Brands are spending serious money on influencers and have no reliable way of knowing what that money produced. That is not a minor inefficiency. It is the central problem of an industry that has built an entire commerce layer on metrics that mean almost nothing.
Let me be specific about what I mean, because “influencer marketing” has become such a broad term that people use it to mean everything from a major creator with five million followers to someone’s cousin with a decent Instagram page and good light. The scale is different. The problem is the same.
When a brand pays an influencer — any influencer — the deliverable is content and reach. The influencer produces something. People see it. The numbers come back: impressions, views, likes, comments, saves, shares, reach. The brand receives a report that looks impressive. The campaign is declared a success or a failure based on those numbers.
Likes are not revenue. Reach is not conversion. Impressions are not sales.
Those numbers measure attention. They do not measure action. And the entire business question — did this spend produce anything for us? — is a question about action, not attention.
1. The metrics problem is structural, not accidental
This is not happening because the influencer industry is populated by dishonest people. Most creators are doing exactly what they were hired to do: produce content that generates engagement. Engagement is what they were briefed on, what they are optimised for, what the platforms reward them for. The metrics they report are real. The problem is that they are reporting on the wrong thing.
The system evolved to measure what was easy to measure. Platform analytics give you reach and engagement data automatically. Connecting that reach to downstream revenue requires attribution infrastructure that most brands and most agencies do not have. So the easy metrics filled the vacuum. Campaigns started being evaluated on reach because reach could be counted, and things that can be counted have a way of becoming the official measure of success even when they are measuring the wrong thing.
An influencer with 800,000 followers and a 6% engagement rate looks like a great investment on a slide deck. Whether that engagement translated into a single purchase is a question the industry has spent a decade not asking.
In the Nigerian and broader African context, this problem is more pronounced because the influencer marketing industry here is newer, less structured, and more dominated by relationships and social proof than by any rigorous evaluation framework. Brands hire influencers because other brands are hiring influencers. Because the influencer’s content looks good. Because they appeared at the right events and have the right audience demographics on paper. Very few brands are going back to ask whether the sales numbers moved.
2. Who benefits from the lack of accountability
When there is no accountability, the market rewards visibility, not effectiveness. That is a problem for everyone except the loudest voices.
The creators who win in an unaccountable market are the creators who are best at generating the vanity metrics. High follower counts. Strong engagement numbers. High production quality. Those things are correlated with actual influence but they are not the same as actual influence. A creator with two hundred thousand genuinely engaged followers in a specific niche can drive more purchasing behaviour than a creator with two million broadly scattered followers, but the broader creator wins more deals because the number looks better.
This means honest creators who have built real trust with real audiences are consistently undervalued because the market does not have the tools to measure what they actually have. And it means brands are routinely overpaying for reach that does not convert because they have no way to distinguish reach from revenue.
The agencies in the middle benefit from this confusion. When nothing can be measured properly, performance conversations are difficult to have. When performance conversations are difficult, budgets are allocated on relationships and proposals that look good rather than on demonstrated results. That is a comfortable position if you are an agency.
It is not comfortable if you are a brand that spent ten million naira on a campaign and cannot tell your CFO what it produced.
3. The attribution problem is solvable
I built Klairova because I spent long enough watching this problem repeat itself with no serious attempt at a solution. The question — did this influencer campaign actually drive revenue? — is not unanswerable. It requires proper attribution infrastructure. You need to be able to trace the path from content exposure to purchase decision, accounting for the fact that influencer marketing rarely drives immediate direct conversion. The influence happens earlier in the journey. You need to measure that.
The technical challenge is real. The political challenge within organisations is bigger. Because proper attribution sometimes produces results that nobody wants to see. It tells you that the influencer with the impressive numbers did nothing for your bottom line. It tells you that the campaign your team spent three months planning moved the needle by less than you thought. That kind of honest data is uncomfortable when you have already spent the budget.
The reason most brands do not measure influencer ROI properly is not that they lack the tools. It is that accurate measurement creates accountability, and accountability makes uncomfortable conversations unavoidable.
But brands that avoid that discomfort are making a choice to operate blind. They are making spend decisions based on aesthetics and relationships rather than evidence. In a tight economic environment — and the Nigerian business environment has been genuinely tight for several years — that is not a posture you can sustain.
4. What this does to the creator market
The accountability gap does not just hurt brands. It creates a distorted market for creators.
If brand deals flow primarily to creators with the biggest numbers regardless of conversion performance, then the career incentive for every creator is to maximise the numbers regardless of what they mean. Buy followers. Game the engagement. Optimise for the appearance of influence rather than the substance of it. The market is training creators to be performers of influence rather than actual influencers.
This is bad for the good creators. The ones who have taken years to build genuine trust with genuine audiences, who are careful about what they recommend, who maintain the credibility that makes their recommendations worth anything — they are competing in a market that does not currently reward those qualities at the right price.
It is bad for the audience too. When creators are incentivised to perform influence rather than exercise it, the content they produce gets shaped by what generates numbers rather than what generates genuine value for the people watching. The audience is the ultimate raw material of this economy and they are also the least protected party in it.
The influencer economy is real. The money is real. The cultural influence is real. But the accountability infrastructure does not match the scale of what is being built on top of it. Until that changes, brands will keep spending without knowing what they are buying, honest creators will keep being undervalued, and the market will keep rewarding the loudest voice over the most effective one.
That is a problem worth solving. It is not solving itself.