Are virtual influencers the future of influencer marketing?

27 January 2026 | By: Dr Dinara Davlembayeva and Prof Savvas Papagiannidis | 4 min read

AI image of a young female AI influencer

Once a novelty, virtual influencers have taken the marketing industry by storm. But virtual influencers have since faced their share of challenges, including debates about their authenticity and ethical use.

With the rapid and widespread public use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), it remains uncertain whether virtual influencers are the future of influencer marketing. However, this uncertainty can be navigated if we understand the benefits and challenges of virtual influencers, as well as how to use them in marketing and management effectively, ethically, and sustainably.

Dr Dinara Davlembayeva, a Lecturer in Digital Business and Prof Savvas Papagiannidis, Interim Deputy Dean and Professor of Information Systems, Digital Innovation and Transformation at Newcastle University Business School explore virtual influencers, associated controversies, and provide evidence-based recommendations to ensure their effective application by brands.

Who are virtual influencers?
Why have virtual influencers become popular?
What is the downside for brands when using virtual influencers?
What can brands do to increase the effectiveness of virtual influencer marketing?

Who are virtual influencers?

Virtual influencers interact with the audience, sell products and endorse brands like any other social media influencer does, but with one difference: they are computer-generated.

There are hundreds of virtual influencers with accounts on various social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. They represent distinct personalities, identities, areas of interest, occupations, lifestyles and communication styles, meticulously chosen and designed by developers and brands. These distinctions are deliberate, to ensure virtual influencers cater to different audiences and the brands’ industry sectors.

The way they cooperate with brands is also different. Some are designed to monetise collaborative promotions while remaining separate entities from brands. Others are brand mascots attached to a single brand to anthropomorphise it. The third category is designed for entertainment purposes; they garner their follower base with funny, musical, and artistic content.

Perhaps one of the most popular independent virtual influencers managed for brand collaborations and entertainment is Lil Miquela, a female fashion model, performer, and singer, whose emergence in 2016 marked the start of the virtual influencer era. Lil Miquela has appeared in the commercials of various brands, including Prada, Samsung, and Calvin Klein, and collaborated alongside human celebrities.

@lilmiquela instagram post as of August 2025, marking 8 years since her first song appeared

@lilmiquela Instagram post in August 2025, marking 8 years since her first song appeared

Why have virtual influencers become popular?

Virtual influencers are the product of technological innovation, socio-cultural shifts, and commercial rationale. Technological enablers, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR), made it possible for brands to create virtual influencers for traditional social media platforms and immersive environments.

Socio-culturally, virtual influencers became the norm due to the increasing audience perception of non-human identities, such as chatbots and virtual avatars. Due to the everyday nature of these interactions, users subconsciously began to apply the same social norms, rules of conduct, values, and expectations to interactions with machines as they would with interhuman interactions. Such standards and values included reciprocity, empathy, honesty, and integrity in relations, among others.

Partly, this social shift happened because of the rise of digital natives. Digital natives are a generation of customers born or raised during an age of prevalent digital technology. Primarily Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and younger Millenials, these individuals are familiar with computers and the internet from a very early age, and so more easily have become accustomed to self-representation and relationship-building in a virtual environment. For them, engaging with virtual influencers is less synthetic and deceptive, as digital conversation is seen as ordinary and everyday.

Commercially, virtual influencers bring multiple advantages for brands in terms of control, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. Their communication and appearance can be carefully aligned with the values and objectives of brands’ campaigns, and are free from physical and logistical constraints.

What is the downside for brands when using virtual influencers?

While virtual influencers are supposed to provide a creative application in marketing, their inherent nature raises fundamental issues that make it more challenging to ensure that the message conveyed is registered in the audience’s minds enough to drive behaviour. A brand’s authenticity is endangered by a loss of trust, deception concerns, accountability ambiguities, and a lack of belief in the virtual influencer themselves.

As the novelty of virtual influencers wears off, the authenticity of their content becomes the biggest issue. Their promotions are not grounded in lived experiences, emotions, or real-life interaction with the products or services they promote. They are simply a mouthpiece for a brand’s intentions.

But there are also other risks.

How virtual influencers appear to the audience signals influencers’ values, which may be ethically controversial, culturally insensitive and socially inappropriate. For example, a rapper, Fnmeka, rose to fame in 2022 when he became the first non-human singer to sign a contract with the record label company Capitol Records. Fnmeka’s popularity, however, was short-lived due to perceived racial stereotyping and cultural appropriation in the influencer’s behaviour and appearance.

@fnmeka Instagram post as of August 2022, celebrating over 1 million song streams, days after the influencer signed a contract with Capitol Records

@fnmeka Instagram post in August 2022, celebrating over 1 million song streams, days after the influencer signed a contract with Capitol Records

In addition, the growing accessibility of generative artificial intelligence platforms has democratised the creation of virtual avatars by small brands and individual creators. As the use of virtual influencers in marketing is unlikely to diminish, it is important to know how brands can leverage them, particularly from consumer psychology and design perspectives.

What can brands do to increase the effectiveness of virtual influencer marketing?

Brands need to tailor the appearance, behaviour, and communication of virtual influencers to align the social signals they emanate with those the audience expects of the brand.

Based on this, we have pulled together some recommendations for brands based on our insights:

Leverage social signals

Our research on the persuasiveness of virtual influencers concludes that social signals, such as interactivity, relatedness, emotional intelligence, and the socially desirable qualities of competence, fairness, and credibility, define their marketing effectiveness.

These signals have varying significance for short-term interactions and long-term engagement between virtual influencers and their audiences, which can be explored in our full research paper

Interactivity means that virtual influencers should be engaging, responsive, and active on social media. Brands can use GenAI to make influencers more context-aware and communications more personalised.
Relatedness is how close followers feel that influencers are in terms of their values, opinions, and beliefs. This feeling is a cumulative perception of what the influencer says, how it behaves and looks, and how it resonates with the target audience.
Emotional intelligence is signalled through empathy and warmth. These are soft characteristics, showing that influencers, despite their non-human nature, can behave by taking the interests of followers to heart. This is typically conveyed through communication style and image.
Competence, fairness, and credibility reflect the social norms and expectations that influencers “know what they preach” and act in ways that are socially acceptable and trustworthy.

Match the influencer strategy to your campaign goal

Not all virtual influencer campaigns are designed to achieve the same outcomes. Some aim for quick conversions and short-term action, while others seek to build lasting relationships between consumers and brands.

If a virtual influencer is used to promote time-sensitive offers, such as limited-time discounts, product drops, or event launches, brands should prioritise interactivity. In these cases, success depends on triggering immediate responses with direct replies, interactive stories, polls, or live-style interactions.

When the goal shifts to long-term brand engagement, virtual influencers’ professionalism, relatedness and social norm compliance become imperative. When an influencer appears credible, through consistent messaging, and professional conduct, their behaviour aligns with what people expect from socially acceptable and trustworthy actors. To enhance relatedness, brands need to understand the target audience and identity to align the style, language and cultural references.

Develop long-term relationships with followers

Short-term interactions and long-term engagement, together with their associated social signals, have differential effects on transactional (purchasing) and non-transactional (liking posts, sharing content) audience behaviour.

To trigger non-transactional behaviour, virtual influencers should be tuned to enable quick interactions through an interactive and responsive communication style. To trigger purchases, virtual influencers need to go beyond quick interactions and short-term actions. They need to develop long-term relationships with followers. Such relationships do not emerge from isolated posts or campaigns, but result from narratives evolved over time. They require storytelling, value alignment, and symbolic connection.