By Kimeko McCoy  •  September 1, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

“Legit marketers are pouring a lot of money in [influencer marketing]. With that comes the expectation of measurement and returns and business outcomes,” said Megan Boveri, chief media officer at Pinnacle advertising and marketing group.

Over the past few years, influencer marketing has seen explosive growth with private equity firms and hold cos alike snapping up creator agencies and brands hiring creator agencies of records. And there’s the $13.7 billion U.S. brands are expected to spend on influencer marketing by 2027, up from $10.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer.

Creators and influencers have broken out of social media spend and marketers are integrating creators into broader campaigns, including in-person events, out-of-home campaigns and traditional broadcast spots.

Take this year’s Super Bowl, for example. Last year, big name influencers were spotted in ads. This year, they took a bigger role as brands hired influencers to host live events and stay at creator-only houses to make content for brand deals. Earlier this month, ESPN signed influencer Katie Feeney as its sports and lifestyle content creator for daily coverage and live events.

All signs point to a maturation in the creator economy and potential for it to become a fully-fledged media channel. The key word, according to influencer experts, is potential.

“I don’t know that it’s reached the full funnel yet, but I do think that that is a part of the pivot that we’re on, where people are seeing now that it has the capability to actually reach all the way across [the marketing funnel],” said Amber Burns, supervisor of creator relations and social media at independent agency Allen & Gerritsen (A&G).

But CMOs are looking for more granular level insights, like clicks, sales and other attribution metrics, to justify ad spend. 

While marketers do have attribution tools at their disposal, the influencer marketing space doesn’t have a standard measurement system like CPMs or CPCs to help with calculations, per the experts. Meanwhile, creator prices are rising. Also, marketers are grappling with how to quantify media efficiency in terms of production costs, influencer endorsement value, brand lift, brand equity and the value of organic reach — especially if the influencer is pushing brand content out from their own channels as opposed to creator-generated content.

“If you’re thinking of them as a media channel, you have to think about the costs and the outcome performance you’re getting from each of these tactics up against other tactics,” said Boveri. 

In the push for full-funnel marketing capabilities, influencer experts say creators can be earned media engines that can also be leveraged with paid support for scale and performance, as opposed to paid media placements. 

“If you’re looking at creators as just a paid media channel, that’s going to be a very different and very more limited view than if you’re looking at them as an earned media channel that can flex paid,” said Burns. 

More sophisticated agencies are either building out proprietary measurement frameworks based on their own paid data or reliant on influencers to share post metrics. At the same time, seemingly never-ending measurement tools, like creator SaaS platforms or agency-built tools, makes for fragmentation and data silos, per the execs. As it stands, the fragmentation makes consistency to scale and optimize campaigns an ever-moving goalpost. 

“Good agencies and brands that are more sophisticated in this area have developed their own metrics based off of their own paid data,” said Gabe Gordon, founder and co-CEO of Reach Agency. 

He added, “But again, this is something that’s constantly evolving as creators are being used in newer capacities in marketing.”