Brands push influencer spend into their econometric models

Marketers are trying to settle the influencer question the boring way, by putting creators into the same econometric models as television and out-of-home. Marketing Week reported on 1 September that brands raising their influencer spend are pulling the channel into marketing mix modelling and loosening the KPIs they judge it on, in a piece by Amrit Virdi.

Matt Bushby, chief marketing officer at Rightmove, is the named example. He says influencer activity is plugged into the property portal’s MMM model, and that the model shows “brilliant” long and short-term effects. That is a meaningful claim rather than a soft one: MMM measures a channel against everything else in the plan, so it is a harder test than the engagement numbers influencer campaigns usually get judged on.

The context is a category still arguing with itself. Marketing Week’s own framing notes that scepticism about the effectiveness of creator content persists even as investment climbs, which is an uncomfortable combination: money moving ahead of proof. The piece sits within the title’s Language of Effectiveness 2026 research and its Influencers Explored series.

The same reporter found a similar view a week earlier. Caroline Drewes, director of brand communications at Asahi, told Marketing Week on 24 August that influencer marketing is one of the drinks group’s “main brand building channels”, and is drawing more investment as the media landscape fragments. Two large advertisers in two weeks, both describing creators as a brand-building line rather than a performance one.

That reframing is the story. For most of the last decade influencer budgets were defended with reach, engagement rate and the occasional discount code, metrics that are easy to produce and easy to dismiss. Measuring the channel inside MMM changes who has to be convinced, because it puts creator spend in front of the finance director on the same terms as a TV buy.

If you are running creator activity, the practical implication is to stop optimising for the metrics that are cheapest to report and start feeding the channel into whatever model already governs your budget. Effectiveness that cannot be compared to other channels tends to lose the argument at planning time. The compliance side matters just as much: our guide to the UK influencer advertising rules covers what has to be disclosed before any of this reaches an audience.