Paul Archer, founder of brand advocacy platform Duel, argues AI automation will replace traditional influencer managers with "advocacy engineers" managing 100,000+ customer advocates.
The traditional influencer manager position faces obsolescence as AI systems automate selection, segmentation, engagement, optimization, and incentive balancing across brand-influencer relationships. Paul Archer, founder and CEO of brand advocacy platform Duel, made this argument in an opinion piece published by BeautyMatter on January 11, 2026. The analysis comes from an executive whose company sells software designed to mobilize customer advocates at scale, raising questions about commercial motivations behind the prediction.
According to Archer's BeautyMatter piece, this transformation creates a new position—the "advocacy engineer"—that sets strategy, teaches AI systems, and runs communities at massive scale rather than curating and negotiating with paid creators. "AI does a far better job of these tasks than an influencer manager ever could," Archer stated.
Duel operates as a B-Corp certified software development company founded in 2015 that enables brands to mobilize and manage communities of social affiliates, content creators, and microinfluencers. The platform is used by brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Monica Vinader, Mint Velvet, NEOM Organics, and ELEMIS, with the company having consulted with hundreds of other brands, according to its LinkedIn profile. The company employs 51-200 people with headquarters in London.
Archer founded Duel alongside viral games developer Panagiotis Tsarouchis. Before founding Duel, Archer gained recognition as a world-record breaking adventurer who drove a London black cab around 50 countries between January 2011 and May 2012. He co-authored a bestselling book about the expedition titled "It's on the Meter" that was translated into four languages and sold over 20,000 copies. He also hosts the "Building Brand Advocacy" podcast where he interviews brand builders about community marketing strategies.
Duel's commercial model directly aligns with Archer's thesis about influencer manager obsolescence. The platform's website describes its core value proposition as enabling "one person - managing 15,000 advocates - on one platform." The software automates tasks including advocate segmentation, content management rights, automated gifting and rewards, and measurable revenue attribution. Duel integrates with eCommerce platforms, CRM systems, and social channels to provide unified views of advocates driving return on investment.
The company markets three-step workflows: segmenting advocates from CRM and eCommerce channels, managing them through gamified portals with tasks and rewards, and scaling programs using AI to automate mundane tasks and attribution. Case studies prominently featured on Duel's website claim Charlotte Tilbury generated 10x ROI and thousands of pieces of user-generated content in 12 months, while Monica Vinader grew their social affiliates program to 15,000 members.
Gabriela Vinader, Managing Director at Monica Vinader, is quoted on Duel's website stating: "We've moved away from an expensive advertising-led strategy to one that uses our own loyal customer base to drive long term, organic growth. Duel lets us scale in a way we never thought possible."
Archer's thesis rests on what he characterizes as a fundamental flaw in traditional influencer marketing: the belief that influence comes from paid creators rather than existing customer advocates. The analysis suggests that consumers don't buy because brands work with 50 influencers, but because thousands of real advocates—existing customers, superfans, microinfluencers, and local community figures—create and share content organically.
Charlotte Tilbury's approach receives specific mention as demonstrating this model. The beauty brand mobilizes tens of thousands of real customers, makeup artists, and superfans who create authentic content at global scale. Community-generated content consistently outperforms traditional influencer campaigns because it reflects genuine product love rather than paid promotion, according to the analysis.
The scale mismatch represents a core problem. Current influencer managers invest substantial budgets on 50 influencers while ignoring 50,000 true advocates participating in word-of-mouth promotion because they love brands. This disconnect stems from an inability to scale influencer engagement and reach genuine advocates effectively. Even powerful influencers' content rarely reaches beyond immediate follower bases, while thousands of loyal customers and local voices already reach prospective buyers' feeds with content that resonates more deeply.
Trust represents another critical factor absent among traditional influencers. While influencers maintain a role, brands miss value from authentic advocates who drive measurable impact through higher engagement, stronger trust, and more conversions. Traditional influencer managers lack bandwidth to identify, nurture, and mobilize armies of true advocates. AI systems possess this capability, creating the need for advocacy engineers who instruct and manage AI to turn untapped advocates into highly organized, scalable networks.
The marketing automation landscape has accelerated throughout 2025, lending credibility to Archer's thesis about AI-driven transformation regardless of his commercial interests. Amazon launched Ads Agent on November 11, 2025, enabling advertisers to create campaigns, review audience segments, and build analytics queries through natural language instructions.
LiveRamp introduced agentic orchestration on October 1, 2025, enabling autonomous AI agents to access identity resolution, segmentation, and measurement tools. McKinsey data indicates $1.1 billion in equity investment flowed into agentic AI during 2024, with job postings related to the technology increasing 985 percent from 2023 to 2024.
Reddit's Max campaigns cut costs by 17 percent through AI optimization that automatically adjusts multiple campaign elements in real time. Smart creative asset selection allows advertisers to provide multiple headlines, images, videos, and call-to-action buttons, with AI systems predicting optimal combinations for each impression.
Yet the industry faces mounting skepticism about automation's effectiveness. Marketing professionals have questioned Meta's Advantage+ automation despite performance claims. Digital marketing specialist Bram Van der Hallen challenged what he characterized as "absolute nonsense" surrounding Andromeda-style campaign consolidation in a November 27, 2025 LinkedIn post. The lack of transparency makes it impossible to diagnose whether performance drops stem from creative fatigue, audience saturation, competitive pressure, or algorithmic changes.
The advocacy engineer role operates at the intersection of strategy, AI management, and community development, according to Archer's framework. While traditional influencer managers manually negotiate with individual creators, advocacy engineers deploy AI systems that identify thousands of potential advocates from existing customer bases, segment them based on content creation capabilities and audience alignment, and automate engagement workflows that maintain relationships at scale.
This approach addresses challenges identified in recent research. IAB Europe research published September 18, 2025, reveals 85 percent of European companies already deploy AI-based tools for marketing purposes, with content generation leading adoption at 80 percent.
The global creator economy projects growth from $191 billion in 2025 to $528.39 billion by 2030, according to research released on September 26, 2025. This expansion creates infrastructure for advocacy engineering approaches that leverage creator networks beyond traditional paid influencer relationships.
However, implementation remains complex. Gartner predicted on June 25, 2025 that over 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls. Marketing entrepreneur Dan Koe argued on December 29, 2025 that when everyone has access to AI advantages, the competitive edge comes from slowing down rather than accelerating automation.
The influencer marketing industry faces ongoing transparency challenges that advocacy engineering models must address. IAB Croatia published comprehensive guidelines on November 3, 2025, establishing self-regulation standards for influencer marketing disclosure across digital platforms. Research cited in the guidelines indicates only 20 percent of consumers recognize influencer content as commercial messaging.
Italian influencer advertising reached €350 million across major platforms according to AdReport's analysis tracking 769 Instagram advertisers, 1,095 Instagram influencers, 579 TikTok advertisers, and 548 TikTok influencers across Italy. Content authenticity emerged as a critical performance factor, with campaigns achieving highest engagement rates maintaining genuine influencer personality integration while delivering brand messages naturally.
The Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft published the first Market Landscape for the influencer marketing and content creation ecosystem in Germany on November 13, 2025. The document divides the ecosystem into five main categories: agencies with their own talent portfolios, agencies without portfolios, management companies, platforms, and technology providers. Platforms and technology providers gained prominence as brands demanded improved efficiency, transparency, and measurement capabilities.
Independent research provides some support for Archer's thesis about customer advocacy value, though not necessarily validating his specific platform approach. TransUnion and MMA Global research published October 2, 2025, demonstrates that traditional measurement tools may undervalue brand marketing's contribution to sales by as much as 83 percent.
The research introduces the Brand as Performance framework, showing brand investments drive customer acquisition and long-term sales growth through mechanisms that conventional attribution misses. For Ally Bank, conventional methods measured only 56 percent of full marketing impact on account openings. At Kroger, traditional tools captured just 17 percent of the complete effect on online sales.
LinkedIn's B2B Institute research published on December 2, 2025, argues that brands must shift investment from "rented prominence" through paid advertising toward "owned prominence" built through brand memory and distinctive assets. Dreamdata's analysis reveals stark performance differences: non-branded searches returned just 68 percent ROAS, while branded searches generated $12.99 ROAS for every dollar invested.
Research from Tracksuit and TikTok examining the relationship between brand awareness and advertising effectiveness found that high awareness brands achieve 2.86 times the conversion rate of low awareness brands. A brand known by four out of ten consumers is 43 percent more efficient in driving performance marketing outcomes compared to a brand known by three out of ten consumers.
Organizations face substantial technical and cultural barriers implementing advocacy engineering models, regardless of platform choice. Traditional marketing teams operate with clearly defined roles, campaign cycles, and performance metrics. Advocacy engineering requires continuous community management, long-term relationship building, and metrics that track advocacy value rather than immediate conversions.
Data infrastructure presents another challenge. Advocacy engineering demands unified customer views integrating purchase history, social media engagement, content creation activity, and community participation. Many organizations maintain siloed data across different platforms and departments, preventing comprehensive advocate identification and segmentation.
Budget allocation creates additional complexity. CFOs understand influencer marketing expenses through clear payment-per-post models, deliverables, and invoicing. Advocacy engineering costs include technology platforms, community management resources, content amplification budgets, and advocate rewards programs that don't fit traditional influencer payment models.
Technical guide frameworks published in September 2025 address common development challenges in autonomous marketing automation. The eight-step process addresses widespread difficulties encountered by marketers attempting to build AI agents, with many organizations starting with overly ambitious projects that lead to abandoned implementations and wasted resources.
Consumer behavior patterns fundamentally affect advocacy engineering effectiveness. Industry leaders from Google, Omnicom Group, and Boston Consulting Group unveiled new consumer behavior patterns during Google's NewFronts presentation on May 23, 2025, highlighting how traditional marketing approaches must adapt to "4S behaviors": streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping.
Derek Rodenhausen, Managing Director at Boston Consulting Group, emphasized that conventional approaches no longer reflect consumer reality. "The consumer experience today" resembles "the name of the recent movie everything all at once," describing how shoppers now navigate multiple touchpoints simultaneously rather than following predictable paths.
Research shows 80 percent of consumers skip traditional purchase paths, while AI-engaged companies report 60 percent higher revenue growth than their peers. This fragmentation necessitates advocacy approaches that operate across multiple touchpoints rather than concentrating influence through single creator relationships.
Platform consolidation affects how advocacy engineering models operate. GroupM launched INCA in Asia Pacific in December 2021, connecting brands to networks of trusted publishers and influencers to create and promote content across social channels. The platform's proprietary technology provides creator and audience insights, fraud detection, workflow tools, content amplification, and detailed campaign reporting dashboards.
YouTube evolved FameBit to YouTube Brand Connect on January 5, 2023, creating a platform for influencer marketing. These platform developments demonstrate major tech companies positioning themselves as intermediaries in creator-brand relationships, potentially complicating direct advocacy approaches that bypass platform fees.
The convergence of affiliate and influencer marketing represents another significant industry trend. Rakuten Advertising's Storefronts solution, launched in May 2025, connects advertisers with hand-selected creators through shoppable experiences. The company positions itself at the intersection of influencer marketing and performance-based advertising.
Archer's argument faces several critical questions despite supporting industry trends. First, the analysis comes from a CEO whose company sells advocacy platform software, creating inherent commercial bias. His prediction that brands will need advocacy engineering platforms directly benefits Duel's business model. Industry analysts should evaluate whether this transformation reflects genuine market evolution or represents vendor-driven narrative construction.
Second, the claim that AI performs advocacy tasks "far better" than human managers lacks supporting evidence beyond anecdotal client results. What specific metrics demonstrate AI superiority in advocate identification, relationship building, and community management? Duel's case studies cite impressive results but lack independent verification or comparison against alternative approaches.
Third, the 100,000+ advocate scale may represent aspirational marketing rather than practical implementation. Managing genuine relationships with 100,000 individuals—even with AI assistance—requires substantial resources. How many brands actually need or can effectively manage advocate communities at this scale? What percentage of advocates remain active contributors versus dormant members inflating headcount metrics?
Fourth, the advocacy engineering role description may simply rebrand existing community management positions. Community managers have built and nurtured brand advocates for decades. Does adding "AI-powered" and "advocacy engineer" terminology reflect fundamental transformation or semantic repositioning?
Fifth, the analysis assumes AI can replicate human judgment in identifying authentic advocates and maintaining genuine relationships. Research on AI marketing automation skepticism and the value of slowing down suggests human expertise remains critical for strategy, quality control, and maintaining authentic community culture—precisely the elements that separate genuine advocacy from manufactured engagement.
Not all industry observers share Archer's deterministic view of influencer manager obsolescence. The German influencer marketing landscape published November 13, 2025, shows continued growth and professionalization of traditional influencer management services. Agencies with talent portfolios, management companies, and specialized platforms continue expanding rather than contracting.
The creator economy's shift toward in-person experiences suggests influencer relationships may become more complex rather than less important. When creators host tours, events, and community activations, brands need skilled relationship managers who negotiate partnerships, coordinate logistics, and measure offline impact—precisely the human judgment AI struggles to replicate.
The distinction between social affiliates (revenue-focused) and ambassadors (awareness-focused) that Duel emphasizes may create false dichotomies. Effective influencer marketing often blends awareness and conversion objectives, requiring nuanced campaign design that considers creator authenticity, audience fit, and brand alignment beyond simple performance metrics.
Archer's advocacy engineering thesis reflects genuine trends: AI automation expanding across marketing operations, brands seeking more authentic customer relationships, and dissatisfaction with traditional influencer marketing ROI. However, the analysis conflates these trends with commercial narratives that benefit platform vendors.
The future likely involves hybrid models where brands maintain strategic influencer partnerships for reach and credibility while supplementing with customer advocacy programs for authenticity and scale. Influencer managers may evolve rather than disappear, developing new skills in AI tool management, community building, and omnichannel relationship coordination.
"Influencer marketing is going out to people and asking if they will talk about you," Archer stated. "Advocacy is amplifying the voices of the people who already love you. Only one will stand the test of time."
This framing presents false choice. Sophisticated brands will likely employ both approaches: working with influential creators who expand reach and working with passionate customers who provide authentic testimonials. The question isn't whether advocacy replaces influence, but how brands balance paid partnerships with organic community engagement across their marketing mix.
Marketing professionals evaluating advocacy platforms should assess actual implementation complexity, true advocate activation rates, content quality versus quantity tradeoffs, and whether technology platforms deliver sustainable competitive advantages or simply automate existing community management practices at higher subscription costs.
Who: Paul Archer, founder and CEO of brand advocacy platform Duel (founded 2015, 51-200 employees), published an opinion piece arguing traditional influencer managers face obsolescence. Archer is also a world-record breaking adventurer, bestselling author, and "Building Brand Advocacy" podcast host who has consulted with hundreds of brands on advocacy strategies.
What: Archer argues AI automation will replace traditional influencer managers (who work with 50-200 paid creators) with "advocacy engineers" who deploy AI systems to mobilize 100,000+ customer advocates—existing customers, superfans, and microinfluencers who create organic content. His company Duel sells software enabling brands to "transform customers into their biggest acquisition channel" through automated advocate segmentation, gamified engagement portals, and AI-powered community management.
When: The opinion piece was published January 11, 2026, amid accelerating marketing automation trends including Amazon's Ads Agent launch (November 11, 2025), LiveRamp's agentic orchestration (October 1, 2025), and industry research showing 85 percent of European companies already deploying AI-based marketing tools by September 2025, though Gartner predicts over 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027.
Where: The analysis appears in BeautyMatter targeting beauty and consumer goods marketing professionals, while Archer's company Duel operates from London, Bristol, and New York offices serving brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Monica Vinader, Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria's Secret, and ELEMIS across fashion, beauty, and wellness categories.
Why: The argument reflects both genuine industry trends (AI marketing automation acceleration, dissatisfaction with traditional influencer ROI, desire for authentic customer relationships) and commercial interests (Duel sells advocacy platforms directly benefiting from this narrative), raising questions about whether the prediction represents objective market analysis or vendor-driven positioning aimed at creating demand for advocacy engineering software and services.
