By Simon Lucey, founder, Hype Collective.

It was a wet winter’s evening in Leeds when I realised what the AMEC measurement framework meant to me. That is a very strange line to open a blog post with. I assure you that the fact it’s true is as surprising to me as it probably is to you.

We were on campus for a client event, and we had to duck into one of the university buildings to take a call from an influencer agency who were responding to a brief we’d sent them. This was a brief that had a good budget, a client who was open to interesting ideas and it was for a good cause. It was, in other words, a fantastic brief.

They shared their screen and ran us through their deck. The campaigns were, from a creative standpoint, pretty strong. But we wanted to get a better sense of the strategic rationale behind the campaign, and more importantly what organisational impact they would drive.

"And why did you propose this campaign?" we asked. This is a pretty easy question, and intentionally so. We always start with an open question, as which route the answer takes tells you a lot about the agency’s thought process.

"A lot of people use that hashtag." Okay, not a great answer. This was the director of an influencer marketing agency who’d worked with a lot of huge brands, so understandably we were looking for a more detailed answer to such an open, easy question.

We followed up with: "And what’s the strategic rationale behind it?"

"Well it’s a very popular conversation point."

"What is?” we asked.

"The hashtag."

At that point we all sighed. We knew where the conversation was going.

Before we wrapped the call - we thought we’d give them one final shot. "What’s your measurement approach? Is it based on the AMEC framework or something else?"

"What’s AMEC?"

This was a particularly painful conversation, but it wasn’t the only time we’ve heard responses like this.

We’re a young agency and, up until recently, couldn’t deliver influencer campaigns ourselves. As a result, we spoke to a lot of influencer agencies on behalf of our clients.

With one or two notable exceptions, the level of measurement we witnessed in the influencer space was incredibly poor. We had many conversations like the above which proved time and time again that the agencies we were speaking to had no real understanding of why they were proposing the campaigns in their pitch decks.

This is why our recently launched student influencer network is built on the AMEC measurement framework: because we want to make sure every influencer campaign we run delivers specific and measurable business results for our clients.

The AMEC measurement framework is a fantastic tool that everyone in the comms industry should use.

It exists to move reporting from vague vanity metrics like 'how many people use this hashtag' to the specific effects of the communications on the target audience. This is absolutely critical for campaign measurement - in the influencer space and beyond - as it demonstrates the true value of the work that we as an industry are doing.

And that’s ultimately why it’s so important: because if our campaigns don't deliver demonstrable organisational impact, then we have no business asking our clients to fund them.

Photo by Lea Böhm on Unsplash