“Influencer marketing is a people business, not a tech business”: Alessandro Bogliari on why platform marketplaces miss the point

Influencer marketing is entering a new phase as platforms like Meta and YouTube seek to take a bigger slice of the creator economy by inserting themselves more directly into brand-creator deals.

While the tech giants pitch the move as a way to streamline partnerships and improve measurement, Alessandro Bogliari, founder and chief executive of creator agency The Influencer Marketing Factory, told The Daily Influence it risks oversimplifying how the industry actually works.

“The idea of having everything on paper looks fantastic,” Bogliari said. “You go directly to the influencer, you negotiate, you send the brief. But it’s not that easy.”

This month, both Meta and YouTube announced changes designed to pull influencer partnerships further into their advertising systems.

Meta’s updates focus on making it easier for brands to turn existing organic creator content into paid ads. Through its Partnership Ads Hub in Ads Manager, brands can now more easily find posts that tag or mention their company, view basic performance metrics such as views and engagement, and convert that content directly into partnership ads.

YouTube, meanwhile, has rebranded its creator video linking feature as “Brand Partner Access”, allowing brands to view video performance inside Google Ads and promote creator content across YouTube and other Google platforms.

For Bogliari, the simplicity being sold obscures how influencer campaigns actually function.

Bogliari, who set up The Influencer Marketing Factory in 2018, said much of the work that determines whether a campaign succeeds happens outside a platform interface. Creative alignment, negotiation over scope and pricing, regulatory considerations, media rights and creator preferences all require experience and constant attention.

He added that platforms, regulations and audience behaviour change frequently, so staying current is critical.

Platforms want a piece of the cake

Bogliari believes platforms’ growing interest in brand partnerships is driven by a structural gap in how influencer marketing has historically been monetised.

“If a brand has a $5,000 budget, the one not getting paid is the social media platform,” he said. “Now they’ve realised influencer marketing is here to stay, budgets are moving into it, and they want a piece of the cake.”

He expects transaction fees and/or paid marketplace access to follow, reframing what is currently presented as product development into a clear revenue strategy.

That commercial push, he said, also risks encouraging a more transactional model that overlooks the operational reality behind campaigns. 

A single campaign involving 10 to 20 creators can generate extensive back-and-forth communication per creator, alongside multiple internal stakeholders on the brand side.

“People think it’s easy,” he said. “But they don’t see what happens behind the scenes.”

Without experienced intermediaries, Bogliari added, brands new to influencer marketing often default to rigid scripts and approval-heavy processes, undermining authenticity and frustrating creators.

He said agencies often act as mediators between brand requirements and creative execution.

ROI, algorithms and the risk of quiet pressure

Growing pressure on brands to demonstrate return on investment has further accelerated interest in platform-led solutions, as marketing budgets tighten and scrutiny increases.

But Bogliari pushed back on the idea that platforms uniquely solve the ROI challenge, arguing that measurement problems are behavioural rather than technical.

Consumers rarely move through linear journeys, Bogliari said, pointing to differences in how generations browse and buy.

“Think about the difference between Gen Z and millennials,” he said. “Gen Z will buy directly on the phone. I’m a millennial – if something is more expensive, I’ll most probably check it on desktop.”

That behaviour, he said, makes attribution harder when users move across devices or return to a purchase later.

Platforms, Bogliari noted, only capture the part of the journey they directly control, making platform-specific reporting an incomplete picture of campaign impact.

“There’s a reason brands don’t put all their money into one platform,” he said. “Everything works together.”

As influencer marketing continues to professionalise, he believes the industry will need to resist reducing creators to data points inside closed systems.

“You’re not working with a data point,” he said. “You’re working with a person.”

And that, he argues, is something no platform can automate away.