Quantifying influencer marketing effectiveness
“The Association of National Advertisers is looking to set some standards in a category that has few—influencer marketing measurement,” reports Ad Age’s Jack Neff. “The country’s foremost marketer organization has issued its first guidelines for measuring influencer marketing, looking to create common ground for assessing the effectiveness of a fast-growing channel with widely disparate and confusing practices.”
Essential context: Neff notes that the ANA guidelines doc “details how each of the eight major social platforms for influencers—Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube—defines engagement differently,” which complicates platform-vs.-platform comparisons.
Background: Influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ has been working behind the scenes with various ANA members, including its customer Unilever, to develop a framework for influencer marketing measurement. (The ANA Influencer Marketing Advisory Board—which produced the ANA’s influencer marketing guidelines—is chaired by Casey DePalma McCartney, senior director, external communications and digital engagement at Unilever.)
Flashback: Regular readers of Datacenter Weekly might experience a bit of déjà vu regarding the issue of cross-platform measurement and comparison in the influencer marketing space. For instance, in the Aug. 27, 2021, edition of Datacenter Weekly, we wrote, “It’s important to note that CreatorIQ’s calculation of its so-called Engagement Rate metric varies a bit from platform to platform because of platform-specific capabilities and terminology. … In other words, a strict apples-to-apples comparison isn’t possible because of user interface differences.”
What’s next: A CreatorIQ spokesperson tells Datacenter Weekly that it has already integrated the ANA standards into its platform—and will be issuing additional ongoing guidance for clients and brands next week.