Virtual human's Double Eleven, using 8,000 yuan to create 8 million worth of value

In November in Beijing, the night breeze is slightly cool. At 0:30, Xiaomei, who works in a major Internet company, returned home after finishing her day's work.

Removed makeup, washed up, used up the last bit of eye cream, and collapsed on the bed. It was already two o'clock in the morning. An advertising text message popped up on her phone. This year's e-commerce Double Eleven event had begun again, so she opened Taobao I want to choose a set of skin care products at an affordable price for myself.

All major merchants and stores were conducting live broadcast activities. Xiaomei mechanically swiped her phone upwards and finally saw the products she was interested in in a live broadcast room of a big-name skin care product. She clicked on a few products and looked at them. After asking a few questions in the comment area of ​​the live broadcast room, "What discounts are there?" and "Is the price guaranteed?" After the anchor answered them one by one, Xiaomei quickly placed an order. And this anchor who just answered fluently is actually a virtual person.

For Xiaomei, watching live shopping is her leisure life after work, but for the virtual anchor on the other side of the screen, 24-hour work is her life.

Xiaomei randomly checked several live broadcasts and found that some merchants were replaying the content of the live broadcast during the day, and more stores were using virtual people to conduct live broadcasts.

More and more brand merchants are choosing virtual human anchors. Every midnight, you can almost see the "figure" of virtual anchors in the live broadcast rooms of flagship stores of major beauty brands. For example, JD.com’s beauty virtual anchors appear in more than 20 live broadcast rooms of major beauty brands such as YSL, L’Oreal, OLAY, and Kiehl’s. They broadcast live 24 hours a day and use their professional beauty knowledge and explanation skills to answer questions for consumers in the live broadcast rooms. to create an efficient and accurate purchasing experience.

When people just applauded AYAYI's beauty and Yoo Ye-hee's excellent production through social media; when people were confused why A-SOUL had so many fans; when people were still debating what virtual humans could bring At that time, in the vertical track of live broadcast e-commerce, a group of code-led virtual anchors had gained the trust of major brands and found jobs in late-night live broadcast rooms.

With 8 million in goods, virtual anchors are quietly becoming popular

In the past two years, the rise of live streaming e-commerce has made anchors popular, and the "C position" of anchors With constant changes, the pattern of the live broadcast e-commerce industry has begun to change quietly. With the support of the concept of the metaverse, virtual e-commerce anchors are increasingly appearing in the public eye.

In addition to beauty brands, virtual anchors have been introduced in stores in various industries such as clothing, food, 3C electronics, and home textile brands.

During the live broadcast, the virtual anchor can introduce products while interacting with the audience and answering users' questions.

Virtual anchors in the live e-commerce track are different from the well-known film and television virtual people represented by Liu Yexi and the trapping virtual people represented by A-SOUL. The latter has different needs in content production. It is completely controlled by people, and the skinned virtual person needs to be played by a "person in the middle". However, the intelligent virtual humans that are widely used in live broadcast e-commerce do not rely on human operation at all. They rely only on code drive and can automatically start broadcasting and bring goods 24 hours a day. This is the ability that major merchants and brands value.

As early as the Double Eleven event in 2020, international brands such as Philips, L'Oreal, Unilever and L'Occitane have used early virtual human "AI anchors" to bring goods.

That year, six of Philips' core stores opened the virtual anchor function, trying to combine real people and virtual anchors to ensure 24-hour uninterrupted live broadcast in the store's live broadcast room, extending service and sales hours. According to the person in charge of Philips, after the launch of the AI ​​anchor, the number of viewers in the live broadcast room has been constantly breaking every day, reaching a maximum of nearly 80,000 viewers.

Three Squirrels also adopted a virtual anchor to take over the live broadcast in the same year. Whenever the real anchor goes off the broadcast, a cute short-haired cartoon girl will take over the live broadcast room and skillfully introduce the various nuts in the store to customers. and snacks. There are more than 600 products in the store, and each product has its own characteristics, taste and preferential price. With the help of virtual anchors, the three squirrels completed 8 million yuan in Tmall live broadcast sales from November 1 to 3.

The performance of early AI anchors has been comparable to that of a real anchor, which has also allowed more and more brands to see the value of virtual anchors.

After two years of development, in the field of live broadcast e-commerce, the development of virtual anchors is accelerating. On the eve of Double Eleven this year, Alibaba introduced the Metaverse continent "Mantavos", where consumers can create virtual digital avatars in the Metaverse and gain a new consumption experience on Double Eleven in the Metaverse. The JD Cloud team also launched the "Ling Xiaobo Virtual Digital Human" live broadcast product, which enables 7×24 hours of unmanned live broadcast, intelligent writing of live broadcast words, automatic marketing lottery activities, etc., and improves the GMV transaction conversion rate of store sales when no one is on duty. .

There is a popular saying in the e-commerce live broadcast circle, "If the broadcast is less than three hours, it means no broadcast" and "It is best to broadcast for eight hours." Merchants are facing the dual pressure of extending the duration of live broadcasts and controlling live broadcast costs, and virtual anchors are also facing greater living space.

MCN organizations are also actively deploying in the virtual human field. Fashion Star has provided 24x7 uninterrupted AI virtual broadcasting for many platforms and brands, providing one-stop e-commerce live broadcast services for merchants.

Fashion Star founder Sun Xiao told Zhiding.com that during this year’s Double Eleven, in addition to the top merchants with store sales of more than 100 million, most of the top merchants have the ability to choose 24-hour live broadcast. , waist merchant brands will choose to use virtual anchors. ​​​​

In addition to solving most of the problems of real anchors such as high cost and limited online time, for merchants, virtual anchors driven by artificial intelligence can better Taking over the "golden crowd" at two o'clock in the morning, which is the Xiaomei mentioned at the beginning of the article. Although this type of user group is not as large as the daytime user group, it already has a certain scale. Virtual anchors are the solution to this type of “golden group”.

Fashion Star serves a large number of brand merchants. Taking a top 5 brand in the beauty industry as an example, the brand customized a simulated digital virtual anchor to take over the "golden group". Compared with the GMV generated by the virtual person The original live broadcast revenue increased by 20%-25%, and the ROI return rate was much higher than that of live broadcasters.

The ideal is full, the reality is very skinny

Virtual people live broadcast to bring goods, how long will it take before the general trend becomes the trend? Why do we say this? Merchants' cost restrictions directly lead to limitations in technology and user experience. The presentation effect of virtual anchors still faces considerable challenges.

Currently, it takes two to four weeks to build a set of customized virtual anchors. Using stock virtual people, which are universal virtual people, only takes a week - buyers download the software, debug the equipment, and can put it into use immediately.

The price of making an AI intelligent virtual human ranges from a few thousand yuan to hundreds of thousands. Merchants can make it according to their own cost margin. Bao Yingze, chief scientist of Tiaoyue Intelligence, said that this is an AI intelligent virtual human People’s unique strengths. At present, Tiaoyue Intelligent is accelerating the combination of products and SDK. Even using an ordinary PC terminal, you can run a digital human that is better and more realistic than a GPU server three years ago. ​​

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Bao Yingze (virtual image), chief scientist of Tiaoyue Intelligence,

in last year’s Double Eleven event , merchants are more inclined to plan full-site operations and technological innovation, but this year more emphasis is placed on the conversion rate that virtual anchors bring to stores. The eye-catching virtual people may just give merchants an opportunity to increase the conversion rate.

However, the visual presentation of low-cost virtual anchors will inevitably not be comparable to that of real anchors, which will lower consumers’ favorability towards virtual anchors. In terms of hearing, virtual people with accents and even slips of the tongue will be more friendly to consumers, which is also a big challenge for AI algorithms. What makes businesses even more troublesome is that virtual anchors cannot conduct real-time evaluation of products like real anchors.

When virtual human anchors interact with real objects, they also need to add more efficiency-improving algorithms. Moreover, when recommending daily cosmetics products, you cannot do some interactions related to the face, such as applying lipstick, skin care products, etc. The authenticity of the product effects will be challenged. At the beginning, Digital Ren Ling suffered from large-scale powder loss due to lipstick reviews.

In addition, in order to improve the user experience and achieve better live broadcast effects, merchants also need to continuously debug, polish their words, and improve the functions of interacting with users. Bao Yingze said that only if the knowledge map behind digital virtual humans is rich enough, can it truly reduce costs and increase efficiency for merchant brands.

The conversion rate of virtual people and fan interaction depend largely on the brand tone, category and degree of compatibility with the virtual people, as well as a series of operational capabilities. Many brands in the fields of digital electronics, home appliances, snacks, etc. are already very receptive to intelligent virtual humans.

So from the actual effect, merchants are gradually accepting virtual people as a real anchor to replace real people, but the uncertainty of the market also makes waist merchants have concerns when choosing virtual anchors.

No one can guarantee that virtual people can achieve the same transformation ability as real people. But huge business interests are leading industry giants and startups to enter this field. Advances in technologies such as deep learning and natural language processing seem to be making virtual people closer to real people.

Build your body in virtuality and grow in reality

"Live Broadcasting Brother" Li Jiaqi, his success is not only his own professionalism and hard work, but also his ability to keenly capture Female consumers have product preferences and emotional needs and meet this need in a timely manner. In his live broadcast room, establishing emotional connections with consumers is the first priority, and delivering goods is the second priority.

It is obviously unrealistic to invest money and time in requiring brand merchants to operate a star anchor like Li Jiaqi, but this kind of personality-based operation method is something that brands and merchants can learn from.

This is similar to the "emotional companionship" that virtual idols bring to consumers. Virtual idols contain the technological imagination of human beings to break through the limitations of the physical body and can provide "emotional value" to fans. In the contemporary fast-paced living environment, it provides fans with a highly imaginative space and emotional sustenance.

For merchants in the field of live broadcast e-commerce, they can also partially project their own brand image onto the virtual anchor in an anthropomorphic way, and use the original goodwill of the brand in the hearts of users to provide a certain " Emotional value" quickly brings the distance between virtual anchors and consumers closer.

With the continuous evolution of AI technology, key technical aspects of virtual humans such as modeling, rendering, perception, and interaction will continue to be optimized. Virtual humans will extend a complete industry solution instead of just one A simple live broadcast auxiliary tool. Sun Xiao believes that virtual people can replace real anchors in the future to complete standardized e-commerce live broadcasts. This is an expansion of the e-commerce live broadcast format and an expansion of brand capabilities and margins.

Perhaps in the field of live broadcast e-commerce, the form of selling products is not important. The supply chain, channels, and front-end and back-end operations of the live broadcast room work together to form a consumption scenario based on trust. Whether it is a human or a virtual person, only if it can satisfy the user's emotional companionship can they get the pass code for the live broadcast industry.

From the real universe to the metaverse, human beings have never stopped learning, and the exploration of AI scenarios will become more and more profound. With more mature AI technology, virtual anchors will gradually become a more mature mechanism that can make It focuses more on vertical areas to maximize value. Li Jiaqi also said that machines can help him better collect and learn the needs and feedback of girls, allowing him to provide better products and services for everyone.

The addition of virtual anchors undoubtedly provides a new way of thinking for the development of the live broadcast e-commerce industry, but the essence is still the role of a shopping guide. The professional product selection and emotional companionship behind it are essential, and the form is just a gimmick. , the key to the success of live broadcast e-commerce is just like the offline business in the past. Only with good products, good prices and good shopping experience can we get a good sales report card.

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