Insights:Is a Cloned Thank You as Good as The Real Thing?

Marketers know personal messages can be a powerful way to build brand loyalty. Of course, consumers aren’t easy to fool, so when they see a direct mail piece or an email with their name in it, most assume it was just printed or inserted in a mass mailer. In other words, not really personal at all.

So how do you make your thousands or millions of customers feel special and appreciated? Not to worry, clever companies have brought deepfake technology to the marketing world. Deepfake involves altering a person’s face or body to make them appear to be someone different. Usually this is for nefarious purposes.

But now there are businesses that will deepfake a video of you thanking an individual customer and create an unlimited number of variations with you saying different names.

The upside of this is a CEO or other business representative can make a single quick video that is then personalized for their entire client list. Now everyone feels super special.

One of the companies that has repurposed this technology for business applications says that part of their mission is to raise awareness of deepfake capabilities and demonstrate some beneficial usages for it. Of course, if they accomplish these goals they may end up eliminating any perceived value of personalized deepfake videos.

This new approach is still in its infancy and marketers who are first to jump on the bandwagon may see some impressive initial results. As it is adopted by more companies and consumers become the wiser, it will most likely become less effective as a loyalty building tool.

While it is impressive technology, any market outreach effort that has the word “fake” in it certainly comes with a significant risk of consumer backlash.

If you’d like to learn more about emerging marketing technologies or discuss effective ways of building loyalty for your brand, give the marketing strategists at Insight Marketing Design a call at 605-275-0011 or send us an email.