Yesterday at Cannes Lions, we ditched the busy Croisette to visit Disrupt Marketing at their Villa Brunch.
During that time, the team introduced a table of brand marketers to the Genuine Influence Index.
In a sneak preview, we saw Genuine Influence as a new way of measuring what matters. The tool promises to address one of the industry's most persistent headaches: measuring the residual, long-term impact of influencer campaigns once the initial media spend concludes.
The problem with tracking measurement
Within influencer marketing, the likelihood of actually knowing your paid vs earned influence is close to zero. Almost no brand knows how many people found their products via paid or organic means, because both are marked and treated equally as a success.
The true test of a campaign’s effectiveness happens in the weeks following its conclusion. When the paid amplification stops and engagement levels inevitably contract back to baseline numbers, brands are often left without the data required to judge whether they have built lasting consumer equity or simply purchased brief, temporary visibility.
How the Genuine Influence Index works
The Index works by scoring your brand on a scale of 0-100. Your score will reflect whether you're simply gaining vanity metrics, or instead a brand with a compounding and transforming community.
According to the pilot, which analysed over 25,000 comments, not a single brand made it past the Integrating stage (66).
What was found instead were comments addressed directly to the brand, and very little conversation between the consumers. No reply chains or natural conversations, but instead a couple of fire emojis and a question or two.
"The idea of the Genuine Influence Index is helping brands and creators get a better view of what we believe to be the two simple differences of owned audiences and rented audiences: moving beyond the reach, views, engagements and actually trying to put some real interesting data beneath that that helps brands understand the full picture," Jamie Hambleton, Director of Partnerships at Disrupt.
Community vs attention
Driving top-of-funnel impressions through creator partnerships has never been easier, but converting that rented attention into a self-sustaining peer-to-peer community still remains incredibly rare. For brands looking to build true cultural relevance, moving past the passive "fire emoji" barrier is the next major measurement hurdle.
