“Earned media value is a meaningless shortcut": Traackr’s Nicolas Chabot on why flawed metrics are distorting influencer ROI

The influencer marketing industry’s continued reliance on earned media value (EMV) is obscuring performance, inflating results and making it harder for brands to understand what they are truly getting for what they spend, Traackr’s Chief Customer Officer has told The Daily Influence.

Nicolas Chabot said the metric – which estimates how much a creator’s post would have “cost” if it were a paid advertisement – has become a widespread shortcut despite being “imaginary, fictitious and not auditable”. 

Traackr has long been critical of EMV, but Chabot suggested the metric’s limitations have become harder to ignore as brands demand more rigorous reporting and accountability in 2025. He warned that EMV now shapes reporting, budgeting and even creator compensation in ways that are neither accurate nor fair.

“It creates a false sense of ROI,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you what happened or what worked.”

Chabot said EMV persists partly because it offers an easy narrative at a time when the industry is looking for structure and clarity. He argued that meaningful measurement must be built instead around three fundamentals: what a brand actually paid, how the content performed on-platform, and whether that content contributed to business outcomes such as sales, awareness or customer acquisition. 

Without that structure, he said, reports risk becoming disconnected from real results.

Chabot added that many brands cannot reliably answer even the first part of that equation. Large companies often work with multiple agencies across several markets, with invoices landing under different accounting codes and no single view of which creator was paid, for which campaign, and with what rights attached. “They don’t have systems to track it,” he said. “Just seeing a number on an invoice doesn’t give you any real insight.”

This lack of basic visibility, he said, feeds directly into one of the industry’s biggest frustrations: inconsistent and opaque creator fees. With no standardised rate system and no consistent performance benchmarks, creators with similar audiences and engagement profiles can end up earning radically different amounts.

“There’s no public rate card,” he said. “It will always remain a little disjointed.” He added that clearer data on performance and investment can give brands a more coherent baseline, reducing the reliance on guesswork, legacy habits or intuition. This becomes particularly important when addressing the pricing disparities creators frequently highlight.

Maturity meets complexity

As the space evolves, brands are finding that even widely accepted ideas aren’t always easy to put into practice. Chabot noted the long-running push for long-term creator partnerships, widely promoted as a way to increase authenticity and improve ROI, but said they remain far from the norm.

“People have been saying it since the beginning,” he said, noting that structural barriers still limit adoption. Budgets are generally allocated on a campaign-by-campaign basis, agencies often sit between brands and creators, and brand managers frequently rotate roles, making it difficult to maintain continuity. “In large organisations, it’s difficult to make happen,” he said.

The rapid growth of agents and creator management companies, he added, reflects the professionalisation of the sector more than fragmentation. As creators build businesses, formalise contracts and negotiate usage rights, more intermediaries have entered the space. 

Chabot said this evolution is healthy, but stressed that brands must retain ownership of their systems and data if they want coherent measurement and long-term consistency. “Whichever agency you use has to connect into your system,” he said.

Chabot, who joined Traackr in 2012 “prior to Instagram”, said the sector has shifted from early education to a far more complex, multi-platform environment. He pointed to wellness, food and beverage, hospitality, technology, gaming and automotive as major growth categories, while highly regulated sectors such as financial services and pharmaceuticals continue to lag due to stricter rules and longer customer journeys.

Fifteen years in, he said, the constant evolution remains the defining feature of influencer marketing. “It keeps evolving... it’s impacting media buying, [customer relationship management] and customer engagement. It’s touching every part of the customer journey.”