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There’s been much talk lately, in newsrooms and boardrooms and pretty much everywhere else, about this whole ‘AI’ thing. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Depending on where you get your news, it’s either the beginning of the Great Robot Takeover, a revolutionary moment for both scientific breakthroughs and workplace efficiency, or both. Suffice it to say that AI technology is poised to transform the world in manifold ways (hot take, I know).
But if you’re reading How to Build Brands and Influence People, chances are that you’re especially curious about what AI entails for creator marketing at large. Well, you’re not going to believe this, but guess what: that’s exactly what this particular blog is about!
We didn’t need AI to tell us that AI was a hot topic (in fact, it would be a little too self-promotional if it had). This is a subject that we’ve discussed with customers, stakeholders in the creator marketing space, and plenty of other human beings. And I don’t just use the term ‘human beings’ facetiously. After all, the Creator Economy is built on human relationships, particularly when it comes to the trust, passion, and authenticity at the heart of creators’ bonds to their followers. That’s why CreatorIQ’s approach to AI places those human values front and center, using technology to amplify, rather than erase, what makes creator marketing so special.
How does CreatorIQ utilize AI technology for aspects of our product? How should creator marketers think about implementing AI-backed technologies within their own programs? And what’s all this about AI influencers versus traditional human influencers?
We cover these topics and more in our recent round of AI content. Sure, you could use AI to summarize those deliverables for you, but hey, you’re already checking out this blog post—why not just keep reading?
The Top Brand Technological and Social Phenomenon of All Time (Of the Week): Artificial Intelligence
First things first: like every organization currently reckoning with AI, CreatorIQ doesn’t have all the answers. But with over a decade of machine learning experience bolstering our product, we feel more than qualified to speak about AI’s impact on creator marketing.
Ironic as it might seem, given the whole ‘machine’ thing, when applied properly within a creator marketing program, AI poses tremendous potential for strengthening connections between creators and followers, further fueling the outcomes that matter most to brands:
- Efficiency (who doesn’t love getting stuff done quickly?)
- Brand Safety (who doesn’t love being safe?)
- Performance (who doesn’t love performing well?)
- Content Optimization (who doesn’t love fully optimized content?)
You know what else everybody loves? Lists! (Coincidentally—or is it?—another task that AI is pretty good at.) That’s why, to simplify things even further, we’re presenting this list of the three areas that savvy brands should focus on as they look to incorporate AI into creator marketing best practices:
- Creator Discovery
- Collaboration
- Measurement + Insights
There’s a lot more to say on this topic, but I am not the most qualified person to say it. However, I know somebody who is: Bhavin Desai, CreatorIQ’s Chief Product Officer! Bhavin recently assembled a must-read blog post on all the ways that CreatorIQ is leveraging AI technology to enforce and enhance those lovely human aspects of creator marketing that I’ve been talking so much about.
And so, much like a mid-2000s rapper turning things over to Twista for a light-speed guest verse, I’m going to plug Bhavin’s blog, which you can check out right here. Read it and *don’t* weep, since your creator marketing program is now set up for success. It’s our goal that you come away fully confident in how CreatorIQ will harness the power of AI to enforce human connection, and enforce the core principles of (here comes another list):
- Authenticity
- Security
- Value
Would AI have come up with an analogy like that Twista thing? Probably not. But you know what AI can do? Come up with an entire fake influencer. We’re in the future now, folks.
Meet Aitana Lopez. She’s a Barcelona-based fitness and lifestyle creator known for her pink hair, chic outfits, and passion for gaming. She looks and acts just like any social media creator, but you probably don’t need AI to see where this is going: Aitana isn’t real. Instead, this ‘Virtual Soul’ is a product of The Clueless modeling agency, a company that curates AI models with the goal of “beautifully embodying diversity.”
While Aitana doesn’t tag brands in each of her posts, when she does, it has quite an impact. Check out the stats for some her posts below:
Aitana Lopez highlight stats
For the record, these figures put her squarely in-line with human creators who boast similarly sized Instagram followings (at press time, 320.5k followers for Aitana).
However, much like that whole ‘she’s not a living breathing human being’ thing, there’s another catch: not all of Aitana’s content meets the level we’d expect from flesh-and-blood creators. This is where we look to Engagement Rates—the expression of followers who like, comment, or share a given post.
When we compare the Engagement Rates for Aitana’s branded posts to the averages seen by all creators who posted content about the same brands in the same time period, a trend emerges:
Engagement Rates for Aitana Lopez and the Community Average
When Aitana looks more naturally human, and can be easily mistaken for a real live human creator—or, when she’s showing more of whatever her equivalent of ‘skin’ is—her posts outpace the average. For other branded posts, humans still have the edge.
That’s the paradox of AI influencers: the more human their posts appear, the better these posts perform.
In our latest report, ‘AI Influencers, Authenticity, and the Future of Creator Marketing,’ we analyze metrics for multiple AI Influencers, including Aitana, and discuss the primary ways that AI can reinforce the human-focused values that are central to winning creator marketing programs. You can download that report here, and I recommend that you do, since I wrote it. Maybe if enough people read it, I won’t get replaced by ChatGPT!
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