dot.LA Summit: Dapper's Lil' Miquela Virtual Influencer Will Soon Be Controlled by Her Community

Ivan Fernandez
Ivan Fernandez (a.k.a. Afroxander) is a L.A.-based freelancer whose work has appeared in GRAMMYs, FLAUNT, KCET (Artbound, Lost L.A. & Southland Sessions), L.A. Taco, LA Weekly, Coachella CAMP magazine, Remezcla, Gamecrate, Panamerika, MTV Iggy, among other publications.
dot.LA Summit: Dapper's Lil' Miquela Virtual Influencer Will Soon Be Controlled by Her Community

Dapper Labs, the company that helped bring NFTs into the mainstream, is set on decentralization. And it's turning to its signature virtual social media influencer Lil Miquela to drive home the idea, company executives told a crowd at Friday's Future of Storytelling panel at the dot.LA Summit.


The NFT startup behind NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs clearly sees the value of virtual influencers. Brands are expected to spend about $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022, according to Business Insider Intelligence. And the company is betting that a rising number of dollars will be spent on virtual influencers who can be fully controlled.

lil miquelaLil Miquela is a new sort of media property.

Dapper acquired Brud, the company that created Miquela, only a few weeks ago. Now, the folks at Dapper want to open Miquela's narrative up to members of the community (she has over three million Instagram followers), rather than writing her story themselves.

"We're turning into a decentralized autonomous organization, which means we go from being a corporation into sort of breaking this open and handing Miquela over to her community," said Dapper COO Kara Weber.

Weber and the creative teams at Dapper have found themselves limited by the constraints of existing platforms such as Facebook (now Meta) and Instagram. Though these social media platforms have provided creative outlets for millions, the creators and consumers who use them remain beholden to the legal whims of these platforms.

"We as consumers have no control and we as creators have no control," said Nicole De Ayora, chief product officer at Dapper. "2020 was this moment where Kara, Trevor [McFedries, co-founder of Brud] and I sort of slammed on the brakes and took a step back and, really, the thing that we were most excited by and inspired by was the community that we were able to create on these platforms...We thought about what a world would look like if we turned things over to the community and really began to develop this vision that would then become Dapper Collectives."

Weber and CPO Nicole De Ayor also spoke more broadly about moving away from a social media model wherein the company owns the user's data to one where customers can have possession of their IP.

"What we learned was that as a creator, when you're dependent on Web 2 platforms, you don't own or control your audience, you don't own or control any information or data," said Weber. "Telling a narrative across Web 2 platforms, you don't really drive anything and that really became very frustrating."

"We want to enable collectives to have more ownership to be able to give and get value for what they're creating," she added. " I think that participation and capturing value is a really key difference in what excites so many of us about decentralization."

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Office Hours: Apex Founder Ian Cinnamon on Why LA Is the Aerospace Capital of the World

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

​Ian Cinnamon
Ian Cinnamon

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Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Raises
Image by Joshua Letona

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Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

McKinsey & Company Launches InLA Accelerator To Help Underrepresented Founders Tackle Startup Challenges
InLA

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