Embracing overt unreality over hyper-realism (tapping into audiences’ preference for companies that are transparent about artifice), creative agencies and avatar-producing technologists are using styling drawn from sci-fi, animated entertainment and gaming to hand brands synthfluencers leaning into the weird and playful. These fanciful creations – able to semi-autonomously generate content – include fictional virtual celebs for hire, and build-your-own, interactive fan-friendly ani-mates for virtual brand promotion.

Handled by avatar production agencies, hyper-real ‘human’ synthfluencers are fictional, non-autonomous virtual beings with increasingly life-like appearances designed for use in ad campaigns on social media, particularly Instagram, and e-commerce sites. The best possess sizeable social media followings and feature as bespoke spokespeople and product models, nurturing audience receptiveness.

Netizens’ attitudes to AI avatars often rests on very flexible definitions of what counts as ‘authentic’ on social media, but pursuing a hybrid approach – e.g. explicitly human-puppeteered synthfluencers – can retain trust while unlocking synthfluencing’s creative benefits. Directions designed to assuage audience anxiety and augment (not displace) human spark include marketing and campaigns starring both humans and synths, content creation digital twins, and human-directed VTubers.  

AI’s potential to transform customer service (where audience appetite for AI intervention is strongest) represents an opportunity to turbocharge influencing potential and brand reach. Accelerating frontiers include multimodal embodied virtual avatars and upgraded agentic-synth brand spokespeople and customer aides – both blending influencing and assistance – with early adopters including supermarkets, auto brands, and the wine industry.  

Confidently meeting audience’s rising expectations around transparency, in-built biases and protecting human creativity can go a long way to fortifying uneven synthfluencer enthusiasm (see Key Stats). Key rules to observe include brands foregrounding AI fair use, commitments to diversifying avatars across ethnicity and appearance, and deep-fake defences for TV and film stars, as well as the rise of AI authentication companies for content creators.