Somewhere right now, a very expensive creator post is sitting on LinkedIn all by itself.

It performed well. Everyone liked it. Some people saved it. Someone put the impressions in a deck.

And that was the end of its pretty little life.

Keith Bendes would like a word.

Keith is Chief Strategy Officer at influencer marketing agency Linqia, where he’s spent the past 7 years helping some of the world’s largest brands figure out what their creator spend is actually doing for the business.

Keith thinks that post is the smallest part of the story.

For every $1 a large brand spends on influencer marketing, Keith says it may be spending $50-$100 or more on paid media.

So why are we measuring the $1 like it lives alone?

Especially when budget season rolls around and someone asks why creators should get more.

Let’s get into it.

We all know creator content can move into paid social, CTV, online video, display, out-of-home…

And Keith considers its effectiveness across that larger media plan “almost more important” than its organic performance.

Eventually, though, someone is going to ask: Did it actually drive business?

For B2B marketers, that’s where creator measurement gets messy.

A buyer could discover you through a creator today, hear about you from a colleague next month, search your company later, and book a demo 3 months from now.

The creator mattered. The attribution may have no idea.

And that’s a problem when the same marketing budget includes channels with much cleaner receipts. Paid search can point to a click. An event can point to leads. A creator might have helped put your company on the buyer’s radar months before either happened.

“For most categories, especially B2B, ‘influencers’ is not an immediate attribution channel,” Keith says.

And there probably isn’t a neat little UTM parameter coming to save you. Keith calls solving the attribution problem “a billion-dollar question.”

While we don’t have the billion-dollar solve, Keith did give some useful ways to get closer.

His advice is to start with what the campaign was actually supposed to accomplish. If the goal was awareness, look at whether your share of the conversation moved. If creator content became paid media, compare how that creative performed against the rest of your media. And if you’re trying to connect it to a business outcome, measure against the primary KPI your company already trusts.

But measuring the campaign is only part of the job. Those results also need to make it into whatever your company uses to evaluate marketing as a whole. For larger brands, that source of truth is nearly always a marketing mix model (MMM) that helps determine which channels are driving results, and, ultimately, where the next dollar goes.

“If influencers aren’t part of that measurement structure, you’ll never be able to justify more budget,” Keith says.

The full playbook gets into Keith’s 3-part framework, including the share-of-voice metric he thinks more marketers should bring to leadership.

Get the full creator ROI playbook ->

Campaigns that got us talking: Haircare brand K18 rolled a 150-pound ball of real human hair through NYC. Welcome to the age of AI, where actually doing the insane thing is a marketing strategy.

AI spotlight: Remember when showing up in ChatGPT was an organic search problem? Cute. As ChatGPT ads expand, marketers have a new question: Do we earn our way into the answer, or pay to show up next to it?

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Air has fake hired, fake fired, and generally caused problems with Kareem Rahma for years. Recently they sponsored the “Keep the Meter Running” series finale in Damascus. A nice case for creator partnerships that build over time instead of starting and ending with a sponsored post. We’re fans. Read about the crazy campaign they ran that even beat out Apple. Yep, that Apple.

Crowd Work is leaving the group chat. 

Turns out sending Sarah Suzuki Harvard into your inbox every Sunday wasn’t enough.

This Thursday, Sept. 17, Crowd Work is going live with storyarb, Air + beehiiv.

Sarah will be joined by Vannessa Jackson (SNL/The Late Show with Stephen Colbert), Ashton Womack (The Daily Show/Comedy Central), Jamie Wolf (Comedy Cellar), and more.

50+ B2B marketers. Live comedy. 0 breakout sessions.

It’s sold out, which feels like pretty compelling evidence that B2B marketers need to get out more.

Follow us on Instagram for the post-show goods.

AI has learned that specificity sounds human, so now everything has a suspiciously specific number attached to it. “I analyzed 1,847 LinkedIn posts over 93 days.” 

Did you, Brian?

Somebody should probably go check on that lonely LinkedIn post.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Creator marketing, circa 1760:

Josiah Wedgwood got Queen Charlotte to use his pottery, became “Potter to Her Majesty,” and sold Queen’s Ware across Britain.

No creator brief. No link in bio. Worked anyway.

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