Does AI UGC mean the end for influencers?

User generated content (UGC) refers to content that is made and shared directly by customers rather than the brand or business itself. For this reason they are perceived as more genuine to traditional advertising and is fast becoming the most cost effective marketing strategy for influencing purchasing decisions.

UGC is particularly popular in D2C because of its higher conversion rates from the inherent social proof that comes with seeing consumers themselves promoting brands.

Research shows that more shoppers now rely on UGC to inform their decisions on purchasing. In fact, according to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers trust UGC more than traditional advertising as they resonate more with customers who prefer authentic recommendations from relatable people over brand generated ads.

Combine that with the fact UGC leads to 29% increase in online purchases and has 4x higher click through rates, we’re looking at a no brainer to why they are more popular than traditional ads that now create a ‘salesy’ feeling in comparison.

An example of a really successful UGC campaign is coke’s ‘share a coke’ campaign which encouraged consumers to find coke bottles with names that hold personal significance to them and post images to social media using the hashtag #ShareACoke. Since its launch in 2012 the campaign has generated nearly a billion impressions on Twitter and has resulted in sales of 150 million personalised bottles.

The emergence of more accessible AI technology has given rise to its popularity for everyday business use cases, but an interesting use case for more cost effective brand promotion comes in the form of AI UGC where brands can create their own influencers to promote their brands for them with deepfake technology.

The Evolution of Deepfakes for Business

The general acceptance of new technology and its capabilities always takes time, usually because we are hesitant to adopt something we don’t fully understand yet. So let’s quickly understand what deepfake technology is.

Deepfake technology uses previous content to generate entirely new video and audio through AI. The technology has actually been around for a long time and used by studios, but has never been as accessible as it is today.

We’re seeing far more profound and effective use cases with deepfake technology now than we had previously seen in the Web 3.0 space which has provided a culturally negative sentiment towards it from scammers using other people’s identities.

However, with much improved regulation and data protection we are now seeing a change in this sentiment and much more practical adoption across companies. For example, Creatify uses deepfakes to create personalized video messages for customers, and Heygen's deepfake technology enables brands to create hyper-realistic spokespersons.

The success of AI video (deepfake technology) from these use cases has now bled into the creator economy and provides new opportunities to both brands and influencers when considering UGC.

Impact on Influencer industry

Traditionally speaking, marketing and brand promos with influencers involved celebrities who could leverage their status and public appeal to endorse products. However, this has evolved over time as people have become more aware and skeptical towards the authenticity of celebrities. This has given rise to the popularity in influencer marketing whereby more relatable people with a large social media following can allow brands to engage directly with their audience through UGC.

As effective as it is for brands to diversify their marketing strategies by leveraging influencers with large audiences behind them, it still comes at a significant cost.

First and foremost, the high costs influencers can demand for access to their audience can strain most marketing budgets, not to mention the rates are highly variable given factors like their audience size, engagement rates, and even niche. This makes it difficult to perform financial planning and budgeting.

It’s also not guaranteed what the return on investment will be as measuring the direct impact of influencer campaigns by translating it into tangible financial returns is not always a straightforward task.

Logistically, as a brand you have little control over ownership of that content and quality control. Establishing clear guidelines, requirements, and coordinating campaigns across different platforms can be a headache and require constant monitoring.

AI UGC might not be positively received by influencers from the get go, but this technology actually creates profound opportunities for both influencers and brands to democratise influencer marketing with AI.

From a business and cost effectiveness standpoint, brands can have far more control and alignment with business objectives by using an AI influencer for more scalable UGC with far less costs than working with a human influencer.

On the other side, traditional influencers can look at renting their AI clone of themselves to brands for agreed upon time periods to generate unlimited promos. This opens up an exciting business model where influencers no longer sell their time but their image and social authority, which is far more scalable given you can service more brands than you previously could manually.

Unsurprisingly, the proof of concept already exists and we have several AI influencers taking over the social media landscape with millions of followers.

The rise of AI influencers

With the speed of development in AI, we will see more AI influencers than human ones very soon. This isn’t far fetched when you consider how lifelike the technology behind AI influencers are already and their social acceptance on the biggest platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

They are virtual personalities or characters that function exactly like a human influencer but are entirely generated by AI. The main difference is AI influencers have 24/7 availability to create content and engage with their audience. They also provide a far more cost effective way of doing so despite no limitation to volume which presents unprecedented opportunities for brand reach and awareness.

Despite the obvious upsides, as with most new technology, it’s also met with skepticism and concern. For example, the main negative perception from small groups suggest there are authenticity concerns and limited capacity for any connections with AI influencers which could affect their effectiveness in endorsing brands. This necessitates an important decision to be made by brands who will need to weigh up the potential behind unlimited UGC and what the target audience’s perception might be that could affect a campaign’s ROI.

However, AI influencers will no doubt soon become the norm for brands and it’s not a wild prediction, it’s a well informed hypothesis when you consider the biggest AI influencer on social media right now:

Lil Miquela has +20 million followers across Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. Most of us would never have thought an audience that size would be possible with AI at this early stage, but that is the pace at which we are accepting and demanding more accessible and readily available influencers.

Even KFC have taken notice and decided to create a virtual Colonel Sanders which currently has 1.3 million followers on instagram. This virtual Colonel Sanders has already promoted partnerships with brands such as Old Spice and Dr.Pepper which has provided a highly engaging and cost effective alternative to hiring human celebrities.

Advantages of AI UGC and AI influencers for brands

Every brand understands the struggle that comes with content at scale for their marketing efforts. Democratising influencer marketing with AI UGC presents us the opportunity to achieve this without the traditional barriers in costs, production hassle, or managing influencers.

With the option to create your own AI influencers with your brand’s ethos, values, and perfect recall of information for consistent on brand messaging, more efficient content creation and UGC at scale is now an option for far more of us. In fact, brands can save up to 50% on content creation costs by using AI UGC.

The biggest growth lever to AI UGC and AI influencers is that there’s no limit to their adaptability to different languages, cultural contexts and diverse audiences for global reach, which was previously either not an option with human influencers or just far too expensive to achieve.

Both Prada and Calvin Klein have worked with the aforementioned AI influencer, Lil Miquela alongside real life model Bella Hadid. These campaigns blurred the lines between digital and reality but also demonstrated to us the willingness big brands have towards this new wave of AI influencer marketing.

For further reading into how UGC creator jobs are changing with AI, read our previous article here.

AI UGC: The Future For Brands and Influencers

Both AI UGC and AI influencers are new to the scene but it hasn’t stopped the speed at which they’ve been able to change how brands connect with their audiences. Human influencers will undoubtedly still play a role in controlling their image rights and renting their avatars to brands, but the shift is noticeable. The advantages of AI’s scalability, 24/7 availability, and cost effectiveness for content at scale are too significant for brands to ignore.

AI influencers like Lil Miquela are reinforcing the need to familiarise ourselves with tools that allow us to engage with audiences through virtual personalities, and brands will need to balance this capability with authenticity in their messaging. After all, the end goal is to create a meaningful connection with the customer, AI UGC and AI influencers are well positioned to do this at scale.

If you want to be one of the first to create your AI avatars with our technology, you can skip our waitlist here.

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