India's influencer marketing industry is projected to reach ₹3,375 crore by 2026. What's less discussed is how much of that spend is effectively unaccountable — deployed without the infrastructure to know whether it worked.
The standard setup for an influencer campaign in India is remarkably low-tech. A creator posts content. The brand monitors likes, comments, shares, saves, and story views. Maybe they give the creator a discount code. At the end of the month, the agency compiles these numbers into a PDF report with some screenshots and an estimated media value calculation.
Why estimated media value misleads
Estimated media value — the practice of comparing an influencer post's reach to what equivalent advertising space would cost — is perhaps the most widely used and most misleading metric in the industry. It tells you how much the eyeballs would cost on a billboard. It tells you nothing about whether any of those eyeballs belong to people who would ever buy your product.
The brands that have moved past this are running every influencer through a proper tracking architecture: unique redirect links that capture clicks at the individual creator level, discount codes as a backup attribution path, cookie windows long enough to capture the delayed purchase that happens three days after the Instagram story.
Why agencies aren't solving this
Most influencer agencies are organized around creative and relationship functions: finding the right creators, negotiating deals, managing content approval. Building and maintaining a technical attribution layer is a different capability entirely, and most agencies haven't invested in it.
There's also a subtler incentive problem. An agency that provides rigorous per-creator attribution data is an agency that makes it easy to see which of its creator relationships are underperforming. The measurement function shouldn't live with the agency. It should live with the brand.