The organizational chart, it turns out, does not always follow the money.
A new report from Linqia, the influencer marketing platform, suggests that while brands have been enthusiastically writing checks to content creators — the industry now represents a multibillion-dollar line item at major consumer packaged goods companies — they have been considerably less enthusiastic about promoting the people who manage those relationships to positions of actual authority.
The findings, drawn from LinkedIn data examining how large CPG companies structure their influencer teams, are what one might charitably call lopsided. Less than 1 percent of the roles identified carried a vice president title. Two-thirds of the positions were at the senior manager level or below. And the majority of job titles did not even include the words "influencer" or "creator," with responsibilities instead bundled into social media, communications, or the capacious category of "culture."
(One imagines the culture manager also handles the office kombucha selection.)
Keith Bendes, a vice president at Linqia who oversaw the research, noted that the disparity raises uncomfortable questions about how seriously brands take the discipline. "If brands want influencer marketing treated like the discipline it's become," he wrote, "that has to start with the org chart and not the media plan."
The report also found that 87 percent of influencer marketing roles are held by women — a figure that makes the near-total absence of female vice presidents in the field somewhat difficult to explain as coincidence.
For an industry that has spent the better part of a decade declaring the creator economy to be the future of advertising, the internal staffing structures tell a more ambivalent story. The budgets have arrived. The titles, apparently, are still in transit.
Original story published in campaignlive.com: "Where are all the influencer marketing VPs? | Campaign US"