The Midas Touch: How AI and virtual influencers are rewriting sports, entertainment & creativity
Opinion: Dan Paris, Chief Product & Growth Officer for Dentsu Creative APAC.
On Saturday 27 September, 100,000 people packed into the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the Australian Football League’s Grand Final. As a Brit living in Singapore, you may be wondering why this caught my attention, but I’ve always had a strong affinity with the Aussies and their love for sport. While the football was the headline, the cultural moment many will remember was Snoop Dogg lighting up the stage. It was spectacle in its purest form: nostalgia, charisma, presence. Proof that sport has always been more than a game – it’s culture, commerce and entertainment colliding in one arena.
And now, this coming weekend, those of us living on the small red dot of Singapore will be in the global spotlight with the Formula 1 Grand Prix. The floodlit streets will once again showcase speed and spectacle.
As I was thinking through the evolution of sports and their cultural presence this morning, I began to wonder how AI is changing who gets to participate in these cultural moments.
Here’s where my train of thinking took me.
From courtside stunts to cultural stars
At Wimbledon earlier this year, a new name trended: Mia Zelu. She looked like any other glamorous influencer, sipping a Pimm’s and posing courtside until it was revealed she didn’t exist. Mia is an AI-generated persona.
She didn’t need an invite, a manager or jetlag – just pixels, prompts and a platform. And she captured attention: headlines, shares, debate. The story wasn’t her content; it was her existence.
For me, this really was the launch of a new wave of AI celebrities, and the experiments since have been escalating fast.
Just this week I was reading about Tilly Norwood, a fully AI-generated actress, who is on the cusp of Hollywood stardom. She’s being hailed as the “ultimate actress” – one who never tires, never ages, and can embody whatever story the culture demands.
The there’s Xania Monet, an AI singer, who just charted on Billboard and signed a US$3 million deal. She can perform endlessly, in any style and on demand (I imagine Snoop would have some thoughts on this…).
These aren’t gimmicks, they’re a new category of intellectual property. Characters born not from talent scouts or grassroots fandoms, but from code. And unlike human celebrities, they don’t fade with time. They can be infinitely remixed, rebooted and redeployed.
The beta phase of influence
We are, however, still in the beta phase of AI influencers. Right now, they dazzle because they’re novel. They can be in ten places at once, they never go off-brand and they can shapeshift into whatever moment marketers need.
But like other trends, novelty wears off. Just as the early days of social media produced thousands of influencers before only a few rose to real fame, many AI influencers will fade. Eventually the public won’t be fascinated simply because someone isn’t real, what will matter is the same thing it always has: story, script, imagination. And CMOs are already alive to this tension: 71% of CMOs in dentsu’s recent global CMO Study say that if they don’t win with the algorithm their content will be invisible, yet 79% worry that optimising too much, risks creating a “sea of sameness.”
Why story still matters
Dentsu’s Consumer Navigator studies show that audiences across APAC crave narratives that deepen their connection to culture:
95% of sports docuseries viewers say they tune in to understand the intricate strategies of the game – the story behind the spectacle.
92% say they enjoy seeing athletes’ personal struggles and triumphs – the human side that makes sport relatable.
In gaming, 81% of players say they started a game only after engaging with related entertainment content.
Audiences want narrative depth, they want to feel connected. AI can scale content, but only those synthetic stars who embody a story people care about will endure.
The IP boundary problem
Here’s where things get complicated. Sport and entertainment are tightly controlled ecosystems. Rights to logos, likenesses and appearances are all carefully managed and sold.
Hollywood has already muscled in. Brad Pitt’s F1 movie, filmed partly during real races, turbocharged the sport’s glamour and mainstream appeal. But now imagine an AI Brad Pitt “appearing” at the Singapore GP on the weekend, posting selfies from the paddock, smiling from the podium club. No studio contract. No rights deal. Just pixels and prompts, like Mia.
Would fans see it as clever theatre or cynical trickery? Would sponsors celebrate the buzz or worry about dilution of the real star power they paid for? This is the cultural tension AI is forcing us to confront: who actually owns the moment when anyone can generate a star into it?
The creative arms race
This is why the Midas Touch matters. In sport, it’s used to describe the very best: Schumacher in F1, Serena on Centre Court, Messi on the pitch. In marketing, it will soon describe the brands and agencies that master AI without losing the magic.
Some are already showing the way. McDonald’s is piling into influencers, anime and gaming by betting on cultural ubiquity. Burger King, by contrast, keeps winning attention with smart, irreverent, entertaining work. Both show that content-led creativity (the work that entertains) is what cuts through.
CMOs recognise this too: 86% say empathetic human truth is more important than ever in an AI-driven world, and 78% believe AI will never replace human imagination. AI can give us speed, scale and synthetic stars but it can’t substitute the wit, surprise and humanity that make culture stick. The winners will be those who use AI to amplify human imagination, not replace it.
The human in the loop
On a run recently, I found myself thinking about the role humans play when machines can act, sing, or perform on cue. It isn’t just about regulators insisting on “humans in the loop.” It’s about how the smartest people in agencies and brands will coax the best out of AI.
Because here’s the irony: as AI makes the banal easier – generating copy, visuals, avatars – it frees humans to focus on the interesting. To tell better stories. To script culture. To create the unexpected moments that audiences remember long after the campaign ends.
Final lap
To give you one final lap of the inner workings of my brain, from Snoop Dogg at the AFL Grand Final to Mia Zelu at Wimbledon, from Brad Pitt’s F1 movie to Tilly Norwood and Xania Monet’s AI breakthroughs, we are watching the boundaries of sport, entertainment and celebrity shift in real time.
As the lights go up over Marina Bay this weekend, the Singapore Grand Prix will be the latest test bed for culture × commerce. Whether an AI influencer, or even an AI Brad Pitt, makes an appearance or not, the bigger story is already here: virtual stars are being minted, audiences are grappling with authenticity and brands are deciding how to play.
The chequered flag won’t be won by who has the shiniest algorithm. It will go to those with the Midas Touch – those that can fuse machine power with human imagination to create cultural moments that feel authentic, entertaining and unforgettable.
Because in the end, culture isn’t automated. Culture is a story and stories still belong to those bold enough to tell them.
If you want to know more about what global CMO’s are thinking when it comes to all things culture commerce and Ai, feel free to download dentsu’s recent CMO study here.