AI Sean, we really have to stop meeting like this.
The heyday of influencer marketing may be over in 2026!
Today we are discussing the impact of AI and bots on the industry and why brands need to rethink their strategies.
Important insight: Focus on real relationships, not vanity metrics!
SOURCES:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/tilly-norwood-creator-responds-fears-over-AI-actors/story?id=128262727 https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/ (FULL: https://archive.ph/20uwc) https://www.fraud0.com/resources/tiktok-bots-fake-accounts-scam/ https://www.vogue.com/article/from-labubus-to-brain-rot-how-2025-unfolded-on-tiktok https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/corporates/tiktok-releases-q1-2025-community-guidelines-1196201 https://clickpatrol.com/tiktok-bots-explained-how-fake-followers-and/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
Transcript:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so this week, we’ll ring in the New Year with five ways marketing may change in 2026. We’re going to cover big changes in influencer marketing, how audio in ads is tuning out, the rise of retail media networks, the powerful motivator of treatonomics and why optimizing AI platforms is going to be very important over the next year.
Today, we’re going to cover influencers. So I teach a marketing strategy class to MBA students, and I’ve been surprised over the last couple of years at how many students really, truly believe in online influencers.
Now, I read the trade magazines, and I know influencers are becoming a major powerhouse in content marketing strategies, particularly in launching new products or promoting off-the-radar ones. The influencer market is worth at least $250 billion, and growing every year. There are a lot of reasons they’re effective – they tend to have large, devoted audiences, they are trusted sources of information and many of them are happy to work fairly inexpensively to create authentic content that follows brand guidelines while also ringing true to their viewers or listeners.
We’ve also shifted from influencers being engaged in direct sponsorship-style relationships to a growing trend of programmatic approaches where software helps identify the right channels for brands and automates relationship-building, which also makes it easier to get placement with narrower niche audiences that fit target market criteria more cleanly.
But there’s a cost to all this convenience, and that’s a parallel rise of AI-generated influencers. I realize this all might sound like science fiction, but I’m also sure you heard about the AI actress Tilly Norwood, whose creators announced this year that “she” is seeking representation in Hollywood. It hasn’t gone over too well, but the idea that movie stars could one day be custom-made for their roles by AI isn’t something we have to rely on movies to show us anymore.
So, here’s the thing. The same technology that powers Tilly Norwood is also widely available to people all over the world, and it’s allowing individuals to create AI influencers who look and sound and act like real people. Much of the time, you’ll find them on TikTok or Instagram, and a lot of the time, they’re posing as women. A recent report from 404 Media revealed that hundreds of these AI-generated TikTok influencers were being run from a single phone farm run by Doublespeed, a startup backed by the major venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
But beyond the ones Doublespeed is running, there are thousands more known AI-generated influencer accounts already, and more are appearing every day.
There are also stories about individuals who are making money creating their own AI-generated influencer accounts. A BBC News article from December 26th talked about how a student at the University of Illinois named Simone McKenzie created an AI influencer named Gigi on Google Veo 3, which is a generative video platform.
Gigi is not real and doesn’t pretend to be. She does things that are definitely not possible, like eating lava pizza or put cotton candy on her face like lip gloss. It’s not hard to know she’s AI-generated.
But she’s racked up millions of views on TikTok and made thousands of dollars for her creator.
Even more alarming, it only takes her a few minutes to create the videos from the prompting tool and she posts multiple videos per day. There’s no time needed for writing or lighting or sound checks or filming or post-production. It’s all available nearly immediately for posting to what is still a very receptive audience on TikTok.
Or… is it? While I don’t doubt that some of those people are real, it’s well-established that TikTok has a major problem with bot accounts, both as creators pushing content and also as fake accounts boosting viewer numbers and engagement. Just in the first quarter of 2025, TikTok removed 211 million videos from its platform for violating community standards. Of these, about 14% fell into the category of “edited media and AI-generated content” – or about 30 million videos.
Tiktok bots are also a big problem. I’ve seen estimates from researchers suggesting that as much as 75-97% of TikTok ad click traffic is driven by bots. Google Ads, by the way, is generally in the 18% range, and Facebook is in the 5% range. Bots are also used to inflate view counts, create fake followers, offer fake likes, make fake comments and boost share statistics.
And you can bet the same people who are trying to make money with AI-generated content on TikTok are using these unscrupulous bots to gain higher visibility.
Everything I’ve just said about TikTok applies to every other popular social media platform. Instagram has the same issues. So does Youtube. So does Reddit. And X is so hollowed out now that you can assume that almost any engagement there is fake.
So, what does this mean for brands who want to use an influencer strategy? It mostly means do your homework and create partnerships with real influencers who have provably real audiences. You are much better offer reaching tens of thousands of real people than hundreds of thousands of fake ones. And you are much better off working with content creators who have built their own audiences through hard work and good production than with programmatic approaches where you have less control over how your brand message is being shared or how your budget is being spent.
And as with anything, set smart metrics that measure actual success, not just clicks or engagement, because those can be faked.
But I have an ugly feeling that the heyday of influencer marketing is coming to a close and we’re going to move to a different sort of model as advertisers get tired of separating the real influencers out from the fake ones. Maybe we’ll see something similar to the entertainment industry where influencers have to hire established agencies to get them deals. Maybe we’ll see some sort of verification and validation platform arise to provide stronger confidence in the humanity of purported influencers.
Or maybe the fraudsters and scammers will siphon off so much of the money that the entire market for influencers collapses and we move on to something else.
We’ll see what happens in 2026!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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