Adtech veteran Marco Ricci discusses why influencer marketing is finally ready for real-time data, performance benchmarking, and a universal score system.
Can you give us a quick overview of your career and what led you to launch Influx Data?
I’ve been in adtech for more than 20 years, starting out at GroupM where I was tasked with bringing technological standards across its agencies like Mediacom, Mindshare, and MEC. From there, I went on to work at companies like Google and Microsoft, as well as founding several startups focused on performance, transparency, and ROI.
Back in the early days, I was hands-on with ad serving, video, and rich media, and I’ve always been driven by how we get that extra 10% of performance. Whether it was the early push into ad verification or later with SPO and supply chain transparency at Fenestra, my goal has always been to help brands make their media budgets work harder.
That passion led me to my most recent move into influencer marketing with Influx Data.
Why do you think influencer marketing needs to change, and how does Influx Data aim to address that?
Influencer marketing is now a multi-billion pound channel, but it’s still built on outdated reporting and often lacks accountability. Brands have historically waited up to three months for performance reports, which is unacceptable when campaigns only last one or two
Influx was born out of a need to fix that.
Influencer agencies act like creator walled gardens, hiding their selection process behind a thick curtain. But having acquired over 8 years of creator profiles and campaign data from over 1,300 brands, Influx offers brands/agencies full visibility on (and opportunity to choose from) over 9M influencers, measuring their past performance as well as predicted future ROI.
By launching as an Influencer platform not an agency, it’s a data-first business, offering real-time campaign analytics, creator scoring, and automated optimisation. It’s all driven by the belief that influencer marketing deserves the same level of data rigour as programmatic/other addressable media channels.
What is the Influence Score, and how is it different from what’s already available?
The Influence Score is our proprietary, trademarked metric. Think of it like the activity rings on an Apple Watch. It combines various KPIs like engagement rate, reach, consistency, and sentiment into a single, live score. It updates in real time and reflects the current performance of a creator or campaign.
It means brands can act quickly, reallocating budget to better-performing creators or switching creative direction mid-flight.
Creators, in turn, can benchmark their performance and build credibility. A creator who scores 9.6 out of 10 and has held that consistently across 100 campaigns is going to stand out from the crowd.
Why hasn’t influencer marketing moved towards real-time optimisation before?
Honestly, there was no real incentive. The budgets were smaller, scrutiny was lower, and waiting for delayed reports was just accepted. But that’s changing.
Big brands like Unilever are shifting serious budget into influencer marketing, and they need assurance that it’s being spent well.
Until recently, influencer marketing was often managed by PR and comms teams, closer to creative than performance. But now media agencies are getting more involved. They understand optimisation, data, and scale.
We’ve seen them building dedicated influencer hubs and hiring influencer specialists. The industry is catching up, and that’s the gap Influx is filling.
How are brands and agencies responding to the platform?
The feedback’s been excellent. We’ve been working with a mix of indie agencies, large holding groups, and direct brands. There’s growing demand, not just in the UK and Europe, but also in the Middle East, where influencer marketing is exploding.
We’re also seeing interest from creators themselves who want to use the Influence Score as a performance credential.
This is no longer just about how many creators an agency can claim to have on its books. It’s about real, data-backed performance. Agencies that used to take six weeks to manually recruit creators can now make those decisions in minutes with our AI-driven search and scoring platform.
Is the goal to make Influence Score an industry standard?
Absolutely.
Just as viewability and brand safety scores became table stakes in programmatic, we believe the Influence Score can become a universal performance metric for influencer marketing.
We’re in talks with industry bodies to help formalise this, and we’re exploring certifications that could help agencies and brands adopt the metric as part of their buying standards.
It also works both ways. Creators can use it to pitch themselves more effectively, and brands can benchmark across campaigns, competitors, and sectors. It’s a level of transparency that hasn’t existed before, but is now essential given how much money is flowing into this space.
What’s your ideal vision for where this goes next?
We see this as the beginning of a shift. More budget means more scrutiny, and influencer marketing needs to evolve into something measurable, repeatable, and optimisable.
Influx is built by adtech experts, so we’re applying the same thinking that transformed display and programmatic. We want to make real-time performance insight the norm.
We’re offering agencies and brands SaaS-based access to the platform, letting them make their own decisions, faster and smarter. Our clients are already seeing 10x improvements on industry-average engagement rates.
That’s not about better creative alone, it’s because the decisions are powered by data science. Our goal is to make that level of performance accessible and expected across the board.
