One of my last influencer marketing gigs was for a major multinational company. You've heard of them and they are not amateurs when it comes to marketing.
I asked one of their top marketing people how they measure the impact of digital influencer campaigns like ours. The short answer is that they don't. They have no idea how to.
When trying to measure the impact of marketing upon sales, teasing the signal out of the noise is almost impossible to do with confidence, especially for huge companies running many campaigns at any given time. I suspect this is true for all advertising, not just influencer marketing.
With few truly reliable metrics, marketers fall back on conventional wisdom. For a long time, conventional wisdom has been that you have to pour a ton of your marketing budget into digital or you're being left behind.
A change in that conventional wisdom seems to be afoot. I saw it as a digital content creator - ad revenues per view have been declining for a while now. Aside from the short-term panic over ads appearing next to extremist content, there might be something more long-term that's changing in corporate marketing strategy.
It's hard to see how this, and not a challenge from a new startup, is not the greatest threat to the success of Google and Facebook. Their business is digital advertising. If spending in that field declines, it's probably rough times ahead for those giants.