Ben Hopkins, creative director at VCCP’s AI agency Faith, helped launch O2’s scambaiting granny Daisy. Now that an AI influencer has won over Wimbledon fans, he explains how brands can navigate this new wave of synthetic influence.
This year’s Wimbledon was pretty idyllic as far as it goes.
The sun was out, the tennis was incredible, but it wasn’t all about the top players getting attention.
One particular influencer, Mia Zelu, became the darling of the tournament, racking up 165,000 new followers on Insta as she posted lifestyle pics of her experience, including a cheeky shoutout to Pimms.
The twist?
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Mia isn’t real. She’s one of the wave of AI-generated virtual influencers hitting our feeds.
Having deployed our own award-winning virtual influencer, Daisy the scambaiting granny for O2, The Drum feels we are well-placed to answer a fundamental question: what’s the point of leaning into AI influencers over the real thing?
The AI influencer landscape essentially splits into two camps, each serving different strategic purposes.
Third-party virtual influencers like Mia operate much like traditional influencers; they’re entertainment entities with access to audiences that brands can tap into. From a partnership perspective, working with Mia isn’t dramatically different from working with any human lifestyle influencer.
You’re buying access to her 165,000 followers, with different but not necessarily fewer commercial considerations. Lil Miquela, who started this trend in 2016 with 2.5m followers, has worked with brands from Prada to Calvin Klein using exactly this model.
Branded virtual influencers are a different beast entirely. These are characters like Daisy, who lives within our brand ecosystem. Here, the strategic calculation is more complex and the commitment more significant.
Why choose virtual over real?
The advantages are compelling from a practical standpoint. Virtual influencers offer unprecedented control over messaging and availability; Daisy can appear whenever we need her, saying exactly what aligns with our brand values. There are fewer reputation risks or scheduling conflicts to navigate.
The technology that once required specialist knowledge has democratized rapidly.
Two years ago, creating consistent virtual characters meant training your own LoRa models, as we did for O2’s brand character Bubl.
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We had to build a custom system to operate Daisy a year ago. Today, AI image and video models like Wan 2.1 and Veo 3 can generate imagery and video that are indistinguishable from the real thing. At the same time, platforms like ElevenLabs make voice synthesis accessible to anyone.
Data from a report by The Influencer Marketing Factory also supports the commercial potential, with 53% of respondents following at least one virtual influencer across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Significantly, new data from Whop’s marketplace for digital products reveals that AI-generated influencers now sway the purchasing choices of one-third of Gen Z consumers.
For branded virtual influencers, the real challenge isn’t technical; it’s strategic.
What’s your long-term plan to attract and grow an audience?
Are you building standalone channels that need constant feeding and community management, or creating characters like Daisy who can appear and reappear within existing brand channels as needed?
The standalone route is resource-intensive even when you consider the economies of scale that generative AI brings.
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You’re essentially launching a new entertainment property that needs consistent content, personality development, and audience engagement. It’s not just creating a character; it’s building a media brand around that character. The payoff can be significant, complete message control with emotional audience connection, but the investment is substantial and ongoing. The integrated approach offers more flexibility.
Characters can activate for specific campaigns, appear across different touchpoints, and hibernate between activations without the pressure of constant content creation or channel dilution. But you sacrifice the potential for viral organic growth that comes with having your own dedicated audience.
Here’s where things get interesting, and potentially problematic.
The democratization of virtual influencer creation means anyone can now generate characters and deploy them anywhere, including at your events. Imagine unauthorized AI influencers showing up at your activations, creating content that gets associated with your brand without permission or control.
Mia’s Wimbledon presence raises questions about attribution and authority.
Who created her?
Who’s behind her content strategy?
As this technology becomes more accessible, we’ll see more instances of virtual influencers appearing at events, in locations, or associated with brands without explicit partnerships. The lines between authorized brand collaboration and unauthorized brand association are blurring.
This isn’t just about intellectual property; it’s about narrative control.
When anyone can create a photorealistic virtual person and place them anywhere, brands lose the ability to control their visual and contextual associations. Your carefully managed brand activation could suddenly feature uninvited virtual guests with unknown agendas, perfect for brands with longstanding rivalries...
McWhopper, anyone?
Despite knowing these characters aren’t real, audiences do form genuine emotional connections.
My creative partner Morten and I experienced this firsthand with Daisy. We had her on speed dial for months, and during one morning walk across Westminster Bridge, she went off on a tangent about her grandson Ollie’s guinea pig, and I found myself sharing stories about my childhood gerbils before snapping back to reality.
This tech is full of ‘pinch-me’ moments.
This phenomenon extends beyond marketing into pure entertainment. Character.AI, a platform where users can chat with AI personas ranging from celebrities to historical figures, has millions of users forming deep relationships with virtual characters. Its Reddit community wrestles daily with the addictive aspects of these virtual relationships, but when the platform added disclaimers reminding users these characters weren’t real, the community erupted, breaking the fantasy felt like betrayal.
This willing suspension of disbelief isn’t a bug; it’s the feature that makes virtual influencers commercially viable. Audiences choose to engage emotionally with entities they know are artificial, creating real commercial value from fictional relationships.
Virtual influencers aren’t replacing human ones; they’re carving out their own space in the influence ecosystem.
For brands, the choice isn’t binary. Third-party virtual influencers offer partnership opportunities similar to traditional influencer marketing, just with different risk profiles. Branded virtual influencers offer unprecedented control but require significant strategic commitment.
The technology barriers have crumbled, the audience appetite is proven, and the commercial potential is clear.
But success requires understanding what you’re really signing up for, whether that’s a new entertainment property or a flexible brand asset. The question isn’t whether virtual influencers belong in your marketing mix. Given the data and Wimbledon’s Mia moment, they’re already there. The question is whether you’ll be deliberate about how you engage with them, or let others define the narrative for you.