AI-Powered Influence: Transforming Marketing Strategies (with Rafael Schwarz)

Last updated on November 6, 2025

A few years ago, I was deep in the influencer marketing space. Now, AI is completely transforming the industry, from content creation to cybersecurity.

To understand what’s next, I sat down with Rafael Schwarz, one of the Managing Directors of Territory Influence, the leading social media and influencer marketing agency in Europe.

In this classic interview, Rafael shares his expert insights on the key trends for 2025, including the rise of Generative AI, the power of nano-influencers, and the “mind-boggling” future of virtual avatars and AI-powered sales agents.

Download the full guide regarding the key influencer marketing trends for 2025: https://info.territory-influence.com/download-guide-trends-2025

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Key Insights & Timestamps

• (01:42) – Top 3 Social Media Trends for 2025:
  1. Generative AI: The explosion of AI-generated images, videos, and text.
  2. User-Generated Content: The rise of employee influencers and brand advocates.
  3. Nano-Influencers: Brands are shifting to collaborate with smaller, more authentic, unpaid creators.
• (03:23) – Long-Form Video is Back: Why we’re seeing a “resurgence” of long-form content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, balancing out the short-form trend.
• (05:01) – Deepfakes & Regulation: The worrying rise of deepfakes and why the EU is pushing for legislation to force disclosure of AI-generated content.
• (06:43) – The “Word Salad” Problem: We’ll see a short-term explosion of low-quality, AI-spun content. The true experts will use AI to save time on mundane tasks, giving them more time for genuine creativity and quality.
• (08:37) – Virtual Influencers & Avatars: AI allows creators to build virtual “avatars” and chatbots to engage with millions of followers at once.
• (10:46) – Brands as Creators: Brands can now create their own virtual “persona” that perfectly represents their values, without relying on human testimonials.
• (15:10) – The Power of Nano-Influencers: Territory Influence has a panel of 7 million unpaid nano-influencers. Their power comes from high trust—you believe a recommendation from a friend more than a celebrity.
• (17:31) – Scaling Trust: The challenge isn’t finding one nano-influencer; it’s activating thousands at once to build massive SEO and awareness.
• (18:50) – The Future of the Creator Economy:
  1. AI will help brands find the right creators (better matching).
  2. AI-powered translations will help creators reach global audiences.
  3. AI agents will be trained on a brand’s IP to act as virtual sales reps (SDRs) that can make calls to prospects.
• (27:02) – Cybersecurity & Influencer Scams: How crypto scams and account hacks are destroying trust in the industry. The defense is simple things like Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on AI & Influencer Marketing

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Full Episode Transcript

(Transcript)

Nat Schooler: I am very privileged today to be joined by Rafael Schwartz and we are here to talk about AI powered influence transforming marketing strategies. And if you want to learn more about this, you’re a marketer, uh, you’re a business person or you’re an influencer or you want to become one, then this is the perfect video for you because Rafael is actually one of the managing directors of Territory Influence. They are the leading social media and influencer marketing agency in Europe with headquarters in Munich, Germany. With his team of 40 plus experts across Europe, Rafael specializes in business strategy and new business development. There’s uh, so much I could say but he’s also a member of the Forbes Communications Council and he hosts the of the Social Corner podcast and that has a hashtag of the social corner.

So yeah, I’m really looking forward to this conversation. We, we put a little bit of planning obviously into this and I used to be in influencer marketing myself for a few years. Um, and uh, I’m really looking forward to kind of digging into you know, this, these huge topics really. So welcome Rafael, good to see you again.

Rafael Schwarz: With pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Nat Schooler: Welcome to Influential Visions. Here we interview futuristic leaders who share their deep industry knowledge and business experience with you, ensuring you have your finger on the pulse and your eyes, eyes wide open. Here is your host, Nathaniel Schooler.

You work at one of the leading social media and influencer marketing agencies in Europe. What are some of the key Social media marketing trends that you anticipate for 2025?

Rafael Schwarz: Oh there, there are so many. I mean social media is a, is a constantly evolving, you uh, know, field of marketing and obviously there’s a lot going on on the platform side. There’s a lot going on with know, consumers and how they, how they um, consume social media content and there’s a lot going on with the regards to the creators that are active on those platforms. But I think um, I mean some of the major trends um, I’m anticipating for uh, 2025 are um, on the one hand side really the use of AI in social media, particularly uh, generative AI which uh, makes it so easy, so much more easy for anyone to create um, you know, great images, great tags, great videos. So I think that’s going to really uh, impact 2025 and we’re going to see a lot more um, AI generated content on social media.

I think also another one is the really the rise of uh, user generated content. Whether that’s just you know, normal people um, talking about their daily life, whether that’s uh, employees, you know, Acting as advocates for their companies. We see a lot of um, employee influencer activity these days. So uh, that’s a trend that is certainly going on or whether that’s the whole area of um, brand collaborations with unpaid, very small niche influencers. That is also um, becoming a huge trend right now on social media.

And then obviously um, it’s very interesting to look at different trends in terms of format. So I uh, do anticipate that while short for video will still dominate, we, we do see a uh, resurgence of long form video content both on YouTube but also on TikTok. Um, so, so that’s going to be interesting to watch how it balances out. Um, you know the, the, the, the whole idea about you know, short form versus long form video content. Um, and I think also it’s going to be interesting to see how uh, you know, threats are doing versus um, versus Twitter or versus X, I should say. Um, uh, and particularly now that uh, Mitner has announced that they will also enable advertising on threads on their short messaging app. So let’s see how that is going to impact the user engagement on the platform and whether consumers will actually continue to flock from Twitter towards uh, threads.

Nat Schooler: Interesting, interesting. You made me think about these Ray Ban glasses that I saw the other day which developed. Right. And if uh, you’re listening to this and you’ve got no idea uh, what I’m talking about, they’re basically, I put them on and you can actually hear music and you can hear extremely well. The way that they’re designed is phenomenal. And you can record video so much like the Snapchat glasses that were out and whatever glasses, they’re in collaboration with Ray Ban and, and you just sort of gave me a bit of enlightenment there because I think you know they develop with M, with Meta to so that is obviously gonna, gonna, gonna make more and more people become producers of this great content. Right. But, but I’m, I’m sort of slightly worried about the deep fakes. I, I, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. Uh, MIT were basically saying that deep fakes are uh, quite worrying for this year. They think that um, you know, people are getting much better at creating these sorts of things and the, the, the, the, the problem I see is people just, just believe things and get triggered so quickly that it’s a really scary sort of world in my.

Rafael Schwarz: No, absolutely, absolutely. I mean the engines are getting so good that you can really hardly differentiate uh, whether it’s you know, fully machine generated or whether it was actually a photographer doing A a video or uh, you know making a, making a picture. Um, I think therefore we’re also going to see uh a push by certainly the European uh legislation um to uh, regulate the space. Um and particularly uh, some push for stronger disclosures um like with influencer marketing years ago there was a strong push to differentiate whether that’s a paid promotion or whether that’s an organic and genuine recommendation. And I think we will soon see something similar and certainly we are also pushing for that because it’s going to help. It’s also going to help creators. It’s going to help creators who are really going the extra mile, who are investing a lot in their craft to create nice content versus someone who is just um, lazy and uses just chain AI um to burn out tons of content um, which is not what, what we all want to see on social media.

Nat Schooler: Right. So, so do you think there’s going to be more of a push towards sort of really high quality content and things will, will improve along that front? Because Stephen, Stephen J. Manning and I, we talk a lot about you know, the word salad which is what you’ve kind of referenced near enough. It’s a, he coined that term um, word salad back in I don’t know the 80s or 70s or something which I think it comes from somewhere before but it really is like that now and we see so many influencers that are just, they’re churning out all this content that really it’s just a uh uh uh, a word spinner. Right. And it’s, and it’s just they don’t put an opinion in it and there’s no style you know. And this is, this is quite sad. I find it quite sad.

Rafael Schwarz: Yeah. I think short term we will still see an explosion of content . m Simply because it’s so much easier and it’s so much you know, more time efficient to create content with the help of Gen AI. I think we will also see an explosion in accounts again because it’s so much easier to create an entire account from scratch and it’s so much easier to um, gain followers with the help of those AI tools. So I think we will indeed at least for the next 12-18 months see a massive explosion in both number of accounts and content. Um and then indeed we might see a little bit um, uh you know uh, a separation of the good, the bad and the ugly. And uh, and you know the, the people who really know their craft will use you know, AI tools in a smart way. Um, but you know, not to replace their genuine creativity and the Genuine content production, but more with that task and so on. And I think their call, their quality, uh, um, of the content is going to be better because they have more time. Right. So they use AI to actually save time for the content production. And then we will, we will have, you know, a, of a lot of people who just think that the, the machine can replace their creativity and that’s, that’s I think not going to work.

Nat Schooler: Right. And when you talk about the explosion of accounts, are you, are you sort of referencing like fake influencers, like virtual influencers that uh, are created from uh. Is that what you’re sort of referring to?

Rafael Schwarz: Uh, yeah, yeah, partly. I think we will, we will see I mean everything from um, from genuine persons who have not been active in social media because it was too much time consuming for them and they will, thanks to the help of actually AI, will now maybe start, you know, operating a YouTube channel or a TikTok channel. Um, I think we will definitely see um, uh, influencer avatars, um, uh, some of them very, very interesting applications in terms of helping them actually become more active on multiple platforms which, which they would otherwise just not be able to do. Um, I think we will have a lot of interesting applications in terms of uh, creator, uh, chatbots so that mimic m. Basically the tone of voice and the character of the creator. But since the creator doesn’t have time to actually chat with millions of people, um, that might be uh, an area where AI powered chatbots may really help interaction and engagement with the audience. Um, I think also AI powered translations are going to be amazing and going to help creators reach you know, a massive uh, audience that otherwise they’re just, you know, the language barrier would prevent them from doing. But I also agree, I think we will also in the, you know, short term see a lot of virtual profiles, um, you know, where the entire account is basically just AI generated. And I mean with those virtual influences you see again you see tons of different profiles from totally cartoonish, very clearly not human, like all the way to kind of human replicas. And you can hardly differentiate whether that’s actually a human or whether that’s just a machine generated image or a machine generated account. Um, so I think we have all of that.

Nat Schooler: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting because a brand can kind of can kind of circumvent influencers and set up their own, can’t they? So they can create a uh, Persona which represents certain elements. I was talking probably about four years ago to this chap who ran uh, an agency that just specialized in, in Those sorts of fake, uh, they are fake accounts. They’re Personas. Right. And I just find that quite, find it quite interesting. It doesn’t mean I want to spend my time talking to that person or, uh, behind the, behind the sort of scenes, you know.

Rafael Schwarz: Yeah, but it’s interesting because the vast majority of audiences doesn’t actually differentiate their behavior. I mean, even with those, you know, very clearly cartoonish characters where it’s very obvious that, I mean, this is not a human person. Right. This is, this is something else. This is machine generated. There’s, you know, there’s a, there’s not a person sitting behind that, but maybe, you know, an agency or, you know, a team, they still have exactly the same way. I mean, if anything, then, then there’s. There might even be more engagement on those accounts at the moment.

Nat Schooler: More engagement. It’s interesting because it’s a lot like the virtual coaches that you can get now that a lot of these companies will, will say, okay, well, we’re going to provide virtual coaches. We’re not going to collect the data of who you are talking to this coach, uh, so you can talk to them. And actually people reveal a lot more information to a, uh, robot than they do a real person. So that’s quite, it’s fascinating, isn’t it, really?

Rafael Schwarz: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, some of those, you know, virtual influencers, I mean, they have amassed millions of followers. They’re really, really important. And then as you said, one of the other interesting use cases is certainly for brands to develop their own highly individual, highly, um, personalized avatar based on their brand character, based on their brand history, based on their brand values, um, and really design that as a representation of the brand. And that can be a really interesting marketing angle because obviously, I mean, that’s something you always struggle with testimonials. I mean, they are never, you know, perfectly identical to what you want to portray as a brand.

Nat Schooler: Absolutely. I think, I think it’s fascinating when you, when you sort of look back over the last 10 years and you, and you look at, say when IBM launched this chatbot at, uh, Wimbledon, and you could, you could actually engage with this chatbot. And it was, and it was. If you were a tennis pro, you could talk to this chatbot and it would give you specifically designed answers based upon you being a tennis pro. Right. Versus you might engage with it and it says, do you know much about tennis? You say no, and then it will talk to you in a different style, which I, which I find, I find fantastically interesting. For the Future, it just opens up a level of engagement which is, I mean, it doesn’t. It’s not tailored, but it’s tailored enough to make people feel like it’s designed for them in a way, doesn’t it?

Rafael Schwarz: Yeah. And with the ability of AI to, you know, digest such a vast amount of data, I mean, uh, myriad, you know, more than any human could do, obviously, it should be able to really tailor the approach and tailor the storytelling, tailor the messages to you as a person or as a Persona. Right. I mean, um, they will try and find as much information from you as possible online, but if not, I mean, use obviously the available data and find some lookalikes and uh, tailor their approach accordingly. And that’s really fascinating because we all, as consumers, we like to have personalization. We don’t want to be just bombarded with generic ads. I mean, that’s really something, um, that we’ve grown out of. Right. I mean, we expect companies, we expect brands to, to reach out and engage with us with highly individual, highly personalized messages. But, uh, that only works if, obviously, you know, the, the data is, is available and, and only works if the, if the AI is, is really trained properly.

Nat Schooler: Absolutely, absolutely. So everybody, uh. Oh, sorry, I’ve got, I’ve got another question here. Um, there’s, there’s certainly a shift towards smaller, more authentic content creators. How do you respond to this demand at territory? Because it’s difficult, isn’t it, with, with the many, many people out there?

Rafael Schwarz: Yeah, we, We are in a luxurious position here because our heritage is actually from working with millions of consumers across Europe. So we do have, uh, panels where we have more than 7 million unpaid, uh, nano and micro influencers registered. So for us, it’s quite easy to tap into that pool of people and find the right ones who are really interested in that product category, in the brand, who are already a loyal user and have a motivation to actually endorse the brand and uh, then just activate them with specific messages, with specific triggers, with, uh, um, uh, motivational content that we provide to them. Uh, and therefore we are really able to activate, I mean, anything between 1,000, 5,000, sometimes 10,000 nano influencers at the same time on behalf of the brands and companies we represent. And, uh, that’s really fascinating. So for us it’s not really hard and it’s still an area, uh, where, um, we see real impact, right? Because, I mean, you trust your friends, you trust your relatives, your coworkers, you have a, uh, you know, a very intimate relationship with them. So if one of those, you know, pro persons in your, in your, in the circle recommends a product, recommends a service or a brand. You are certainly listening. So I think that um, that is why marketeers and why brands are so interested in smaller influences. It’s because of that credibility, because of that um, influence that they have um, on, on, on behavior, on preferences, on purchases. Um, and the, the challenge is just basically to find an agency like, like territory that is able to scale it. Ah and, and, and not just work on a one on one relationship. I mean that’s something we’ve always been doing but really be able to scale it and activate you know, thousands of these profiles because then you’re going to get both the uh, the awareness but also then the impact on, on in the marketplace.

Nat Schooler: Yeah, I agree. Being able to leverage all those people at the same time because then that will obviously build, uh, builds Google SEO as well. Right? Because if you, if you engage multiple people who are all clicking that same page, then it becomes hugely interesting for Google because they think what, wow, where did these people come from? Right, so it gives us fast, fast growth, right?

Rafael Schwarz: No, absolutely. I mean it does wonders in terms of SEO and, and, and obviously you know Google searchability uh, picks up very quickly if thousands of people are talking about a brand, are tagging a company, are tagging a brand, social media profile. It also does wonders in terms of awareness because I mean obviously you know all of those uh, posts are seen by, I mean literally millions of people. Um, and it does, it does wonders in terms of engagement because you know, contrary to big celebrities, I mean those normal people like, like us, uh, actually, I mean who have you connected with on social media? It’s our friends and, and they obviously interested in the content we share. So they are, they are then also, you know, highly interacting with the content and they’re being influenced by that content. And uh, we’ve seen, I mean we’ve seen over, we’ve done over a hundred external measurement studies and each single one of them has been able to measure uh, a significant sales impact. So it’s really something that drives sales at the end as well.

Nat Schooler: Very good, very good, very good. So I know we’ve talked a bit about uh, AI these days. Um, but, but what impact do you think Gen AI will have on the creator economy?

Rafael Schwarz: Yeah, I think it’s gonna be um, it’s gonna be significant. I think it’s going to be significant both on the creator side itself, but also the way that brands collaborate with creators. Um, I think we’ve already talked a bit about you know, the explosion of content and you know all the, all the profiles that I think um, will we will see over the next couple of months, um, just popping up and being able to you know, very quickly accelerate and get traction. I think that’s going to be impacting certainly the creator economy I think already relationship with, or the you know, the collaboration between brands and creators. I think you uh, know AI is also really going to help brands to, and agencies like us find the right creators again. Uh, you know based on the, on the sheer amount of data that the AI is able to, to capture and digest, I think it will really help us create better matches between creators and companies for partnerships. So huh. I think that’s going to be a key driver um, and that’s going to help certainly the creator economy. Right. Because I mean if brands find better creators for them that are more in sync with their values with the type of content they want to see out there, going to invest more into it. So I think that’s, that’s going to be interesting. Um, but I, I also think that uh, we will see a lot more of those you know, virtual AI powered influencer profiles over the next, over the next years. Yeah, uh, yeah, simply because I mean the you know the, the AI algorithms are, are just, I um, mean they are improving at a, at a speed of light and type of content they can create the type of image, image, generated images they can create but also the type of videos they can create. I mean it’s mind boggling. It’s really amazing to see the quality which is already out there today and it’s only going to get better. So I think those virtual influences are a very interesting use case and are certainly going to shape also the creator economy. I don’t think they’re going to ever replace human creators. I mean some, obviously some fears out there among the creator community but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. But I think they will find their niche. I mean like in any other field, you know, you will have in the future your niches where those virtual avatars will work really well and there are certainly a lot of applications where it just doesn’t make sense to use a virtual creator profile and for human interactions, whether uh, that’s with a celebrity or whether that’s you know, collaborations with, you know, as we discussed with thousands of nano and micro influencers are just going to work so much better.

Nat Schooler: Absolutely. I think it’s a very interesting prospect really when you, when you can take some words, I mean Look, Microsoft, you’ve been able to do that in Word for quite a long time. You, you put some words in there and then Microsoft reads your text to you. Right? So, so very soon, I mean there is, there are applications where you can, you can take your words and then you can upload them to a platform and then it will create a podcast for you. Right? But, but for me, I like to do the opposite. So I like to interview people and then take the words and create, um, uh, some, some sort of blogs and things like this. But, but actually I don’t, I think that there’s, there’s so much satisfaction from uploading your content to a platform, uh, talking to the AI and saying, okay, well I want, I want this platform, I want you to use this content as a base for an application as an example. And I’m looking into a few of those sorts of applications in terms of personal brand creation and as an example. Right. Uh, I mean, you know, when, when you can, when you can upload your own work. I mean, I spent a long time writing a book on personal branding A few years ago. My father edited this for me at the age of 86 years old. And it was, it was really funny because he was so, he was so into uh, the perfect grammar and the, you know, this and that. And, and in the end we just sort of agreed to disagree and, and he said, okay, well that’s your style. I like it, it’s good, it works. There weren’t any mistakes. It was just a certain style thing which is, it’s prevalent in marketing. Right, But I think, but I think taking your own intellectual property and then creating an application from it using AI which then delivers a product I think is a fascinating, fascinating, uh, thing to do in the next few years. I can see that happening because, you know, you look at what, what available tools there are out there, it’s, it’s actually quite, it’s quite mind blowing really. But, but I mean look, you know, look at what the new iPhone can do with, with image creation. Uh, but it, but it is clearly evident that those are not real images. That’s the interesting thing on the iPhone, the way that you can upload, you.

Rafael Schwarz: Can still, you can certainly detect still, you know, an image is created by, you know, Mid Journey or, or Adobe at the mom of Firefly. Yeah, I, I think that will very soon vanish. I mean, I think in a year’s time it will be really hard to detect with just, you know, the plain eye whether something was created by gen or not. And, but I, I agree. I think. I mean, there are so many interesting applications. I mean, the last two years we’ve seen a lot of your text to text, but I mean, chat GPT was all, you know, text to text. Then, then we had, you know, text to image, uh, text to video. But I also agree, I think the other way around is fascinating because obviously, you know, when you do a podcast like that and you have the ability to do a, uh, powered transcription and you have the text available, you know, In, I mean, 10 seconds after the podcast finishes. Yeah, yeah. That allows you to create, you know, lots of other stuff. Blog articles, you know, white papers, ebooks, whatever. Exactly. If you have the same with video, I mean, it’s amazing, right? Audio to text, video to text. But then the same. I mean, as you said, the next thing will be, um, AI agents, where you train them on all the stuff that you have developed and then ask them based on that to either develop a new email or a new blog post, or develop a video message or a video or call somebody. I’ve seen applications where. Oh, really, somebody created a. Yeah, somebody created an sdr, uh, a virtual SDR based on all the available training materials that the company had available for training, you know, their sales reps. Um, so they trained a virtual, you know, Persona to call prospects. And I mean, at least what they showed looked and saddled it. And it was terrific. It was amazing. I mean, you could not detect any different. You didn’t know whether there was a human calling or not.

Nat Schooler: Amazing, amazing. So, yeah, they’re very interesting applications out there. Yeah. And, and they’re all developing all the time, aren’t they? Very rapidly as well. Which is, which is fascinating, you know, when, when, uh, when you can do all these sorts of things, it then becomes more about style, doesn’t it? It becomes there’s this style, substance kind of balance, isn’t there? Which is. Okay, so I have substance, but I don’t have any style, or I have too much style and no substance. And then you have to, you have to kind of find, um, some sort of quality volume balance, don’t you? I suppose is, is kind of, it’s kind of the thing. But, but, but it’s also algorithm driven, isn’t it? Because if, if the algorithm doesn’t. Just doesn’t like your content, right. Then the, uh, way that you’re presenting it, it all becomes about just education. It’s, it’s con. It’s education. Right. I mean, like it, like anything. Yeah. If you want to become an influencer, you need to learn how to get more pop, become more popular. And how, how do you do that? You learn what you need to do and you, and you eventually tweak, tweak, tweak as many different variables and then eventually people can’t ignore you because you, you, you grow at such a rate. But then it’s, but then it’s like you say, it’s a, uh, uh, it’s a lot. The Micro influencer, uh, is, is an interesting piece because I believe people trust them more than they trust a lot of these big influencers. And that’s probably, that’s probably, um, due to a lot of people being scammed I think recently with the Bitcoin, uh, uh, sort of, you know, they hack people’s accounts and then they, and then they send messages to all the followers. I don’t know if you saw that post pictures, right? Because people are slack on their security. And then, and then they’re like, oh, well, I just uh, invested in this, uh, crypto because uh, I don’t know who the hell it was. It doesn’t matter. But it’s someone big and famous and then they lose thousands of thousands of dollars and then, and then the whole influencer marketing industry suffers because of some hackers that are, uh, manipulating people. It’s, it’s a very difficult place to be, I think, in that.

Rafael Schwarz: No, I fully agree. I think, I mean a couple of years ago it was the influencers themselves, right? They, they had a lot of influencers who were advocating for NFTs and you know, crypto. And a lot of them got burned themselves and you know, lost money themselves, but also obviously lost credibility with their followers. Um, and uh, now it’s even worse because obviously if, you know, some criminals are obviously stealing your Persona and uh, trying to portray, um, uh, yourself. Ah. And you don’t even know about it. I mean, that’s certainly not going to help the industry.

Nat Schooler: No, no, but I think there are, there are good people like you that are doing a great job. I’m sure you educate people to use two factor authentication. Right? And there’s a lot.

Rafael Schwarz: No, you’re absolutely right. I mean we actually, um, you know, we have a sister company, um, uh, that is, that is actually really helping a lot of P2P companies. And one of the services that are most in demand right now is actually an uh, education service on how to prevent, you know, it and cybersecurity attacks. So we’ve created a lot of, you know, trainings and education materials and even gamified them to Help companies create awareness among their, their employees and on what they need to do. And I mean some of them are very obvious. Like, I mean you’re not going to pick up a USB stick from the parking lot and then you’re going to put it into your, into your um, into your uh, laptop. But some of them are much more subtle, right, um, and much harder to detect. So it is important to raise awareness, uh, among everybody that, you know, they’re, they’re not only good people out there. And uh, a lot of people want to try and break into your accounts, want to try and break into your wallets, uh, and you have to be careful these days.

Nat Schooler: It’s very dangerous with, with all the fake content that can be created. They just need someone’s voice and they can, they can clone that. So you know, if you’re listening to this and someone calls you and you’re in accounts and your managing director calls you and says o transfer this money and it sounds like him or her, don’t do it. Because it’s uh, it could be someone with a, with a fake recording, right? I mean it’s, it’s uh, slippery, slippery slope.

Rafael Schwarz: We’ve seen that, I mean we’ve seen it over and over again with emails, right? And, and yeah, people trying to fake your, you know, footer, fake your email address, um, fake, ah, your, your style of uh, of text. They became really good. But I mean it’s even more frightening if you think about, you know, voice messages or video messages that you cannot differentiate anymore. So people will need to be much more careful and we will see a lot more, as you said, you know, a lot more multifactor authentication, um, simply to, to, to have additional layers of proof that whoever you were talking to was actually that person that instructed you, that was supposed to instruct you.

Nat Schooler: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Well, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you. I really, really, really been uh, it’s been fantastic. And if you are watching this and you would like some information on uh, the key influencer marketing trends for 2025, you can download the full guide and I will pop a link, uh, wherever you watch this, if you don’t see the link because it’s on a platform where there aren’t loads of links, drop me, drop me a message and I will uh, send that to you. And uh, and I’ll also put your, uh, put your LinkedIn profile if people want you and I mean reach out to me.

Rafael Schwarz: I’m very active on LinkedIn, would love to have a chat there, uh, and connect with all of you.

Nat Schooler: Fantastic. Thank you. Once again. Thanks very much for listening to Influential Visions. Please make sure you share this episode with your friends and business connections. And don’t forget to drop us a review wherever you listen. Thanks.

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