Your Favourite Influencer Might Not Be Real

I got influenced by someone who doesn't exist. A video popped up on Reels, which was an ad for two of the brands I most admire; Porsche and Loro Piana.

I watch the video, I then share the video to a few mates who I thought would enjoy it, before the realisation set in that the entire video was generated by AI. My feelings were mixed. But in truth, I did feel a bit silly.

Here is an ultra-realistic ad, featuring an “influencer” that has 30k followers producing an ad for two of the world’s most valuable brands…

That moment made me want to dig into what's happening to influencer marketing right now, because things are changing faster than most of us realise.

The Numbers Are Staggering

The virtual influencer market is growing by over 40% each year. Grandview predicts AI creators will eat up $45 billion of influencer marketing budgets by 2030.

Aitana López, a fully AI-generated Spanish "model," reportedly earns up to €10,000 a month from brand deals. Imma has worked with IKEA, Nike, and Porsche. These aren't just experiments anymore. They're line items on media plans.

So here's the question that should be keeping CMOs up at night: if consumers are buying from people who don't exist, what does that do to the entire trust model that influencer marketing was built on? And should you be getting involved?

The Brand Appeal Is Obvious (And That's the Problem)

From a brand safety perspective, virtual influencers are a dream. They don't go off-script. They don't age. They don't post something regrettable at 2am after a few glasses of wine. They don't have contract disputes or personal scandals. Everything about them is planned and programmable.

That gives companies something they've never had before: total control over the messenger.

But control and trust are different things. And the more polished and predictable the content becomes, the more it starts to feel like what it is: advertising wearing a human mask.

On top of all of that, there is clearly a cost efficiency argument to be made. When working with a virtual creator - you don’t need huge camera crews, editors, directors, talent, locations etc. You just need a Mac.

The Dark Side Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here's where it gets properly uncomfortable.

The same technology that lets a brand build a virtual spokesperson from scratch also makes it trivially easy for bad actors to hijack a real person's likeness. And that's not a hypothetical. It's happening at scale.

Paris Hilton had a deepfake ad run using her face and voice to endorse a luxury brand without her knowledge or consent. Scarlett Johansson was fabricated into making political statements she never made. Taylor Swift topped McAfee's "most deepfaked celebrity" list in 2025 after scammers cloned her image for fake merch drops and bogus giveaways.

The FBI reported that deepfake complaints more than doubled in the past year. Global deepfake production was projected to exceed 8 million files in 2025, a 16x increase from 2023. Over $200 million was lost to deepfake scams in Q1 2025 alone.

For marketers, this isn't a sideshow. It's a direct threat to the trust infrastructure that makes influencer marketing work. If consumers can't tell the difference between a real endorsement and a fabricated one, every endorsement becomes suspect.

The Regulators Are Coming (Slowly)

The FTC now treats AI-generated endorsements with the same disclosure obligations as human ones. In January 2026, they issued their first warning letters under the Consumer Review Rule, pulling up companies for synthetic testimonials and deceptive review practices.

The rule is simple in theory: if AI generated or materially influenced an endorsement, the audience needs to know before the content influences their decision. Both sponsorship and AI involvement need to be disclosed. No burying it in the fine print.

On the tech side, there's a standard called C2PA (backed by over 6,000 members now, including the big camera manufacturers) that's trying to bake authenticity metadata directly into media files. Samsung started embedding it in the Galaxy S25's camera. The idea is that you could verify whether an image or video is real, who created it, and whether it's been altered.

The catch? Most social platforms strip that metadata on upload. So the verification layer exists, but the distribution layer doesn't support it yet. Which means the tools to prove something is real exist, but they break the moment the content hits the feed where people actually see it.

So What Does This Mean For Your Brand?

I keep coming back to something I wrote last week about founder-led content being the scarcity in an AI world - the same is true for influencer marketing.

When anyone can fabricate a spokesperson, the brands that invest in real, verifiable creator relationships will stand out. The handshake between brand and creator matters more now, not less. The human premium is real.

There's an argument forming that messy, imperfect, clearly-human creators will command a premium specifically because they can't be faked. Some brands are cementing this stance and putting their money where their mouth is on this too - Dove, Aerie (who saw sales growth by 23% after the announcement) and others have all committed to not using AI creators.

The Uncomfortable Question & My Take

We're heading toward a world where "real" is a marketing differentiator.

The tricky question for us is: does the audience even care?

If your competitors are going to be investing in virtual creators, isn’t it worth a test? Well, probably yes…

As a marketeer with limited budgets and resources, the reality is that the level of control that you can have, and the drastically lower costs of producing these campaigns, are super appealing. Speaking for many brands that I have worked with, this wave of disruption is an exciting growth opportunity, because they don’t have Dove levels of budget to be able to commit to continuing to solely invest in “real” creators.

My honest view is that this whole wave (like many others) will be much more relevant for some brands & industries than others, and that virtual creators won’t wholly replace real ones, but sit alongside them.

The tools are here. The costs are dropping. The temptation is obvious. The brands that move early will learn the most. Just make sure you're testing with intent, not jumping on a trend because it's cheap. That's how you end up with a feed full of content nobody trusts.

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