Navigating hyperreality: Tourism practitioners’ ethical sense-making of deepfake destination advertising

Abstract

While deepfake technology is rapidly transforming destination marketing, scholarship on this topic remains predominantly consumer-centric, obscuring how practitioners interpret and manage these hyperreal representations. To address this gap, the purpose of this study is to explore how tourism marketing professionals experience and make sense of deepfake destination advertising. Drawing on Moustakas's transcendental phenomenology, interviews were conducted with 23 marketing practitioners in South Korea. The findings revealed that the practitioners experienced deepfake advertising as a profound tension between hyperreal promotional power and professional authenticity. Although they recognised the capacity of such advertising to intensify visual persuasiveness and commercial appeal, the practitioners also expressed ethical unease concerning representational ambiguity, consumer misperception and brand credibility. Rather than passively adopting or rejecting the technology, they engaged in continuous moral boundary work, suggesting a potential and contingent practitioner-level connection to corporate digital responsibility. This study advances the deepfake literature by redirecting the analytical focus towards practitioner-level ethical negotiation within hyperreal promotional environments.