2 min read
Balenciaga just hired a video game character
Viper in the NEO FOCUS glasses, from Riot Games China's announcement art for the VALORANT x Balenciaga café. Image via VALO2ASIA.
On September 23, Balenciaga announced its first digital brand ambassador. Her name is Viper, and she is a character from VALORANT, a free online shooter made by Riot Games. The deal runs alongside VALORANT Champions, the game’s world championship in Shanghai from September 24 to October 18. For those weeks Balenciaga is opening a gaming café on Yongyuan Road, and it is launching NEO FOCUS, its first pair of gaming glasses, which are only on sale while the café is open.
Balenciaga has done this kind of thing before. In 2021 it partnered with Fortnite, where four Fortnite characters got Balenciaga outfits you could buy in the game and there was a real hoodie in actual stores. So why is this one any different? If you look at the paperwork, it isn’t, because Viper is intellectual property owned by Riot in exactly the way the Fortnite characters are intellectual property owned by Epic. Balenciaga is paying to use her for a set period, during a tournament, in a café. It is purely a licensing deal.
The difference is the terminology. Balenciaga is calling her a digital brand ambassador, which is the title it gives to human celebrities. They are trying to make this feel like more than a licensing deal, even though that is exactly what it is. They are talking about Viper as if she were a real person who chose to work with them. That is a signal about where characters are heading. A luxury house decided a video game character has enough personality to be presented the way you would present an actor.
Having said it, they don’t follow through. Viper is on the billboards and the posters wearing the glasses, and that is where it ends. Nothing about why she is there. Nothing she says. No sign of her outside the artwork. It is the word ambassador attached to a licensing deal.
What I would do is push into that a lot more. If she is a digital brand ambassador, she needs to have that life to her. She should appear. She should take Zoom calls with press. She should be at the café, talking to people in her own voice, as cold and sarcastic about the whole thing as she is in the game. She should wear the glasses all the time, and she should be on the glasses themselves, on the case and in the packaging. There should be someone cosplaying as her on every street corner in Shanghai for the length of the tournament. Once you have called a character an ambassador, you have permission to let her act like one. That is where the fun is. You lean into the character and you play with her.
I direct brand characters for companies and keep developing them so they can do exactly this. If you have one that could be doing more, talk to me.