They (almost) walk among us 🤖

Hello marketers and a happy new year to all! Welcome to AI Marketing School, where we dish out the latest and greatest in AI-powered marketing.

In this week’s issue:

1. AI Marketing Update: Bots invade social media

2. The Stack: 2025’s AI marketing trends to watch

3. Consultant’s Corner: Generative AI x ads

Onwards!

AI MARKETING UPDATE

Social media companies bet big on bots

Meta recently announced plans to roll out AI-generated profiles across Facebook and Instagram. 

They’ll eventually have bios, profile pictures, and the ability to post, comment, and interact like regular users. 

Connor Hayes, Meta’s VP of generative AI, explained, “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.”

People are already creating AI personas with Meta’s tools, though most remain private.

Meta had to kill some public profiles already, but plenty remain, and Meta wants to AI profiles deep into their social media ecosystem.

Expectedly, this has culminated in some harsh criticism.

Becky Owen, global chief marketing officer at Billion Dollar Boy and former head of Meta’s creator innovations team, stated that “without robust safeguards, platforms risk amplifying false narratives through these AI-driven accounts.”

“Unlike human creators, these AI personas don’t have lived experiences, emotions, or the same capacity for relatability.”

Let’s just hope we don’t see a repeat of Microsoft’s Tay incident.

So, will AI walk among us in the digital realm? Yep — it’s inevitable. A precursor to AI entering the physical world, probably.

Social media bots could eventually recommend products, engage in conversations, and even follow and interact with accounts.

TikTok Symphony and Snapchat’s play

Meanwhile, TikTok is already using AI to simplify content creation. Its Symphony suite allows marketers to generate videos, captions, and even multilingual ads in minutes. 

Need a brand ambassador speaking in Spanish, French, and Mandarin? Symphony’s AI avatars can make it happen.

The tool has been live for months, giving some brands and creators an edge in producing localized, high-quality content at scale.

Snapchat is also joining the fray with its own native text-to-video generator.

Type a prompt, and Snapchat’s AI produces a short video clip based on the input, pluggable directly through the platform.

Why this matters for marketers

If official or platform-sanctioned bot profiles become more prominent on social media, the state of play surrounding engagement and traffic may change dramatically. 

So, what might it mean when AI bots become part of the audience – or even part of the conversation?

1. Changes in engagement: AI profiles could amplify content, liking and sharing posts, commenting, and even following accounts. This may inflate engagement metrics. Marketers might find themselves reevaluating KPIs to ensure they’re measuring real impact, not just interactions driven by bots. There may also be ways to take advantage of AI bot amplification – this could become a new growth hack.

2. A flood of AI-generated content: With AI tools in full swing, the volume of content on platforms could skyrocket. But quantity isn’t quality. To stand out, brands will need to focus on creating truly valuable, human-centered content that really slices through the AI noise.

3. Redefining trust: As platforms fill with AI-generated personas, transparency will be critical. Meta has promised clear labeling for AI accounts, but will users accept interactions with bots as authentic? Brands that rely too heavily on AI risk eroding trust if audiences feel they’re being “tricked.”

4. New opportunities in localization: TikTok Symphony and similar tools make it easier than ever to create localized campaigns. Expect to see more brands experimenting with AI-driven personalization at scale in 2025.

5. Algorithmic shifts: If AI bots are engaging as “users,” they’ll inevitably shape what content gets prioritized by algorithms. Marketers will need to adapt their strategies to ensure their content is not just seen but meaningfully engaged with – by both humans and AI.

Successfully adapting will depend on striking the right balance: leveraging AI tools to enhance efficiency to reach new audiences while staying grounded in the human stories and insights that resonate most.

Keep a close eye on this throughout 2025 to see if bots become commonplace on social media. Those who react will surely seize opportunities.

THE STACK

Being AI-ready for 2025

It’s only fitting to overview some of the greatest trends to follow for AI marketing in 2025. 

There might just be something that totally transforms your strategies for the year.

1. The year of AI-generated video

AI-generated video will become a core marketing tool. 

OpenAI’s Sora, though still in limited release and unavailable throughout much of the world, allows marketers to generate short, polished videos from text prompts. 

Its storyboard features and pre-set visual styles are promising for creating longer, more coherent videos.

There’s plenty of great tutorials for using Sora effectively out there already.

Runway is a more established option and is excellent for producing b-roll footage for marketing material, YouTube videos, etc. 

Soon, we’ll see AI video tools transform into something like Canva’s branding suite.

Logo placements, color palettes, and tone guidelines will become embedded features.

Expect to be able to upload your assets and use them to generate new rich media directly within a singular UI.

2. AI Search: The year it becomes indispensable

2024 saw AI search move from concept to reality, and 2025 is the year it scales. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT with internet browsing and Google’s AI snippets vastly improved AI’s interaction with search. Perplexity users have also rocketed. 

There’s also Amazon Rufus, launched as an AI shopping assistant, it blends product catalog data, customer reviews, and web insights to answer detailed questions like “What’s the best sunscreen for sensitive skin?” or “How do I start an indoor garden?” 

It delivers context and guidance, moving from search results to true discovery, also changing how products are recommended to queries and keywords.

In 2025, these tools will grow smarter and more integrated. LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) will become critical to rank sites and products in AI tools rather than the search index. 

We’ve already covered LLMO briefly but will be tracking the best strategies and bringing a playbook soon.

3., AI Personas and influencers: The next stage

Virtual influencers and AI avatars are rapidly becoming the norm and will hugely extend the reach of creators and brands who take advantage. 

AI content creator Rowan Cheung recently announced that his AI avatar videos have helped him add 48.4k followers to his account, racking up 7 million+ views.

Intriguingly, he also states this resulted in little to no backlash or criticism: “When I started this experiment, I was preparing for the criticism I thought I would get for delegating my face + voice to an AI avatar.” However, this wasn’t the case. 

That could be explained by Cheung writing in the tech space, but even so, such deployment and use of AI will surely become normalized. 

The advantage of using AI avatars? Cheung describes it well: “By delegating my face/voice, I can focus on what I'm actually good at – finding interesting stories and writing about them.” 

So how do you build them? Some platforms like TikTok via Symphony are offering AI avatar functions natively. Or you can go DIY and make your own.

Cheung offers a very useful starting point for how to do that. Stay tuned for an in-depth tutorial soon. 

This is only the start, too. Soon, AI avatars will be capable of holding live conversations, adapting their tone to fit contexts, and probably even generating content in collaboration with followers. 

You’ll soon be able to deploy ‘you’ to do your socials for you near-autonomously.

CONSULTANT’S CORNER

Generative AI combines with ads

Ads are under existential threat from AI. Or are they?

When ChatGPT first came out, it was touted as the ‘Google killer’ – people said it would steal so much from Google’s ad bottom line. AI search came and people said the same.

This didn’t happen.

Google was smart about counterbalancing AI’s ability to take traffic from ads by using the technology to improve ads themselves. Also Google announced last year that they would roll out ads to AI overviews soon.

Google isn’t the only one embedding AI in ad workflows. Meta’s GenAI ad suite saw over a million advertisers create more than 15 million ads in December last year. 

The suite automatically resizes visuals, adjusts copy, and repositions elements for maximum performance. 

Text-to-video tools are also changing ads by enabling brands to create impactful visuals without filming anything – as we witnessed last year when companies like Google and Coca-Cola created AI-generated ad campaigns with varying results. 

Hiccups in the quality of these ads — and therefore how they’re received by the public — will likely be ironed out as the tools themselves become better and controllable.

This is now in progress. Startups like Pika, for example, are creating text-to-videos that allow users to specify every detail of an ad, from the props in a scene to the emotions of characters. 

Last year, Pika was used to create a real advertisement that took 30 people and a month of work to produce. It looks pretty excellent.

Platforms like Amazon’s Nova AI are already hinting at what’s possible for the new generation of AI ads.  

Nova allows ads to update in real time based on weather, events, or product availability. Imagine a coffee ad promoting iced lattes in hot regions while simultaneously showcasing hot drinks in colder areas – all managed by AI.

We’ll also start to see adaptive AI ads that users can interact with in real-time. That’s going to be pretty crazy.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s issue. If you missed the last newsletter, you can read it here.

If you found it useful, please recommend it to a friend or colleague.

Until next time. Happy marketing.

—The AI Marketer