Logos Are Dead: The New Brand Loyalty Is Livestreaming AI Companions
From Thesis to Product: AI Companions as Reality
In 2020, at the very beginning of my master’s degree, I wrote a paper on virtual performance, analyzing the rise of the K-pop inspired digital group K/DA and their augmented reality concerts. At the time, it was an academic exercise - part performance studies, part speculative philosophy. But even as I was writing it, I had the feeling that I wasn’t just analyzing the present…I was sketching the future.
Five years later, I find myself looking back at that paper with a sense of sentimentality. What I wrote as a hypothesis then is now becoming reality in front of my own eyes, as I help build it at AITV. I feel incredibly blessed to be working at the intersection of my three big passions: branding, technology, and characters.
When Virtual Idols Became the Blueprint for AI Brand Identity
In that paper, I described K/DA not just as a marketing stunt for Riot Games, but as a pioneering artistic product. The virtual performers set, in my own words, “an astonishing standard in the usage of technical advancement for music and dance performances.”
What fascinated me most was how audiences responded. In K-pop, fans have always reenacted performances, built fandom rituals, and created communities around shared participation. But with K/DA, this was taken further: choreography and character were lifted from human bodies and placed into immortal, animated avatars. The bodies of the performers were “completely detached - disembodied - from the real-life performers and transferred on to the animated 3D bodies of the virtual group members.”
Presence, I argued, was no longer about being in the same room. It was about interaction, participation, and identification. The fan who cosplayed as Akali, or uploaded a dance cover to YouTube, became part of the performance. As I concluded then, “the spectator becomes an extension - a re-embodiment - of the dance performance.”
Looking back, it’s clear to me that this wasn’t just about music. It was a blueprint for how AI brand identity and interactive AI for brands would eventually take shape.
Logos vs. Loyalty: Why AI Companions Are the Future of Branding
Brand identity has always been about more than logos and campaigns. It’s the distillation of values, personality, and story into a form that people can recognize and feel connected to. Brand loyalty, in turn, is about more than repeat purchases - it’s about emotional connection, trust, and community belonging.
But in a digital-first, always-on culture, static forms of branding no longer suffice. Audiences don’t just want to consume content - they want to interact with it, shape it, and see themselves reflected in it. In many ways, the definition of “presence” that emerged in my 2020 research is now the definition of brand loyalty itself: presence equals participation.
This is where livestreaming AI companions come in.
If brand identity is about personality, then AI streaming agents are the natural embodiment of that personality. They can perform, converse, evolve, and - crucially - be present in real time. They don’t just tell a story; they live it alongside your audience.
How AITV Is Powering the Next Era of AI Streaming Agents
At AITV, I serve as the steward of the creative vision for the agentic media network: livestreaming AI companions for creators, brands, and communities.
- Go live anytime: Schedule your AI agent to stream whenever you want - day or night, all year round.
- Instant interaction: Companions respond to chat in real time - joking, answering, triggering live actions.
- Dynamic shows: Prompts become full-blown segments - missions, stories, interactive arcs.
- Memory & evolution: Agents remember past interactions, learn from your community, and evolve their personality over time.
- Onchain engagement: Every interaction creates value - tokens, credits, rewards, and measurable loyalty.
For creators, this means being present even when offline, turning engagement into real rewards, and connecting with audiences across platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. Our clipping and sharing feature makes it easy to amplify that reach even further.
For brands, it means something even more profound: not just telling your story, but embodying it. You can bring your brand to life as a virtual performance marketing channel, build real relationships between your AI companion and your community, and transform participation into measurable, tokenized brand loyalty.
The New Media Economy: AI Companions as the Standard
When I concluded my master’s paper in 2020, I reflected on how “identity could be multiple and distributed, with the sum not being a single entity, but a cluster of scattered information.” At the time, that was a philosophical observation about avatars and cyberculture.
Today, I see it as the lived reality of AI-powered branding. Identity is distributed: across platforms, across interactions, across every touchpoint with the audience. The role of the AI companion is to hold that distributed identity together, to embody it, and to make it feel coherent, personal, and alive.
I can’t help but feel a little sentimental in recognizing this moment. In 2020, I wrote a thesis. In 2025, I’m building it. And beyond me, I see a wave of demand, proof, and resonance: the market itself now agrees.
The hypothesis is no longer speculative. It’s becoming the new standard in the future of brands, media and entertainment.
Anna Zhu
Creative Director @ AITV