Gen AI disrupts influencer marketing, and promises a golden age of personalized marketing for businesses

Published in

Personalization and Digital

6 min readMar 2, 2024

By Gopi Vikranth and Nandini Mathan

Read [PartII] for A how-to guide on creating your Gen AI made Influencers for businesses

Influencers are projected to become a $24B industry by the end of 2024, as they continue to grow in B2C markets with more brands engaging influencers. This marketing approach has solidified its position as a crucial component of digital marketing strategies, driven by its ability to connect with audiences in a genuine and personalized manner.

Globally, 72% of marketers work with influencers and creators on Instagram, making it the top social media platform marketers state they work with influencers and creators on. This is followed by TikTok (61%), YouTube (58%) and Facebook (57%).

Can a brand without the budget of Nike create similar marketing? Gen AI says yes, and it might be the dawn of the golden age of marketing for businesses where they can have their own AI generated influencers and marketing.

Generative AI-based Content Modules in Personalize.AI

One of the most significant impacts of Gen AI on influencer marketing is the democratization of content creation. With tools that can generate high-quality images (Midjourney, Dall.E), videos (RunwayML, Pika Labs, potentially Sora in the future), and text (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.), businesses can make influencer accounts and create content at a fraction of the traditional cost and time. This enables brands to experiment with new ideas and formats like AI companions, AI community engagement, etc..

Influencer Marketing is big

Influencer industry exploded in the last few years: the industry grew from $1.7B in the year 2016 to $21B in 2023. Brands on average are making 6x per dollar spent on influencers. 86% of B2B brands consider their influencer marketing successful.

*Influencer marketing market size worldwide from 2016 to 2024 (in billion U.S. dollars)*

There are different types of influencers, ranging from nano to mega influencers, each offering unique benefits from highly engaged niche communities to broad-reaching visibility.

Nano and Micro influencers provide an authentic voice and the close-knit community feel. They embody the value of quality engagement over sheer audience size.

Nano influencers: <10K followers,
Micro: 10–100k
Mid-tier: 100–500k

Macro and Mega influencers offer a wide reach and are well-suited for brands looking to increase visibility and awareness. Their endorsements can reach a vast audience, making them ideal for large-scale campaigns that aim to make a significant impact.

Macro: 500k — 1M+
Mega: 1M++

Typically once influencers get to 25–50k followers, they are able to get deals from brands to monetize their following.

Meet the Gen AI made influencers

Over the last year, Gen AI made it possible for anyone to create an influencer. This will fundamentally disrupt the influencer and overall marketing as businesses leverage GenAI. Tools such as Midjourney, Rendernet, and others now make it relatively easy for anyone to create an influencer. In fact, there are questions on whether all the posts done by current influencers are real situations or if they themselves are augmenting their posts with AI.

Meet Eva — A Travel Influencer

Eva’s content is a blend of fashion, travel, and lifestyle. She has an eye for style, often seen wearing chic, flowy dresses that complement the vibrant backdrops of her travel destinations. Her posts are not just snapshots of a place but experiences captured in time, encouraging her followers to live fully and explore beyond their boundaries. She is passionate about sustainable travel and often partners with eco-friendly brands, promoting a message of responsible tourism.

Her Instagram bio says,

Wandering the globe with style and a cause. 🌍✈️ I tell stories about the places I visit and try to travel in a way that’s kind to the planet. Join my journey! #EvaTheExplorer

All of the above influencer content, including the model, pictures, captions were created using Gen AI by the authors in 2 days (locations and content is fictional). An in-depth exploration of this is presented in Part 2 of this series.

What does this mean for brands and businesses?

Businesses, especially small businesses, now have the ability to create nano/micro influencers for specific communities and personalize engagement. Small businesses will be quick to experiment — along with the influencer, they can create AI companions and Gen AI chatbots to build community engagement.

Larger firms, for the same budget if not lesser, can create a multitude of Gen AI influencers and content that is owned by the firm, engaging communities of customers on a personalized basis. They have already been leveraging virtual influencers over the last few years. For example:

Lil Miquela has worked with some of the top fashion brands, released one single in 2017 and debuted her first music video at Lollapalooza’s online festival in 2023.
Noonoouri is a 19-year-old digital character that has taken the fashion industry by storm and has worked with the majority of top luxury fashion brands that include Lacoste, Versace, and Bulgari.
Lu do Magalu boasts more than 14.6 million followers on Facebook, 6 million followers on Instagram, more than 2.6 million YouTube subscribers and over 1.3 million followers on Twitter and TikTok respectively.

However, with Gen AI, large enterprises can now create these influencers at will and engage specific user communities. While this might take some time to unfold, we are already seeing glimpses of a different future for personalized marketing.

Performance marketing is going to explode over the next few years. Brands will be able to test infinite numbers of variations rather than being limited by marketing departments - variations of ad creatives, limited & expensive videos, time-taking copy process.
Brands will be able to perform content personalization at scale, enhancing audience engagement. They can use gen AI made Influencers to tailor their messages and content to different channels and the preferences of different segments of their audience, improving the relevance and effectiveness of their marketing efforts. This personalization extends to language translations, making content accessible to a global audience, thereby expanding their reach.
As Gen AI content creation costs go down, customers can expect creative content that uniquely appeals to them based on who they are. This will further extend to a very personalized customer journeys.
AI companions, emerge as new experiences and take place in the context of a conversation that they are already having. AI companions will provide incredibly persuasive messaging in the form of video or interactive content.

Authenticity and Trust

That said, this does have some legal, ethical aspects to take into consideration especially for large enterprises given that they must take a more conservative approach given brand guidelines. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, distinguishing between genuine experiences and AI-enhanced or created content may become challenging for followers. Influencers and brands will need to navigate these concerns carefully, ensuring transparency about the use of AI in content creation to maintain trust with their audience. Recently our colleague Arun Shastri, wrote in detail some of the considerations to be taken into account in this Forbes article.

About the Authors:

Gopi Vikranth is a Principal at ZS and leads AI SaaS Products and Platforms, Customer Experience Analytics and Personalization.

Nandini Mathan is a product lead at ZS who works with Gopi Vikranth to develop AI-first SaaS Products such as Personalize.AI and Max.AI.

Gopi, along with Arun Shastri, hosts a podcast called “Reinventing Customer Experience”. Gopi and Arun chat with digital, analytics, technology and customer experience leaders from various industries and organizations to understand how they are engaging their customers. The podcast is available on Apple and Spotify.

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