Dive Brief:
- Pacsun has teamed with Miquela, a prime CGI influencer, to assist its back-to-school and vacation applications this 12 months, based on a press launch.
- The freckled digital character components into Pacsun’s social content material and promotes the model’s brick-and-mortar shops. In posts asserting the collaboration, Miquela poses in sporty Pacsun gear outdoors a location within the Soho neighborhood of New York City.
- The youth-oriented retailer stated the tie-up is a part of a brand new advertising technique that places an even bigger deal with virtual influencers and the metaverse, with plans to closely ramp up exercise across the fourth quarter. Pacsun sees this method as a option to strengthen bonds with its core contingent of Gen Z customers.
Dive Insight:
Pacsun needs to carve out an even bigger stake within the metaverse, and is popping to one of many earliest examples of a virtual influencer to take action. Miquela, which went reside on Instagram in 2016, has continuously grabbed headlines — and stoked controversy — for performing as a purely synthetic model ambassador and poster. The lifelike character was created by the corporate Brud, whose deal with virtual avatars and transmedia appears prescient within the wake of entrepreneurs’ present metaverse mania.
Some critics have discovered the concept of Miquela unnervingly dystopian, significantly within the makes an attempt to imbue her with a human backstory. The character generated backlash in 2019 for sharing a vlog about being sexually assualted in a rideshare, with many commentators viewing the coopting of an unsightly real-world situation as cynical.
Regardless, Miquela, with her rigorously airbrushed look and signature coiffure of bangs and buns, has proved a magnet for style manufacturers as extra gravitate towards CGI influencer advertising. Dior, Balmain, Kenzo and Prada are among the many high-end labels Pacsun cited as serving to buoy the development within the class. Miquela and Pacsun each lately dropped into the metaverse as a part of ComplexLand, a virtual purchasing occasion placed on by the writer Complex.
For Pacsun, the partnership is a option to prolong its attain on social channels which were more and more central to the retailer’s development technique. Miquela has over 3 million followers on Instagram and three.6 million on TikTok on the time of publication. The perpetually younger influencer can be positioned across the forms of causes that Pacsuns’ goal demographic is thought to care about.
“She aligns with our core model values and imaginative and prescient … talking out on essential social points like [Black Lives Matter] and Rally The Vote, in addition to reaching inroads into metaverse style and tradition,” stated Brieane Olson, president at Pacsun, in a press assertion.
Working with Miquela may assist Pacsun construct on latest social media successes. The model final week stated it surpassed its aim of reaching 2 million followers on TikTok, which it achieved by leveraging a mixture of hashtag challenges, shoppable livestreams, creator partnerships and content material made by its in-house group.