Should Your Brand Hire a Virtual Influencer?

Relying on AI-generated personalities can be a low-risk, high-engagement strategy.

by

and

Kannan Srinivasan

by

and

Kannan Srinivasan

From the Magazine (May–June 2024) · Long read

Lil Miquela earns an average of $2 million a year posting content for leading brands.

Why the Influencer Industry Needs Guardrails

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Should Your Brand Hire a Virtual Influencer?

How Marketers Choose College Athlete Influencers

Summary.

Followers respond more favorably to sponsored posts by virtual influencers versus those by humans, costs are lower, and creating an influencer from scratch allows marketers to introduce more diversity.

When the meal-kit delivery company HelloFresh wanted to promote its latest line of healthful menu items, it made an increasingly popular choice: It hired an Instagram lifestyle influencer. Jenna Kutcher is a Minnesota-based mother of two who has more than a million followers, and as part of a 21-day challenge, she and 15 other influencers hired by the brand posted recipes and photos of meals they made using HelloFresh, each tagged #RefreshWithHelloFresh. The campaign produced 461 influencer posts and generated 5.5 million impressions, with 20% of the influencers’ followers mentioning HelloFresh on Instagram—a clear success.

A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.

How Marketers Choose College Athlete Influencers

Here are the characteristics that matter most.

Serim Hwang is an assistant professor of marketing at SKK Graduate School of Business at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.
Shunyuan Zhang is an assistant professor in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School.
Xiao Liu is an associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Kannan Srinivasan is the H.J. Heinz II Professor of Management, Marketing, and Business Technologies at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.

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Why the Influencer Industry Needs Guardrails

What Makes a Successful Celebrity Brand?

Should Your Brand Hire a Virtual Influencer?

How Marketers Choose College Athlete Influencers

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