The advertising industry has spent the better part of a decade assuring itself that influencer marketing is no longer experimental, that it has matured, that it deserves a seat at the grown-ups' table. And yet the grown-ups, it seems, still cannot agree on how to read the check.

A new report from the Association of National Advertisers found that two-thirds of marketers surveyed named measurement as the most difficult aspect of influencer marketing — a figure that far exceeded the challenges of finding, vetting, or even negotiating with creators, each of which troubled fewer than half of respondents.

"Influencer marketing has really moved from what in the past was a more experimental tactic to a really critical strategy for brands," said Leah Marshall, vice president of digital and influencer marketing at the A.N.A. "Our members consistently report measurement is the trickiest element of creator marketing."

The difficulty, Ms. Marshall noted, stems partly from the fact that social platforms define basic metrics like views, reach, and engagement in different ways, making comparisons across channels an exercise in creative interpretation. (What, you were expecting the platforms to standardize out of the goodness of their hearts?)

In response, a growing number of marketers are simply paying to amplify influencer content through traditional media channels, where measurement tools are more reliable. Spending on such amplification is expected to equal creator-sponsored content revenues of nearly $14.2 billion by 2027, according to eMarketer, and surpass them by 2028 — a shift the A.N.A. report called "a pivotal crossover."

The report also identified a more prosaic problem: organizational chaos. As influencer marketing has expanded from awareness campaigns to direct commerce — creators are now, as Ms. Marshall put it, "the store," not merely the path to it — more business units within large companies want in. The result, particularly at global brands, is that multiple teams sometimes negotiate with the same creators, effectively bidding against themselves.

The creator economy generated $37 billion in marketing spending last year and is expected to reach $44 billion in 2026, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. For an industry of that size, the measurement infrastructure remains, to put it gently, aspirational.

Original story published in Marketing Dive: "Why brands struggle with influencer measurement -- and what to do about it"