Why Allbirds Ditched Earned Media Value and Built an Influencer Measurement Model That Finance Actually Trusts

Every influencer marketer has the same nightmare conversation. The CFO asks for the revenue number. The marketer opens a dashboard full of impressions, engagement rates, and something called earned media value. The CFO does not care.

That gap between the marketing team’s enthusiasm for influencer and the finance team’s demand for commercial proof is not new. But it is getting harder to paper over. As influencer budgets grow and programs scale into the thousands of partners, the measurement question becomes existential.

This was the core tension in a fireside chat at eTail Palm Springs 2026 between Sarah Grosz, Influencer Marketing Lead at Allbirds, and moderator Robyn Nissim, Social Media Educator at Social Proof. The conversation moved through tactics, tools, and mental models, but its throughline was unmistakable: if you cannot prove influencer ROI in language your CFO understands, you cannot scale.

Compounding returns are real, but only if you build the machine

Grosz inherited an Allbirds influencer program with no paid strategy and roughly 1,000 ad hoc affiliate partners. In just over two and a half years, she scaled it to approximately 3,000 affiliates and 600 paid partnerships.

The key insight behind that growth is what Grosz calls the network effect. Unlike paid media, where incremental spend eventually plateaus and then declines in efficiency, influencer marketing compounds. When you niche down in a specific community, multiple creators talking about the same product create overlapping social proof. A first-time parent following 10 mom influencers who all mention Allbirds is, as Grosz put it, “almost guaranteed” to convert.

That compounding only works, though, with systematic scale. Ad hoc seeding does not create network effects. Intentional community building does.

Earned media value is a fluffy metric

When Nissim asked about measurement, Grosz was blunt. Earned media value, the industry’s go-to metric for assigning dollar amounts to impressions and engagement, is not something she can use to explain impact to a CMO.

“Finance does not care about how many impressions I’m getting and how many comments we have,” she said. “It’s not as important a conversation.”

Instead, Grosz leans into a mixed media model. Unlike EMV, which silos influencer into its own measurement bubble, a mixed media model ingests data from influencer alongside paid social, paid search, email, and SMS. It creates what Grosz described as a “universal EMV,” a report for incremental value that shows influencer’s contribution to total e-commerce revenue, not just the direct revenue traceable to discount codes and affiliate links.

The distinction matters. If direct attribution says influencer drove $1,000 in revenue, the mixed media model reveals that the true impact is larger, because influencer activity is lifting performance across other channels. That incrementality is the number that gets finance’s attention.

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Grosz’s frustration with EMV and her shift toward a mixed media model mirrors a broader industry reckoning with partial attribution. Fospha‘s positioning as “the only full-funnel MMM delivering daily, ad-level insights” speaks directly to this gap: the need for measurement that captures incrementality across channels rather than siloing influencer into vanity metrics. For brands at Allbirds’ scale, the challenge Grosz describes, proving influencer’s halo effect on other channels, is precisely the problem unified full-funnel measurement is designed to solve.

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Discount codes are the cost of knowing who drove what

The conversation turned to one of influencer marketing’s most contested tools: discount codes. Grosz reframed the debate entirely. “The cost of not having discount codes is attribution,” she said. If you are willing to forego knowing which partners drive which customers, you do not need codes. But if customer acquisition tracking is a top KPI, and at Allbirds it is, discount codes are the lever that makes that tracking possible.

She pushed the point further. Grosz floated using two codes per influencer: a larger one for new customer acquisition and a smaller one for retention. “That is literally the cost of attribution, right there,” she said. “Is it worth 5% of your cart value? Is it worth $5?”

The counterfactual is the strongest argument

When pressed on proving influencer’s total impact, Grosz turned to a question she uses regularly with internal stakeholders: what would happen if we stopped doing influencer marketing? The answer, she said, is always the same. Sales would drop, and the effect would ripple across the full funnel.

It is a simple argument, but it cuts through attribution noise. Rather than defending the precision of a tracking model, Grosz forces the conversation into business reality. Influencer is a demand engine that feeds the rest of the marketing mix.

She reinforced this with a secondary argument: influencer marketing as a cost saving exercise. Instead of expensive in-house content production, brands can use influencer-created UGC. Nissim backed this up with a practical scenario from her own experience in fashion: calling a local influencer to create product content overnight and running paid media behind it the next day.

Conversion rate and AOV are the proof points that matter

Asked for the first three data points she would pull to prove influencer revenue impact, Grosz went straight to conversion rate and average order value. Influencer traffic converts at a significantly higher rate than paid media or organic, she said, because trust is built from the first touch point. And AOV actually increases despite the discount code, because the time-limited offer motivates larger cart sizes, especially for first-time customers.

The third metric? Grosz paused. She did not have one. The honesty was telling. For a channel that is supposed to be “measurement impossible,” having two rock-solid commercial metrics that finance cares about is more than most performance channels can claim.

What this means for senior marketers

The measurement conversation in influencer marketing has been stuck for years. Brands either default to EMV and hope leadership does not ask hard questions, or they abandon measurement and run on instinct. Grosz’s approach at Allbirds offers a third path: treat influencer as a performance channel with compounding properties, measure it within a mixed media model that captures incrementality, and defend it not with dashboard vanity metrics but with commercial proof points that finance teams actually respect.

For senior marketers still fighting the EMV fight – stop trying to make influencer measurement fit into a reporting framework designed for paid media. Build a model that reflects how influencer actually works, and speak the language of the people who control the budget.

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EVENT COVERAGE SPONSORED BY FOSPHA