Virtual influencers have gone from a curio to a genuine strategic consideration for marketing teams around the world. These are fully computer-generated personas, complete with backstories, aesthetics, and follower counts that rival real human creators. Brands from luxury fashion to fast food have experimented with them, and the results are complicated enough to warrant a clear-eyed look at what is actually happening.
What virtual influencers actually are
A virtual influencer is a digital character, typically rendered using CGI or AI image generation, that operates on social media as though it were a real person. The most well-known examples include Lil Miquela, a CGI character created by the Los Angeles-based studio Brud, who has amassed millions of Instagram followers and has partnered with brands like Calvin Klein and Prada. Others, like Imma from Japan and Shudu from the UK, have followed a similar model: photorealistic renders, consistent personas, and carefully managed brand narratives.
What makes these characters interesting from a production standpoint is the level of craft involved. Creating a convincing virtual influencer is not a quick render. It requires character design, narrative development, ongoing content production, and increasingly, AI-generated video. As AI video tools are changing content creation at pace, the cost of producing high-quality virtual personas is falling sharply, which means more brands are considering building their own.
Why brands are drawn to them
The appeal is not hard to understand. A virtual influencer never goes off-script, never gets caught in a scandal, and is available for any campaign at any time. From a risk management perspective, that is enormously attractive. Brands that have invested heavily in human influencer partnerships know how quickly a relationship can sour when a creator says something controversial or acts in a way that contradicts the brand's values.
There is also a control argument. When a brand works with a human creator, they are borrowing that person's audience and their creative voice. With a virtual influencer, the brand owns the persona entirely. The character can be styled, positioned, and narrated to serve the campaign with precision. For brands that care deeply about consistency, this level of creative control is compelling.
Budget is another factor. While building a virtual influencer from scratch requires significant upfront investment, the ongoing cost per post can be substantially lower than retaining a high-profile human creator. As AI image and video generation tools mature, that equation will only tip further in favour of virtual personas.
The authenticity problem
Here is where things get genuinely complicated. Influencer marketing works, at its core, because audiences believe in a real person's recommendation. They follow a creator because they like them, trust their taste, or find their life aspirational. A virtual influencer offers none of that by default. The audience knows it is a character. The parasocial relationship, so central to how human influencer marketing functions, is different in kind with a CGI persona.
Research into audience behaviour suggests that younger audiences are more comfortable with virtual influencers than older cohorts, partly because they have grown up in digital environments where the distinction between real and constructed is already blurred. Gaming, avatars, and online personas have normalised the idea of identity as performance. But comfort is not the same as trust, and trust is what converts followers into customers.
The brands that have had the most success with virtual influencers tend to be those in categories where aspiration matters more than relatability. Luxury fashion, for instance, has always been about fantasy rather than intimacy, which makes a photorealistic CGI model a reasonable fit. Categories where personal testimony and lived experience drive purchase decisions, think health products, travel, or financial services, are harder territory for a virtual persona to credibly occupy.
How this intersects with AI and content creation
The rise of virtual influencers cannot be separated from the broader acceleration of AI in content production. The same tools that allow studios to generate realistic video footage are enabling more sophisticated virtual personas. Real-time animation, voice synthesis, and large language models are combining to create characters that can respond dynamically to audiences, not just post static images.
This creates new possibilities and new risks. A virtual influencer that can have real-time conversations with followers via a comment thread or livestream is a fundamentally different proposition from one that just appears in campaign photos. It also raises harder questions about disclosure. Many markets, including Australia, are tightening their requirements around influencer advertising transparency. A virtual character that responds to comments in real time, generated by AI, is navigating territory that regulators are still mapping.
The trend also intersects with deeper questions about AI content moderation, as platforms grapple with how to label and surface synthetic personas differently from human creators. That policy landscape will shape how visible virtual influencers can be on major platforms over the next few years.
What this means for creative studios and production teams
For video production studios, the rise of virtual influencers represents both a threat and an opportunity. On one hand, a brand that builds a virtual persona in-house may redirect budget away from traditional campaign shoots. On the other, creating and maintaining a compelling virtual influencer requires exactly the kind of cinematic craft, character design, narrative development, and visual consistency that experienced production teams are built for.
The studios that are positioning themselves well here are those that treat virtual influencer production as an extension of character-driven storytelling rather than a tech problem to be solved. A beautifully rendered character with no compelling narrative is just a piece of software. The story, the voice, the world-building: that is what separates a virtual influencer that audiences engage with from one that disappears after a single campaign.
The most durable brand strategy here is probably a hybrid one. Human creators offer authenticity and community. Virtual personas offer control and consistency. Used together, with clear creative logic behind each, they can serve different functions in a broader content ecosystem. The brands that treat virtual influencers as a replacement for human connection will struggle. The ones that treat them as a new kind of creative canvas are more likely to find something genuinely useful.