One of the biggest challenges for brands in influence marketing is tying all these wonderful content collaborations with creators back to the bottom line. Not only do brands not often have full or direct exposure to an influencer’s analytics, but many don’t sell direct to consumer, meaning sales data is often in the hands of another third party in the form of retailers. And if you’ve ever dealt with big box retailers you also know that sometimes, they just don’t share enough data for the appropriate granularity in measurement.

So answering the question of the ROI on influencer marketing is hard. 

One company trying to solve for that is gen.video. The platform is built working from measurement and attribution backwards, rather than where most other software companies started … on the front end with influencer discovery. It’s a platform built from web video technology, but allows a brand to partner with influencers and measure how much traffic goes to purchase points, either direct to consumer or through retail platforms like Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart, then measure conversions and sometimes complete shopping cart activity on those retail end points.

Jessica Thorpe worked her way up through the original iteration of the company and is now president and co-founder and Gen Video. She also happens to be the newly donned president of the Influencer Marketing Association. We talk about how gen.video helps brands and influencers better connect the dots to the age-old question of What is the ROI? I also talk to her about the state of things in influencer marketing, particularly around the fact that everyone seems to be desperate for industry leadership and organization, but no one is truly stepping into that role.

It’s a good discussion with some great learnings and ideas.   

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