Deepfakes: perspectives on the future “reality” of advertising and branding

Deepfakes are real videos with fake content. Leveraging artificial intelligence technologies to superimpose voices and likenesses, deepfakes can, quite literally, put someone’s words in anyone else’s mouth. Deepfakes are exploding across mass and social media, and these outlets are feverously trying to manage the proliferation of content with potentially deceitful authenticity on their platforms. This paper introduces what deepfakes are, how they work, and the potential for deepfakes’ influence on advertising. We provide a conceptual model that explores the influence of deepfakes on advertising practice in a holistic context of consumer consumption and cultural influence to explore how deepfakes influence three perspective dimensions of advertising – not only the tangible ads themselves, but also how consumers perceive those ads and the greater sociocultural context in which the ads are created and consumed. Deepfakes present both threats to and opportunities for advertisers, and we leverage this conceptual model to highlight several critical areas of practice that warrant further investigation.