☕️ Brands are passing off AI influencers as real customers

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In today's MarketingShot:

🤖 Brands are passing off AI influencers as real customers

🧒 Marketers face new rules for reaching kids online

📺 Instagram wants creators on living room screens

🎨 Adobe is giving brands new AI creative tools

🎲 Polymarket paid creators to fake winning bets

💄 ChatGPT is becoming Maybelline's new try-on channel

🎁 + 5 other news you might like

💡 + 6 strategies & tactics

🧰 + 6 trending tools

🤖 Brands are passing off AI influencers as real customers LINK

An investigation by the Guardian found that brands are quietly using AI-generated influencers on social media to promote their products as genuine customer experiences, with no clear sign that the people shown are fake.

Clarissa Mansbridge, who creates AI influencers for brands, estimated that 40% to 60% of content from some big brands is made with AI, and many creators sign NDAs barring them from discussing this work.

Brands turn to AI-generated content to cut costs, avoiding traditional photoshoots that can run $20,000 to $70,000, while a Which? study found 70% of people could not correctly tell real videos from fake ones.

🧒 Marketers face new rules for reaching kids online LINK

House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders Brett Guthrie and Frank Pallone struck a bipartisan deal on the Kids Online Safety Act, setting stricter online safety standards for children that could reach the House floor as soon as next week.

The House version of KOSA drops the "duty of care" standard, which would force social media platforms to design with kids' safety in mind, and it would override state laws that fall short of the federal rules, including state AI laws tied to the bill.

KOSA sits inside the larger KIDS Act, which also requires pornographic websites to add age verification technology, bars minors from disappearing messaging features, and makes AI-powered chatbots disclose that they are not humans.

📺 Instagram wants creators on living room screens LINK

Instagram is testing longer-form videos, episodic series, and Live TV for its television app as it tries to reach more viewers watching on living room screens.

The move puts Instagram in competition with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, on top of its existing rivalry with TikTok and YouTube for viewer attention.

Instagram's TV app is rolling out to Samsung TVs, after already running on Amazon Fire and Google TVs, and is gaining channels, phone casting, horizontal video, and Stories support.

🎨 Adobe is giving brands new AI creative tools LINK

Adobe has rolled out a creative agent across Firefly and Creative Cloud that helps users handle multi-step workflows in Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, InDesign and Frame.io, taking spoken instructions and managing tasks like editing and content generation.

The AI Assistant in Firefly now creates brand kits with logos and colour palettes from text, makes short-form product videos from images, builds automated rough cuts, and generates storyboards that can be turned into video content.

Adobe's Creators' Toolkit Report, surveying over 16,000 creators worldwide, found 75% describe creative AI as integrated or essential to their work, while 85% believe humans should keep final creative decisions.

🎲 Polymarket paid creators to fake winning bets LINK

Polymarket paid influencers to make and post videos of themselves placing bets and winning money on a fake version of its website, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation into the prediction market's social media promotion.

Of more than 1,100 videos the Journal reviewed, 70% showed fake bets and 118 featured creators reacting to old footage and fake wins, with some creators earning $2,000 to $3,000 each month from the campaign.

Polymarket hired a marketing contractor who handpicked 10 TikTok creators, then paid a large social media army to copy and repost their videos to increase reach and engagement, while some creators were told not to disclose the sponsorship.

💄 ChatGPT is becoming Maybelline's new try-on channel LINK

L'Oréal has teamed up with OpenAI to bring Maybelline New York's virtual makeup try-on feature directly into ChatGPT, an announcement the company made at VivaTech 2026 during its 10th year at the event.

The try-on tool runs on L'Oréal's ModiFace technology, which lets users test makeup looks through a conversational interface, drawing on the augmented reality beauty company that L'Oréal bought in 2018.

The feature reaches a large audience, as OpenAI reported that ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers in 2026, while L'Oréal's Beauty Tech services logged 120 million uses by late 2025.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> How to win the gatekeeper’s ‘Yes’ with stakeholder co-citation gap analysis by Citation Labs: Explains how to win committee approval by mapping which sources AI search cites for each buyer role, then building content for the unserved gatekeeper who can veto the decision.

> 3 ways to build a more complete SEO ROI model: Credit SEO for all defended organic revenue, assisted conversions, and content reused by paid and social channels, not just new incremental traffic.

> Google Ads Provides More Tips On Pin Headlines & Descriptions: Pin only one or two essential keyword headlines while letting the rest rotate, and avoid pinning identical text to the same slot.

> How to blend AI chatbots with high-touch sales: Use AI as a concierge that qualifies high-value prospects and briefs sales reps, so humans focus on building the relationship.

> Demystifying ‘Loop Engineering’: The Marketer’s Guide to Self-Optimizing AI Prompts: Build self-optimizing AI loops where separate writer and evaluator agents iterate against a numerical quality rubric, with iteration caps to prevent runaway token costs.

> Build an AI Flywheel for Ecommerce: Connect AI across customer feedback and product pages so each improvement generates better data that drives the next round of gains.

Other news you might like

• TikTok Adds Post-Publish Keyword Management Tool for Creator VideosLINK

• Mark Ritson: Claude is my Cannes bartender. My AI agent is favoring established brandsLINK

• Google silently routes Shopify purchases into GA4 - attribution gaps remainLINK

• Your analytics are lying: Similarweb traces AI recommendations to real trafficLINK

• NYT Advertising's first clean room deal beat cookies by 61%LINK

🧰 Trending tools

Agent A by Ahrefs: an SEO toolset that simplifies keyword research, backlink analysis, and traffic tracking for teams at any skill level.LINK

Blaze 2.0: automates your entire content strategy by learning your brand voice, audience, and business to handle marketing without dedicated staff.LINK

WarmIntro: finds employees at target companies who share your background—university, past employers, city, title—turning cold outreach into genuinely connected introductions.LINK

VIDEO AI ME: turns selfies, scripts, and product photos into AI-generated videos with realistic actors, supporting ads, courses, and viral content across 70+ languages.LINK

Notra Image Generation: automatically generates visual assets from your shipped work, turning changelogs and updates into ready-to-publish images without manual design work.LINK

Deliveryman.ai: automates cold email infrastructure setup including DNS, warmup, blacklist monitoring, and reply routing so you can launch campaigns faster without technical headaches.LINK

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