Virtual Influencers for Marketing: A Guide

One of the more interesting marketing considerations I'm seeing from brands heading into 2025 is an increased interest in AI Influencer bots or Virtual Humans. There's enough evidence stacking up now that consumers like Virtual Humans and that they can benefit a brand. When done right. Here's what to consider.

Why People Like Virtual Humans

First, it may help to understand why people like AI influencers. It's a background that will help marketers understand them better for when they're trying to figure out how to design, build and manage an AI influencer.

While AI influencers may seem new, the concept goes back many thousands of years. We called them and many cultures still do, totems. In Egypt, for example, they had temples with oracles. These oracles were statues. They often had moving parts, controlled by priests behind the scenes and ventriloquism was used to project the voice of the oracle.

These totems, which were often gods and goddesses enabled social cohesion as they were wrapped in stories and allegories. Often reproduced and they've been found going as far back as hunter-gatherer societies and foragers.

Humans form parasocial relationships with these totems, just as we do today with celebrities like Taylor Swift and her "swifties" or Beyonce with her BeyHive. As AI agents, and AI influencers become easier to design and operate, we are likely to see more. 

Already there are several successful ones such as Puma's Lil Miquela and Lu do Magalu in Brazil. Puma's Lil Miquela was one of the first and has been highly successful at building fan and audience engagement across Europe and parts of Africa. We might call them AI Totems.

A virtual influencer is successful when the audience actually "reclaims" the influencer by creating content and digital assets around the virtual human. These are memes, articles they write, poetry and songs. When they build community, they're building it around that influencer. But doing so does have its risks.

AI Virtual Influencers in Marketing

Virtual humans could be a very interesting way for brands to engage their audiences and build customer loyalty and already there are companies that offer services to help brands create virtual influencers. So what do brands need to consider?

Brand Personality Design: This is the foundation and it's absolutely critical for a brand to get right. If it doesn't, it is likely to fall flat with the audience. The better you define your brand personality the better the chance of success. So write lots of stories about the brand personality. The more you create, the more the Virtual Human can call on along with LLMs (Large Language Models like ChatGPT or Claude.)

Proper Budgeting & Lifespan for Virtual Humans:  If you're planning to use a virtual influencer for a short campaign of a few months to a year, be very careful. If it takes off and customers form strong parasocial bonds with the influencer, it can whiplash when you turn it off. 

Customers can get angry with the brand and send rippled through social media that impacts brand reputation. Proceed accordingly.

Monitoring and Analysis: Keep a close human eye on your virtual influencer! Very close. You'll want to assess how consumers engage and the content they hopefully, will create around the influencer. If they do, it's a sign of success. If things go awry, you'll want to take steps.

Success Metrics for Virtual Influencers: This is tricky. Be clear about why you're doing this. Is it a brand reach and reputation project or do you want to drive sales? Or both? Puma did it for brand loyalty and relationship building, sales were a secondary result. Your approach and business objectives must also feed into the design of the virtual influencer.

Since virtual influencers are quite new and a sort of Wild West, there are no clear success metrics yet. They will evolve over time.

These are the basic elements of consideration. We've built a Virtual Influencer Lean Canvas that is a one page document for marketing teams to help them figure out the approach to take and what the business objectives and goals are. It's an exciting and interesting opportunity, but needs careful consideration and planning to be successful.