Influencer Marketing

Why AI Influencer Content Will Make Human Influencers Even More Valuable

Oct 11, 2024 | By Chris Jacks

Pop culture can be a funny thing. Just like AI influencer marketing.

Trends can seemingly materialize out of thin air. One day you’ve never heard of something, and within days it seems like you can’t avoid it even if you tried.

But although it seems these trends come out of nowhere, they often follow a path to relevance that can be traced back to the trends that came before.

The peculiar thing about large pop culture trends is that new trends are often a 180-degree departure from the previous trend.

If loose and baggy clothes are in fashion, the next movement will likely be tighter-fitting styles. If modern and minimalist interior design is in style, the next trend will likely be something more rustic and lived-in.

Part of this is simply trying to be unique. What better way to stand out than to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing?

Fashion designers, musicians, artists, and others in creative fields usually take this route.

But in pop culture, this whipsaw movement between opposing trends is also driven by the consumer. Consumers tire of a certain trend and want something new that offers a unique connection to something they feel was lost with the previous trend.

Going back to the minimalist and modern interior design example. While that style may look great in photographs or during cocktail parties, some of the qualities of a “home” are lost with such a sleek and sterile look.

The reversal of a trend in pop culture is often driven by consumers who are looking for what was lost in the previous trend. Maybe it was a connection, maybe it was some human element, but they want to regain something the current trend has eliminated.

That’s part of what makes the new trend suddenly so appealing. It fills something that has been missing.

But you might be wondering, what does that have to do with influencers and influencer marketing?

Currently, AI content technology is one of the hottest topics in business and marketing. AI tools are being developed and improved at a shocking pace. These tools look to accelerate influencer content production by orders of magnitude compared to today.

Google recently released a beta version of its Notebook LM that turns any information into a long-form podcast, complete with joking banter between two AI influencers to keep the audience engaged.

In the clip below from CNBC, you can see the moment one of the hosts realizes her own podcast could become obsolete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx2imp33glc

The question we want to answer is what will this flood of easily producible content mean for the world of influencer marketing? How will consumers respond to it and how can brands and marketing firms position themselves to navigate the shift?

If past is prologue, at least when it comes to pop culture, the rise in AI content could very well make human influencers even more valuable than they are now. As the AI influencer trend grows, the wheels of pop culture will continue to turn and consumers will want to recapture what was lost.

To help explain how this may all play out, we’ll go over some recent pop culture examples to help illustrate how some of the biggest trends are often the result of consumers looking to gain back what the previous trend obscured.

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Cassette Tapes, Taylor Swift, And Influencers

Albums on cassette tapes have seen a surge in sales over the past two years. Part of this is due to pop star Taylor Swift releasing her most recent albums on cassette alongside the standard streaming service release. Other notable artists selling cassette versions of their albums include Charli XCX and Billie Eilish.

Music streaming has many advantages for both fans and artists. It’s convenient, fast, and allows access to any music just about anywhere in the world. But it removed a certain connection fans had with their favorite artists when they held an album in their hands.

This example of how consumers react to technology is significant because musical artists and social media influencers have a similar authentic relationship with their audience.

It’s also telling because this example isn’t just about the nostalgia or retro appeal of cassette tapes. Many of the newer consumers buying music on cassette tape are too young to have originally owned music on those mediums back in the day.

Instead of nostalgia, these young fans are buying physical music to recapture a connection to the artists they love. Many of the younger consumers never experienced that type of connection having grown up completely in the streaming age of music.

It really drives home how powerful this concept is. It shows that the craving for a connection to artists or influencers is almost innate. Even if you’ve never experienced it, you can feel it’s missing when technology replaces it.

Within a few years, an entire generation of young people will grow up with AI content being a completely normal aspect of daily life. But this example shows young consumers will still seek out and engage with authentic content, even if it’s completely new to them.

Human influencers who understand their audience will still hold significant value and will likely increase their value to marketers as AI content causes an overall decline in authentic content and connection online.

Cassette tapes and social media influencers may seem worlds apart, but they have a common thread when unraveling the current state of pop culture marketing trends.

Food Trucks & Franchises

It’s hard to believe, but not long ago food trucks were synonymous with boring, bland, worse-than-cafeteria-style food.

Food trucks were the domain of construction sites and industrial parks. Offering premade, barely edible sandwiches and coffee to workers who weren’t able to leave the job site for a lunch break or early morning snack.

Of course, that’s not the case anymore. Food trucks are often seen as the premier way to explore new flavors, exotic cuisine, and culinary experiences not found anywhere else.

But how exactly did this shift happen?

If you live just about anywhere in America, you’re no doubt surrounded by quick-service food franchises. Franchises are great, but they can feel limiting when it comes to your options as a consumer.

When it comes to food, over the past few decades franchises have taken over the market for affordable, quick-service options. That pushed out a lot of the smaller restaurateurs that helped maintain variety and vibrance within a town or neighborhood.

Sure, trendy new restaurants would open with completely new concepts, but the affordable exploration was gone due to the takeover of repetitive and often overlapping franchises.

Food trucks were a direct response to that loss. Consumers were hungry (literally) for something that would replace what the previous trend had taken away.

Food trucks took hold fast and cities around the country set up special areas for food trucks to flourish.

That doesn’t mean popular food franchises went away or were replaced. But it shows how food trucks suddenly became more valuable in the eyes of consumers. The real relationships the consumer felt with the food truck propelled its success.

Suddenly, you could order and receive your food directly from the person who created the menu and prepared the ingredients. You felt you were exploring new offerings, and the connection was far more satisfying than with franchises or strip mall copycats.

To bring this full circle and back to influencer marketing, in a world of AI influencers and content, human influencers will be the food trucks. 

They’ll provide a unique product that breaks through the noise of copycat and derivative AI content that lacks the engagement and connection that consumers want.

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Podcasts

Podcasts are without a doubt one of the hottest forms of media available today. If you asked young people what their dream job would be, many of them would tell you they want to be a successful podcaster.

Podcasters are influencers, and the rise of these influencers was similar to the other examples outlined above.

Before podcasts, traditional linear television programming and cable news had embraced the sound-bite era. Complex issues requiring careful debate would be distilled down to 5-minute back-and-forth arguments filled with sound bites and then bookended by a commercial break.

The result was that audiences were craving more, and podcasters filled that void.

Despite the billion-dollar media empires controlling television and cable news, podcasters on minimal budgets were getting more views and building bigger audiences with a simple microphone and laptop.

You can probably recognize the theme here. Audiences were attracted to the authentic conversations that were taking place on podcasts.

Despite the billions poured into linear television and traditional media, podcasts attracted the biggest audiences and provided marketers with a way to target the consumers they needed to reach.

The rise of AI content will likely spawn a similar dynamic. Billion-dollar data centers will crank out lifelike podcasts in a few seconds, but will audiences engage with that content the way they do with their favorite influencers and podcasters today?

It’s likely the opposite will happen. Audiences will instead gravitate to the most authentic podcasts and influencers they can find. Influencer marketing will still be the bridge that brings brands and customers together under the umbrella of the most authentic influencers.

AI Will Still Be Influential & Crucial For Influencer Marketing

The goal of this article isn’t to deny the impact AI content & AI influencers will have on influencer marketing. 

Instead, it’s to show the value shift that can happen when a new technology is introduced. It’s not always a zero-sum equation with distinct winners and losers. Seemingly opposing trends can experience increased value alongside certain technological or market disruptions.

But that doesn’t mean AI has no place in influencer marketing or digital marketing in general. The powerful attributes of AI can still provide many benefits in areas of marketing that aren’t customer-facing.

Analytics

Analytics is one area where AI can be the most helpful for influencer marketers and agencies. Analytics are key to maximizing any campaign, but they can be difficult to manage and sift through.

AI will allow for a conversational approach to analytics using LLM (large language models). Marketers and even influencers will be able to ask direct questions about their metrics or ask an AI assistant to find insights or opportunities that might have been overlooked.

This will allow marketers to increase targeting and find new audiences faster without alienating customers or introducing inauthentic content that could cause consumers to push back or ignore the messaging.

Ideation

One area where AI is helping marketers and other creatives is by streamlining the ideation process. AI chatbots can be extremely helpful for creating starting points based on the bot’s knowledge of existing campaigns, influencers, and trends.

Newer recursive AI allows the chatbot to keep a memory of past conversations and prompts, AI can act as an ongoing workspace for a creative campaign as a marketing team fine-tunes the details and brings them to fruition.

Content Editing

AI can also be useful for editing influencer content. Whether it’s images, video, or even text, AI can speed up the process using tools that are already available.

Just make sure to not lean into these tools too heavily where they cross into content creation. Early on, some influencers tried to use AI-generated thumbnails, and those videos performed rather poorly in almost every situation. Views, engagement, and most metrics underperformed.

That doesn’t mean audiences reject AI content, but if they’re expecting human-created content, an AI substitute will be seen as inauthentic.

Competitor Research For Influencer Marketing

Researching competitors and learning how they’re reaching audiences is an integral part of any marketing campaign. AI can help automate this process by following competitor’s social media mentions, activity, and other signals.

Marketers can then use AI chatbots to dig through this data and locate insights or find untapped markets and opportunities.

Successful Influencer Marketers Will Choose When To Use AI And When to Avoid It

Marketing isn’t about producing the most content possible in the shortest amount of time. In fact, it’s often the opposite. True marketing that connects with audiences is about the careful and methodical creation of content that resonates and delivers the intended message in a way that’s natural and organic.

In its current state, AI is an opposing force to that goal. It’s about cost savings, labor reduction, and fast output.

These attributes are perfect for some of the more mundane tasks that marketers and influencers deal with. That’s where AI can streamline your marketing efforts.

But care has to be taken when deciding to use AI for customer-facing applications. The benefits and attributes that AI offers quickly become contrary to what marketing is.

AI in itself isn’t a positive or a negative. It’s a tool. Like any other tool, it must be used in situations that best suit its strengths.

With the hype around AI content and influencers, it’s easy to get swept away in the idea that AI is a do-everything technology. 

But wise marketers and influencers will use AI when appropriate and avoid alienating their audiences by using the technology where it doesn’t make sense.

Summary

Sometimes it’s easier to create trends than to predict them. 

We’re not trying to predict exactly how AI will play out. Instead, the goal of this article was to look at the way audiences have responded to market disruptions and how that can inform the decisions influencer marketers make in the future.

Influencer marketing will no doubt change as a result of AI content. But influencers are agile and fast to adapt. That’s how they grew their audience and became so dominant in the fast-moving environment of social media in the first place.


Influencers will continue that trend and it’s likely that they will become even more valuable as AI content starts to flood the internet and social media platforms.

As the examples in this article show, audiences will always seek out what’s authentic. When they do so, it brings increased value to those sources that deliver what the audience is seeking.

Even in an AI-infused world, human influencers will still be able to deliver a connection that has made influencer marketing one of the fastest-growing marketing channels in history. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Jacks is an influencer marketing professional with over a decade of experience in the digital marketing sphere. As the Director of Growth Strategy, Chris oversees and drives strategic initiatives to fuel business expansion. With a keen eye for market trends and opportunities, Chris develops comprehensive growth plans and aligns business objectives across cross-functional teams. With a strong focus on crafting impactful, ROI-driven influencer campaigns across multiple sectors, Chris utilizes his expertise to enhance market positioning and maximize results.

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