Businesses are spending over $40B this year on influencer marketing, and I have just one question: Does it work?
The truth is almost no one knows. It's the modern version of the old joke: 50% of ads work, but no one knows which 50%. A few have the rigor to do geolocated testing, but mostly businesses are throwing cash into the void, knowing it's a void. They are dealing with the pressure of having to do it because, well, everyone else is doing it.
And let’s be honest, I’m sure that some of it actually does work. There’s a ground truth out there, and I have no doubt that people view that content and it impacts their decisions. So, OK, is it worth $1m? $100? $1? How would you know?
I teach classes where we train PhD students on causality, statistics, measurement and proof. None of this would pass.
Am I ridiculously biased because we have a solution to this challenge? Yes, of course. I’m also able to back up our results. When we say a person has influence, we bring the receipts. There’s an accuracy. There’s verifiable ROI. We never say “trust us.”
Real, measurable influence comes from people you know. Small-scale. Friends, co-workers, family, teammates. In the aggregate, it drives a third of all spending. We prove this out every day. No estimates. Real end-to-end ROI. I challenge any online influencer or tech to do the same.
