Puma Tackles Southeast Asia With Virtual Influencer

Tackling the Southeast Asian market can be a challenge with language disparities, Puma has decided to work past this by emulating AirAsia, launching a virtual influencer to engage the region’s youth population.

Partnering with UM Studios x Ensemble Worldwide, the German sports brand giant has unveiled Maya, a virtual influencer to represent Puma across Southeast Asia.

To create Maya, the agency team was backed by So.Min a social media artificial intelligence platform, which mapped millions of Southeast Asian faces from multiple online sources including a user-generated process via Instagram. This facilitated the rendering of several face versions, the first step in creating a virtual avatar.

“Research told us that it was impossible for any single influencer to cut across the entire Southeast Asian (SEA) region, so the team decided to “give birth” to one,” said Amit Sutha, Chief Executive Officer of UM Studios & Ensemble Worldwide.

“Creating a new virtual persona was a completely new journey for us, so it was a learning process every step of the way,” added Sutha.

“We crowdsourced features for Maya’s face, while simultaneously rendering it. This was a challenge, but a completely exciting process. Her personality also has a complex number of layers and was developed using AI technology, with her story completely evolving in real-time.”

Maya’s personality was created using multiple innovative techniques. Her baseline persona was developed through proprietary UM Studio wave studies on Southeast Asian psychographics. It also gives the Puma the license to shape her personality in real-time as her interests are taken from social listening and AI curation of the content generated by her interactions.

“Her story is also carefully constructed to cater towards the Southeast Asian audience, meaning the emotional connection they have with her is on a much deeper level than with other influencers,” said Sutha.

Maya is currently plugging Puma’s Future Rider sneakers. As a virtual influencer who portrays Southeast Asian values, we can’t rule out the possibility of her getting involved with other brands should they align with her values.

“We are seeing a high level of engagement with Maya, even in these nascent weeks and more plans are in the pipeline for her character as she continues to make friends across the region. Interestingly, people are wondering if she is real, and there have even been a few romantic interests. The name Maya has multiple meanings, most significantly ‘virtual beauty’, and she is a representation of everything we love about being Southeast Asian. She plans to show the world the beauty of this region,” concluded Amit.