When I was at Unilever, my team helped architect its first significant move into influencer marketing. So I’ve been watching the recent debate around CEO Fernando Fernandez‘s statement about increasing its investment levels significantly with interest, and if I’m honest, a degree of bemusement.
Having spent time inside a business like Unilever, it’s worth saying upfront that what gets said on investor or analyst calls is often picked up in a way that doesn’t reflect what is actually happening on the ground. The regular reinvention of marketing models is typically designed to provoke change, rather than to be applied uniformly across hundreds of brands.
That is where some of the commentary feels slightly off track. Ritson’s latest column, for example, appears to take the statement fairly literally, while others defend it as if influencer marketing is the answer to everything. It of course won’t apply consistently across categories.
What is undeniably true is that brands are now putting serious money into influencer marketing. When a channel sits in an innovation budget, it is rarely held to the same level of accountability, but as it takes a more meaningful share of spend, the question becomes much simpler: is it actually driving incremental business results?
From what I am hearing, we are now moving into this model’s first full year of proper implementation. And that of course is typically when meaningful evidence begins to build. I’ve also heard of other FMCG / CPG companies following suit, one in particular driven by investor demands.
That is why I think a reckoning is coming. Not because influencer marketing does not work, in many cases it does, but because it is required to prove its contribution in a rigorous and comparable way.
As investment scales, the internal conversation changes. The question becomes whether it is outperforming what it has replaced. At that point, this stops being a channel debate and should become at least in a large part a measurement problem.
Setting a bold vision is one thing. Evaluating what works, and making confident decisions across the full mix, requires a holistic view as much as you can get to it. That is a gap we see regularly with clients at Entropy.
It can be less of a problem for an FMCG / CPG brand where you have centralised P&L ownership but, in my experience, that is also where things can start to break down. Not because the data is unavailable, but because there is no clear ownership of the decision across the full mix.
The opportunity can be significant, but it sometimes requires a degree of bravery to trust the evidence, importantly validate and then act on it. Particularly when that means cutting through the hype and potentially colleagues that have been conditioned by narratives pushed by the trade media / media or those with a vested interest.
If you are interested in influencer measurement, we’ve been working on it for a few years. I’ve included some thoughts we put together historically in the comments.
We’ve built our hybrid consultancy measurement proposition to help brands take that leap.
Alex Tait, Entropy’s Founder
