AiMCO moves to prove influencer marketing's worth as brands demand better measurement

Australia's influencer marketing industry is taking a significant step towards establishing how creator campaigns contribute to business growth, with industry body AiMCO today convening its first dedicated working group on measurement and marketing effectiveness.

The initiative brings brands and agencies together to address one of the sector's biggest challenges: proving the commercial return on influencer investment beyond the reach, views and engagement figures supplied by social media platforms.

Chaired by Hypetap founder and group CEO Detch Singh, the working group will examine measurement standards, the data brands need to evaluate creator campaigns and how influencer marketing can be better represented in marketing mix modelling (MMM).

It comes as major advertisers pour increasing resources into creators, while new consumer research shows influencer recommendations are playing a substantial role in purchasing decisions, particularly among younger Australians.

But the industry faces a fundamental question. As creator marketing becomes a larger part of advertising budgets, can it demonstrate the same commercial accountability expected of established media channels?

AiMCO managing director Patrick Whitnall said the initiative follows research across the organisation's membership that identified measurement as a priority for brands and agencies.

“You can see the investment, you can see there's an increase in spend and you can see why brands are using creators,” Whitnall told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

But much of the industry's existing measurement remains concentrated on platform analytics, rather than the broader business outcomes that increasingly determine marketing investment.

“As a market or as an industry matures, the pressure will come down and the questions will be are we getting value and are we delivering on metrics,” he said.

“I think what brands will start to consider is how is influencer marketing delivering against business metrics.”

The working group will meet monthly, bringing together representatives from AiMCO's brand and industry membership to identify priorities and develop a more consistent approach to measurement.

Whitnall said demand to participate had been particularly strong among brand members, although he cautioned that meaningful progress would take time.

“We're not going to nail it in the first session,” he said. “It's always about coming together to share where we're at, what our priorities are, where we need to go and what we need to focus on.”

The longer-term ambition is to help marketers demonstrate the contribution of creator campaigns to commercial performance, rather than treating influencer activity as a separate category measured primarily through social engagement.

“If you're going to be investing more money, you've got to show a return and ROI on that,” Whitnall said.

“So for me, it's a natural and important step to show how this is all linked to business metrics and proving ROI beyond how it's currently being analysed.”

A market growing faster than its measurement

The initiative comes at a pivotal moment for influencer marketing.

Major global advertisers are making increasingly ambitious commitments to creator-led activity, with Unilever among the companies pushing influencer marketing further into its brand-building strategy.

L'Oréal has also disclosed that it works with approximately 500,000 creators globally, illustrating the scale at which major consumer brands are now operating.

The trend is becoming increasingly visible in Australia.

Nestlé, for example, is placing creators and social relevance at the centre of its push into the ready-to-drink iced coffee market, targeting younger consumers who increasingly discover and engage with brands through social platforms.

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Its new $5.6 million marketing campaign for NESCAFÉ canned iced coffee is designed to build relevance among Gen Z consumers, with the company viewing social currency as an important part of its growth strategy.

Nestlé's head of beverage marketing, Melissah Toomey, told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that creators were increasingly being assessed against the same commercial and brand objectives as traditional media channels.

“Measurement is increasingly important as consumer behaviour changes and attention fragments. Wherever we invest, we want to measure, learn and optimise,” Toomey said.

“We consider creators in the same way we consider other channels. It starts with being clear on the brand problem, setting the right objectives and measuring against them. For us, creators are increasingly helping to drive consideration, not just awareness and contributing to brand uplift.”

While platform metrics remain useful for optimising campaigns, Toomey said the real test was whether creator investment could demonstrate measurable brand and business outcomes.

“Ultimately while softer metrics are useful for optimisation, brand uplift and ROI are what demonstrate business effectiveness,” she said.

“That's why we look at longer term brand measures alongside creator ROI through market mix modelling. It puts creators in the same footing as channels like TV, OOH and digital video.”

Recent research also suggests that creator recommendations are influencing purchasing behaviour.

Deloitte's latest Australian media and entertainment consumer research found that 38% of consumers had purchased a product or service based on a creator recommendation in the previous year.

That figure rose to 61% among Gen Z and 58% among Millennials, with younger Australians considerably more likely than older generations to act on creator recommendations.

Food, beauty, fashion, entertainment and health were among the categories benefiting from creator influence.

The findings reinforce the growing commercial importance of creators, although self-reported purchasing behaviour is not the same as independently measuring the incremental sales generated by a campaign.

That distinction is central to AiMCO's new initiative.

Whitnall said the rise of creator recommendations also needed to be considered alongside changes in how consumers discover products, including social search and AI-powered recommendation tools.

“That recommendation and trust economy is so important,” he said.

He also pointed to the growing possibility that creator content is influencing the information surfaced by large language models, creating another potential route between social content and consumer discovery.

The challenge for marketers is understanding how those interactions contribute to business outcomes and determining what should be measured.

Australia is lagging the US and UK

Singh, who will chair the working group, believes Australia has considerable ground to make up against more mature influencer marketing markets.

The Hypetap founder, who operates internationally and is based in the UK, said the differences were apparent not only in how much brands invested in creators, but also in their willingness to fund research into effectiveness.

“There is a different maturity spectrum from the US versus the UK versus Australia,” Singh told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

“I think the US market has maturity when it comes to creators. They're willing to invest in it the same way that they invest in broadcast media,” Singh said.

In an analysis comparing creator investment with out-of-home advertising, Singh estimated US spending on creators at approximately US$34 per person, compared with around $16 per person in Australia.

Australian out-of-home spending, by comparison, was approximately $36 per person, according to his analysis.

The figures illustrate what Singh sees as a substantial gap between Australia's enthusiasm for creator marketing and its willingness to commit significant budgets to the channel.

“Australia just hasn't got that same level of investment when it comes to creators,” he said.

“They're all doing it. Everyone is doing it. Everyone is claiming they are social.”

While surveys suggest many advertisers intend to increase creator investment, Singh argued that the Australian market is still growing from a comparatively low base.

He pointed to the extraordinary expansion of influencer marketing since launching Hypetap in 2013.

“When we started Hypetap in 2013, global influencer spend was $800 million US, and I think this year it's going to be more than $40 billion US,” he said.

“I would wager it is the fastest growing advertising category.”

The growth has also changed the economics of working with creators.

As global advertisers compete for talent, demand has increased and the market has become more expensive.

“There's just so much more bidding on creators, and so it's become really, really competitive for brands to succeed on a relative basis,” Singh said.

The pressure is particularly evident as major consumer goods companies expand their creator strategies and increasingly treat influencer marketing as an established part of their media investment rather than an experimental activity.

The evidence is building

Singh said research emerging from international markets had strengthened the case for creator investment, particularly as studies began examining long-term brand effects and sales outcomes.

He cited a 2025 WPP report indicating that creator-led content production was set to exceed traditional professional content production spending, a development he described as a watershed moment for the industry.

He also pointed to a UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) effectiveness study examining the contribution of creator marketing to business outcomes.

According to Singh, the research found particularly strong returns from creator activity across both short- and long-term measures, while suggesting the category remained underinvested relative to more established media channels.

He said the analysis attributed approximately 4.5% of sales impact to creator activity, compared with 32% for linear television, indicating a substantial difference in the scale of investment and contribution.

“It's hit a tipping point, I think,” Singh said.

The growing body of effectiveness research is important because it moves the conversation beyond whether creators generate attention and towards the contribution they make to brand and commercial performance.

Yet Singh believes Australia has been slower to embrace the type of independent measurement needed to demonstrate those outcomes.

Brands want proof, but who pays for it?

The most immediate challenge facing AiMCO's working group may not be a shortage of measurement methodologies.

It may be a shortage of willingness to invest in them.

Singh said Australian advertisers increasingly want evidence that creator campaigns contribute to sales, but many remain reluctant to fund the independent research required to establish that relationship.

“I feel like measurement is the big thing that everyone's talking about, and not the media-led measurement that we've been doing for the last decade,” he said.

“They want commercial measurement and commercial impact.”

The distinction, he said, matters. A lot.

A creator campaign might generate millions of views, thousands of interactions and substantial organic conversation, but those figures do not necessarily explain whether the investment drove incremental sales or improved long-term brand performance.

“Great, but what does that mean for my sales?” Singh said.

“The business is demanding a commercial return from marketing as it should, and we've been banging on about this for years.”

He wants the industry to move towards a position where marketers can demonstrate the financial contribution of creator campaigns in language understood by senior business leaders.

“I want to be able to tell the CMO that we had a business level impact while spending X million dollars.”

According to Singh, advertisers in the US and UK are considerably more willing to fund independent effectiveness studies. Australia, however, remains heavily dependent on analytics supplied by Meta, TikTok and other platforms.

“In the US and UK markets, people are far more willing to fund industry measurement,” he said.

“Whereas in Australia, their main gripe with the category is uniform measurement.”

He argued that the industry already has access to established approaches for assessing marketing effectiveness, but insufficient investment is being directed towards applying them to creator campaigns.

“You want to fund a category like creators. You want to spend a lot of money in it. You have to equally fund measurement. They do that for telly, they do it for all the other broadcast stuff. But I don't think there is a willingness to fund influencer measurement the same way.”

He believes this has created a cycle in which brands invest relatively modest amounts, struggle to establish commercial impact and consequently hesitate to commit larger budgets.

“They don't want to fund the measurement because they're not spending enough,” Singh said.

“So it's this vicious cycle of, oh, we did a little bit, we don't know how effective it was. We'll do a little bit more next year.”

While some Australian brands are investing millions in creator marketing, Singh said the category still frequently lacks the research budgets and measurement infrastructure available to established channels.

He also believes marketers are sometimes approaching creator activity too cautiously.

“It's like we know we have to do this. We know everyone else is doing it, so we'll tick the box rather than swing the bat fully because it's safer,” he said.

“I think people are playing it safe.”

Getting creators into the marketing mix

One of the working group's priorities will be examining how creator marketing can be incorporated more effectively into marketing mix modelling.

MMM is increasingly used by major advertisers to evaluate the contribution of different marketing channels to business outcomes and guide future budget allocation.

Whitnall said the industry needed to understand what data should be supplied to these models to ensure creator activity could be evaluated alongside established media investments.

“The majority of big brands in this industry are utilising some form of MMM to inform their investment and inform the performance of where their investment is going,” he said.

“We need to make sure what is the right data that is going into that is ensuring that creator and influencer marketing is on a level playing field.”

Singh said Hypetap was increasingly briefing creators differently for paid and organic activity, reflecting the distinct roles those channels play.

“We'll have a paid brief which has a really different structure in the way the content is, it's way more brand led, and then the organic content is more of a storytelling dynamic,” he said.

He believes organic creator content is becoming more important as social platforms develop into search and discovery environments.

“The organic side is still super important, and I've been telling it to anyone who will listen that organic is back in a big way.”

Social search is one reason. The other, he argues, is the increasing use of social content by AI-powered discovery tools.

“Because they're crawling social, creator content is one of the big ways for brands to be discovered via LLM as well,” Singh said.

His argument is that marketers need to understand both the immediate commercial contribution of paid creator content and the longer-term value of organic content in building discoverability, brand familiarity and trust.

That makes consistent measurement more complicated, but potentially more valuable.

A turning point for the industry?

Whitnall said the working group represented a natural next stage in the development of Australia's influencer marketing sector.

He expects the process to evolve over time, drawing on developments in other markets and the experiences of AiMCO's members.

Previous AiMCO working groups, including its work on child and family influencers, have taken as long as 18 months to two years to develop guidance.

There is no suggestion the new measurement initiative will deliver a complete framework immediately.

Instead, its initial focus will be establishing common priorities, understanding the industry's existing measurement practices and identifying the gaps that need to be addressed.

For Singh, the urgency is clear.

Australia's influencer marketing industry is expanding, major brands are committing greater resources to creators, and evidence of commercial effectiveness is accumulating internationally.

But without a comparable investment in independent measurement, the sector risks struggling to demonstrate its full contribution to business growth.

“We're absolutely focused on measurement and I think the industry is galvanising to do something about it.”

He believes the next step requires more than agreement on common metrics.

“I just think the main thing is that they need to fund it.”