Virtual Influencers: Smart Brand Strategy or Expensive Novelty?

Virtual influencers are computer-generated characters that operate on social media as if they were real people, posting content, building audiences, and entering brand partnerships. They have become a genuine commercial phenomenon, with some CGI personas accumulating millions of followers and commanding fees comparable to mid-tier human creators. Whether that represents a meaningful shift in influencer marketing or an elaborate distraction is a question worth examining carefully before any budget moves.

The honest answer is that virtual influencers work for some brands in some contexts, and they are a poor fit for most. The deciding factor is not how impressive the technology looks, but whether the format solves a real business problem that human creators cannot.

What Is a Virtual Influencer, Exactly?

A virtual influencer is a fictional character, typically rendered in CGI or illustrated in a stylised format, that maintains a social media presence and engages with an audience as though it were a real person. Some are photorealistic enough that casual observers do not immediately register them as artificial. Others lean into an overtly animated aesthetic. The character Lil Miquela, created by the Los Angeles studio Brud, is probably the most cited example. She has appeared in brand campaigns for major fashion labels and accumulated a following that most human creators would envy.

What separates virtual influencers from brand mascots is the parasocial dimension. These characters post personal updates, express opinions, respond to comments, and construct ongoing narratives about their lives. The audience relationship is built on the same emotional mechanics as any other influencer, even when the audience knows the character is not real. That is the genuinely interesting part, and it is also where the marketing opportunity sits.

If you want a broader grounding in how influencer marketing works before getting into the virtual side of it, the full picture is covered in the influencer marketing hub.

Why Are Brands Interested in Virtual Influencers?

The appeal is not hard to understand. Human influencers are unpredictable. They have opinions, personal lives, and the occasional public crisis. A creator who fits your brand perfectly in January might be the subject of a controversy you want no part of by March. I have been in rooms where a brand partnership had to be quietly unwound because of something a creator said that had nothing to do with the campaign. It is expensive, it is awkward, and it is entirely avoidable if the influencer is a character you control.

Virtual influencers eliminate that category of risk. The character will not have an off-brand opinion, will not age out of the target demographic, will not get tired or difficult to work with, and will not demand a renegotiated fee after their follower count doubles. From a brand governance perspective, that is not a trivial advantage.

There is also a creative flexibility argument. A virtual character can be placed in any environment, wear any product, and appear in any visual context without the logistical overhead of a location shoot. For global campaigns that need to show a product across multiple settings, the production economics can be compelling, provided the upfront investment in the character has already been made.

The creator economy has grown large enough that brands are genuinely looking for structural alternatives to the human creator market, where rates have climbed and talent has become harder to retain. Virtual influencers represent one answer to that problem, though not the only one and not always the right one.

What Does the Audience Response Actually Look Like?

This is where the conversation needs to get more specific. Aggregate follower counts for top virtual influencers are impressive, but follower counts have never been a reliable proxy for commercial impact. The more useful question is whether audiences engage with virtual influencers in ways that translate to brand outcomes.

The evidence suggests they do, in certain categories. Fashion and beauty audiences, particularly younger demographics with a high tolerance for constructed identity and digital aesthetics, engage with virtual influencers at rates that are broadly comparable to human creators in the same space. Gaming and entertainment audiences have similar patterns. These are communities that are already comfortable with the idea of fictional characters as cultural figures, so the leap to a virtual influencer is not a large one.

Outside those verticals, the evidence thins out considerably. A virtual influencer promoting financial services or healthcare products faces a credibility problem that the technology does not solve. Trust in those categories is built on the perception of lived experience. A CGI character cannot credibly claim to have used a mortgage product or managed a health condition, and audiences know it. The parasocial relationship breaks down at exactly the point where it would need to be strongest.

I spent a period judging the Effie Awards, where you see the full range of influencer campaigns, the ones that drove measurable business outcomes and the ones that generated impressive creative work without moving a commercial needle. The campaigns that worked consistently had one thing in common: the influencer format matched the audience’s existing relationship with that category. Virtual influencers are no different. The format has to fit the context, not the other way around.

What Are the Real Costs Involved?

The economics of virtual influencers are frequently misunderstood, and the misunderstanding tends to run in one direction. Brands assume that because there is no human talent to pay, the costs will be lower than working with human creators. That is rarely true, and for brands building their own virtual persona rather than licensing an existing one, it is almost never true.

Creating a photorealistic CGI character requires significant investment in design, modelling, and animation. Producing content at the volume and quality needed to maintain a credible social presence requires ongoing production capacity. The character needs a voice, a personality, a consistent visual style, and a content team behind it. None of that is cheap, and none of it is a one-time cost.

Partnering with an existing virtual influencer, rather than building one, changes the economics but introduces a different set of considerations. You are paying for access to an audience that someone else built, using a character you do not control, with creative constraints imposed by whoever owns the IP. That is not categorically different from working with a human influencer, and the rate card for established virtual influencers reflects their audience size in the same way human creator rates do.

Early in my career, I learned that the most expensive marketing decisions are the ones where the cost structure is not properly understood before the commitment is made. Building a website from scratch rather than accepting a no-budget situation taught me to be specific about what things actually cost before presenting them as solutions. The same discipline applies here. A virtual influencer strategy needs a realistic cost model before it goes near a budget conversation.

What Are the Legal and Ethical Considerations?

The disclosure question is straightforward and non-negotiable. The FTC’s guidelines on influencer marketing apply to virtual influencers in the same way they apply to human ones. If a virtual character is promoting a product in exchange for payment, that relationship must be disclosed clearly. The fact that the character is artificial does not create an exemption, and some regulators have argued it creates a stronger obligation to disclose, not a weaker one.

Beyond compliance, there is a transparency question that brands handle with varying degrees of care. Some virtual influencer campaigns are explicit about the character’s artificial nature and build that into the creative concept. Others operate in a more ambiguous space, allowing audiences to form their own conclusions. The second approach carries more reputational risk than it might appear to, particularly as media literacy around AI-generated content improves and audiences become less forgiving of perceived deception.

There is also a labour dimension that does not get enough attention. Virtual influencers do not replace just the creator. They replace the entire ecosystem around the creator, including the photographers, stylists, and production staff whose livelihoods depend on human talent working in the industry. That is not a reason to avoid the format entirely, but it is a consideration that sits within the broader conversation about what influencer marketing is actually for and what kind of industry it is building.

How Do Virtual Influencers Fit Into a Broader Channel Strategy?

The framing of virtual versus human influencers is largely a false choice. The more useful question is what role each format plays in a channel mix and whether that role is defined by genuine capability or by novelty.

Virtual influencers have a defensible place in campaigns where brand control is paramount, where the audience demographic is receptive to the format, and where the production economics make sense at scale. Fashion campaigns targeting Gen Z audiences, gaming brand activations, and global product launches that need consistent visual execution across markets are all contexts where the format can earn its place.

Human influencers retain the advantage in almost every context where trust, relatability, and lived experience are the primary drivers of persuasion. Micro-influencers, in particular, operate on a depth of audience relationship that a virtual character cannot replicate. Their credibility comes from being genuinely embedded in a community, not from the quality of their CGI render.

When I was growing an agency from a small team to over a hundred people, the discipline that mattered most was being honest about what each channel was actually good at rather than forcing everything into the format that was generating the most excitement at the time. Paid search was not the answer to every problem. Neither was social. Neither is any single influencer format. The brands that get the most from virtual influencers are the ones that place them precisely, not the ones that treat them as a universal upgrade.

Understanding how influencer marketing functions as a channel is the prerequisite for making sensible decisions about where virtual influencers fit within it. The format is a subset of the discipline, not a replacement for thinking clearly about the discipline itself.

Which Brands Have Used Virtual Influencers Effectively?

The most instructive examples are not the ones with the biggest follower counts but the ones where the format served a clear strategic purpose.

Luxury fashion brands have used virtual influencers to maintain an aspirational distance that human creators sometimes collapse. A CGI character can be placed in environments and scenarios that would be logistically impossible or prohibitively expensive with a human talent, and the slightly unreal quality of the imagery can reinforce rather than undermine the brand’s positioning. Brands in the Balenciaga and Prada space have experimented here with results that generated genuine cultural conversation, which in luxury is often a meaningful outcome in itself.

In gaming, the fit is even more natural. Virtual influencers are not a departure from the aesthetic language of gaming communities. They are an extension of it. A brand activating within a gaming context through a virtual character is speaking a visual language the audience already uses. That is a meaningfully different situation from a virtual influencer appearing in a category where the format feels imported rather than native.

The less successful examples tend to share a common characteristic: the virtual influencer was chosen because it felt innovative rather than because it solved a specific problem. I have seen enough marketing decisions made on the basis of what feels exciting in a boardroom presentation to recognise the pattern. The question that cuts through it is simple: what does this format do that a human creator cannot, and does that capability matter to this audience in this category?

If you are evaluating influencer formats more broadly, including how to identify the right creators and structure campaigns for commercial outcomes, there is more depth on those questions in the influencer marketing section of The Marketing Juice.

What Should Brands Actually Do With This Information?

Start with the problem, not the format. If the problem is brand control in a category where creator unpredictability is a genuine operational risk, virtual influencers are worth a serious look. If the problem is building trust with an audience that responds to authenticity and lived experience, they are the wrong tool regardless of how impressive the technology is.

If the decision is to test the format, be specific about what success looks like before the campaign runs. Engagement rates, follower growth, and brand sentiment are all measurable. Revenue attribution is harder but not impossible, particularly if the campaign has a direct response element. The mechanics of measuring influencer performance apply to virtual influencers in the same way they apply to human ones. Vague objectives produce vague results and make it impossible to learn anything useful from the test.

Consider the audience’s relationship with the category before assuming they will transfer trust to a virtual character. Fashion and gaming audiences have demonstrated they will. Most other audiences have not been tested at scale, and the assumption that novelty will substitute for credibility is one worth challenging before budget is committed.

Finally, be honest about the production commitment. A virtual influencer that posts inconsistently, has a visual style that degrades over time, or fails to maintain a coherent personality will erode rather than build brand equity. The investment required to do it properly is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a reason to go in with accurate expectations rather than optimistic ones.

The content creator landscape is evolving quickly enough that the formats available to brands will keep expanding. Virtual influencers are one development within that, not the conclusion of it. The brands that benefit most will be the ones that evaluate each format on its commercial merits rather than its novelty value, which is, in the end, the same discipline that separates effective marketing from expensive theatre in every other channel.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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