES 2021 conference. It was a big deal … mainly because no one knew why LG was doing this.
Was it to create a “physical” incarnation of faceless voice assistants? Was it to take a slice of the $ 10 million pie some virtual influencers are raking in? Was it just an overly exuberant marketing machine?
My interest was piqued at CES 2022, where LG announced that Reah Keem – who, let’s not forget, is a DJ and songwriter with his own SoundCloud and all although she doesn’t actually have a heartbeat – her debut album will be released.
I wrote about her “news” on her album deal at the time, and even while I was writing it sounded like a misuse of time – does anyone care that LG is creating a virtual influencer?
Of course there is a trend here – what about Gram of Shudu, originally “launched” as real but turning out to be synthetic … and yet after that appeared in Korean Vogue?
Or, and this is the big one, Miquela, aka LilMiquela, which amassed 3,100,000 subscribers and could charge $ 8,000 for a single Insta post – and is set to accumulate $ 10,000,000 in one year for its “creators”, the Los Angeles-based startup Brud.
Virtual influencers are a thing now – what really bothers you in terms of defining what an influencer actually is.
If Reah becomes the face of a future LG voice assistant (as shown in LG’s OmniPod concept), then make her famous, get a Instagram and next SoundCloud Is it that that makes sense, I guess … but her appearance in said concept was a version of her from a cartoon. I don’t know what’s going on.
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Okay, I haven’t even reached the weird point yet: LG erased material from Reah Keem’s social media, as if trying to cover her up by saying something that would then be used against her.
Obviously that’s not the case – I went through all of his posts on Insta last week (then realized, again, that I was supposed to be doing a “good job”) and what I found was a strange thread of “finding her voice”, which resulted in her posting both of a wonderful hashtag #pissedatdevelopers when they had not “found her voice” and also the one where she reveals its new tones and invites comments.
But now everything that was released after August 2020 has been deleted. Mistrustful.
Why is LG doing this? Could it be that the new album deal she signed with Mystic Story forced LG to remove the previous voice she “found”?
“Singing around universal themes like love, acceptance and oneness is what I want to focus on,” Reah said. Wait, no … someone wrote in marketing and then claimed it was a 3D model that said it.
“In the near future, I would like to work with various fashion and visual artists to expand the style of content for the enjoyment of my fans. The opportunities as a virtual artist are endless.
I contacted LG to find out why this might be happening. I have to stop this now – I have other work to do beyond satisfying my curiosity about a bunch of pixels and if it could be able have become sensitive enough to delete their own Insta posts.
