Virtual Influencers in Practice: Who They Are and How Brands Use Them

A virtual influencer never misses a shoot, never ages out of a demographic, and never posts something off-brand at 1am. That's the pitch brands hear, and it's why the category has moved well past novelty accounts into actual ad campaigns. This isn't a how-to for spinning one up — it's a look at who the working examples actually are, how the FTC now treats them, and the trade-off brands are genuinely weighing when they choose a synthetic persona over a human one.

The case that started it: Lil Miquela

Lil Miquela is the reference point the entire category gets measured against — a CGI persona with brand partnerships spanning Calvin Klein, Prada, BMW, Samsung, Tiffany & Co., and Pacsun. Her highest-profile moment is also the category's clearest cautionary tale: a 2019 Calvin Klein campaign paired her with real-life model Bella Hadid in an ad that ended with the two appearing to kiss. GLAAD and LGBTQ media outlets called it queer-baiting — using a same-sex-coded moment for attention without any actual representation behind it — and Calvin Klein issued an apology.

That single campaign is worth sitting with because it's the authenticity problem in miniature. A human ambassador makes a bad call and it's a scandal about a person. A virtual persona makes the same bad call and it becomes a question about the entire premise — whether an entity built and scripted entirely by a brand team can meaningfully "mean" anything it appears to endorse or represent. Every brand evaluating a virtual influencer today is implicitly weighing that risk, whether or not they'd put it in those terms.

The agency model: Aitana López and The Clueless

Not every virtual influencer starts as a brand mascot — some start as an agency's answer to a staffing problem. Aitana López was built by Barcelona agency The Clueless, and the origin story, as founder Rubén Cruz told Euronews, came out of frustration with human influencer projects: "many projects were being put on hold or cancelled due to problems beyond our control." Rather than keep absorbing that unpredictability, the agency built its own model instead of casting one.

What that buys an agency is consistency at the cost of spontaneity. Aitana doesn't cancel a shoot, doesn't renegotiate a rate mid-campaign, and doesn't age out of the look a brand originally hired her for. What she can't do is have an actual unscripted reaction — every post, every "day in her life," is a decision made by a team, which is precisely the trade-off Cruz's own reasoning points to: control was the entire premise from day one.

Not just two: a growing, named roster

Lil Miquela and Aitana aren't outliers anymore — they're the first two entries in a category that keeps adding names. Mia Zelu is a more recent addition, built by a digital agency in early 2024 and known for appearances tied to real-world events like Wimbledon — the pitch being that a virtual model's team "can place her at any event, in any style, at any time," without the logistics a human ambassador's schedule would require. She's frequently cited alongside Lil Miquela as the two most-referenced examples when marketers discuss the category, which is itself a sign of how narrow the field of genuinely well-known virtual influencers still is, even as the underlying technology gets cheaper to produce.

The FTC now treats them as endorsers

The regulatory ground shifted under this category in 2023. The FTC's updated Endorsement Guides broadened the definition of "endorser" to explicitly include entities that merely appear to be an individual, group, or institution — language written specifically to catch computer-generated, fictional characters, not just human spokespeople. The practical effect: if a consumer might reasonably believe a virtual influencer's endorsement reflects a real opinion or experience, the same material-connection disclosure rules that apply to human influencers now apply here too.

This closes what used to be a genuine gray area. Before the update, it wasn't obvious whether "sponsorship" disclosure rules were even meant to apply to a character everyone already knows is computer-generated. The 2023 language settles that: virtual doesn't mean exempt.

The trade-off brands are actually weighing

Strip away the novelty, and virtual influencer campaigns come down to one exchange: consistency and control, in exchange for questions about authenticity.

The consistency side is real and specific. A virtual persona hits every brand guideline exactly, shows up in every market simultaneously, never has an off-camera controversy independent of the brand's own decisions, and can be adjusted rather than recast if a campaign's direction changes. For a brand running dozens of markets or a high volume of content, that's not a marginal advantage — it removes an entire category of production risk.

The authenticity side is where the Calvin Klein moment still matters years later. Audiences forgive human influencers for being human — inconsistent, occasionally off-message, visibly improvising. A virtual influencer doesn't get that same benefit of the doubt when something lands wrong, because there's no person to have made an honest mistake; there's only a brand team's decision, fully exposed. That's a harder position to defend from, not an easier one.

If a brand wants to build one

The technical core of a believable virtual persona is the same problem character consistency describes in AI generation generally: nothing carries between separate generations by default, so the same "person" has to be deliberately locked across every post rather than re-described from scratch each time. A face written out in words gets reinvented slightly differently on every generation; a face copied from a reference image or a locked master still doesn't.

That's the practical starting point for a brand — or an influencer marketing agency weighing a synthetic persona against booking a human creator — building an owned character rather than licensing an existing one: a reference sheet the model copies from, not a paragraph it reinterprets. Versely's AI avatar generator is built around that same pattern — a consistent presenter generated from a photo or a locked reference rather than reimagined per clip — and the Plush Lipstick Influencer Review workflow is a working example of the format this produces: a single recurring persona narrating a product review across multiple scenes with the same voice and the same face throughout, the way a brand's own virtual ambassador would need to work across a real campaign. Browsing Versely's model catalog is the practical next step for evaluating which generation and reference tools fit a specific persona brief.

FAQ

Are virtual influencers required to disclose brand partnerships?

Yes. The FTC's 2023 update to the Endorsement Guides extended endorser disclosure rules to computer-generated characters, so the same material-connection disclosure that applies to a human influencer's sponsored post applies to a virtual one.

Do virtual influencers replace human influencers for brands?

Not typically — they occupy a different niche built around consistency and control rather than being a direct substitute. Brands generally choose a virtual persona for the production reliability, not because it performs identically to a human relationship with an audience.

Who owns a virtual influencer — the brand or the agency that built it?

It varies by arrangement. Some, like Lil Miquela, were built by an independent studio and partner with multiple brands over time; others are built in-house by a brand or agency specifically to represent one company's products.

What makes a virtual influencer look consistent across posts?

The same reference-driven approach that underlies character consistency in AI generation broadly — a locked reference image or master still that later generations copy from, rather than a text description that gets reinterpreted slightly differently each time.

The mechanics of building one are more accessible than the two headline examples suggest — the harder call is the authenticity trade-off above, not the production. Start with Versely's AI avatar generator to see what a consistent, reference-locked persona actually looks like before committing a campaign to one.