Can Fashion Move Beyond Vanity Metrics?

When Gucci dropped its Primavera campaign, which showed a series of AI-generated scenes — a Milanese grandmother in a restaurant, a young couple sitting on the hood of a car — in February, buzz around the brand skyrocketed. More specifically, Gucci’s earned media value (commonly known as EMV) hit $28.8 million globally in February and March, according to influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ, which developed the measurement.

But those numbers didn’t tell the full story. Much of the chatter around the campaign was negative, with critics lambasting the imagery as “AI slop.” By contrast, when the Italian megabrand dropped its Monte Carlo campaign earlier this week, it received plenty of praise from industry insiders in just a few hours.

It’s an illustration of fashion’s increasingly tenuous relationship with vanity metrics. While brands often point to EMV and MIV (media impact value) — which assign a dollar value to earned media exposure by benchmarking against what a comparable paid placement would cost — as indicators of a given marketing moment’s success, many are realising that these numbers cannot be looked at in a vacuum.

“There’s no one KPI that can be that source of truth to us,” said Damon Berger, senior vice president of marketing shared services for Gap Inc.

Rather than laser-focusing on MIV or EMV, brands are looking to a broader variety of measures to provide a more comprehensive picture of how a media moment not only gets people talking, but influences how shoppers feel about a brand. In practice, this means gathering more data on customer sentiment through social listening and looking at the longer tail impact on conversation after an MIV spike.

More complex, thorough metrics are all the more important as brands move away from trying to engineer viral moments and pivot to “slower marketing,” hosting in-person activations for customers rather than influencers, and aligning with cultural spheres like literature or television. Likewise, data platforms like Launchmetrics and CreatorIQ are evolving their models to meet the moment.

“The idea of having just one metric to build your whole measurement policy on is a tough sell,” said Michael Lambie, head of global measurement and insights for CreatorIQ.

What Needed to Change

When, over a decade ago, Launchmetrics first proposed its framework for measuring the return on investment of a marketing moment, co-founder and chief executive Michael Jaïs said brands, particularly luxury labels, were not interested. Their reasoning was that with high annual growth, there was no need to prove their marketing ROI — it was clearly working.

That shifted, however, as the need for brands to develop a presence across a variety of digital channels became more important, making it tricky to “increase the budget as fast as the number of touchpoints,” he added. The company rolled out MIV in 2018, to allow brands to get a better sense of the value of a mention in a print magazine compared to a social media post. Different voices, from influencers to traditional media, were given weights. As luxury sales slowed in recent years, Launchmetrics saw more interest as brands looked to better understand how to maximise their marketing budgets.

Today, that pressure has amplified even more — it’s not just about understanding the size of the impact, but the scope, too.

“You can look at two different posts and see identical earned media value, but what happens in the comments … is really … where that blind spot is in EMV,” said Berger.

The justification for attributing a dollar amount to visibility, first intended as a proxy for what a comparable paid placement might cost, has also come under fire. Ascribing a financial outcome to how many people have seen and talked about a campaign is very different from driving actual sales.

Still, it remains a way for marketing and PR teams to justify their budgets.

“That dollar sign sticks around ... because it’s history, it’s a way to make it more tangible,” said Lambie. “It’s psychological.”

Rather than relying too heavily on the dollar amount itself, brands, instead, should focus on how the numbers change over time, or how they measure up in benchmarking reports, added Lambie.

From Buzz to Brand Health

To better equip companies to do so, beginning in September, Launchmetrics will be rolling out new layers in its measurement framework.

The first piece is around brand identity, which captures whether a brand’s target audience understands its personality traits — think intangible qualities like elegance or approachability — as intended. The second, cultural relevance, illustrates the brand’s connection to what is going on in the zeitgeist. Jaïs described the identity facet as tied to a brand’s timelessness, while cultural resonance is about timeliness.

The number of eyeballs, though, is still a factor.

“It’s the measurement of the power of the brand [through] visibility; the historical, universal strength of the brand, which is the identity; and the connection to the audience in terms of the cultural level,” said Jaïs.

Based on these new facets, Launchmetrics can provide AI-based strategic recommendations based on how a brand measures up to its competitive set, and the areas where consumer perception may not match what the brand is hoping to project.

While the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) — which worked with Launchmetrics on MIV’s original 2018 launch — has moved beyond intuiting the impact of a runway show to using MIV to track it, the emotional and cultural effect a show or a collection has during New York Fashion Week remains crucial to establishing connection and ultimately, a business’s longevity, said Marc Karimzadeh, senior director of content and communications for CFDA, in an email.

“Looking ahead, the real opportunity is understanding not just what happened, but why it happened and how brands can build on that momentum,” he said.

Decoding sentiment and how it is tied to a brand’s core attributes will be a key piece of the puzzle. Experimenting with AI in a campaign, for example, may bring an onslaught of negative comments, but what really matters is the specific topics that negativity is tied to — and if that matters for the brand’s identity and target audience.

“The secret of it is to always associate an element of tone with a trait of personality of a brand,” said Jaïs. “It’s not because you got a positive sentiment on something that it really tells you how your narrative is perceived by your target audience.”

CreatorIQ, too, will start taking sentiment analysis into account, and has already begun to roll out a number of other measures, like “SafeIQ,” which assesses a brand’s risk tolerance for different creator partnerships to help them better navigate potential fallout. A scandal, for instance, might cause an initial spike in chatter, but could also lead to a cratering in engagement — a sign of a loss of consumer equity.

“Usually it is a matter of how damaging to a brand’s core tenets something happens to be, so if they’ve partnered with a creator who is just in complete violation of what they stand for as an ethos of that brand,” said Alex Rawitz, director of research and insights at CreatorIQ. “That is something that it can take longer to catch up on.”

Even with these additions, brands still need to dig deeper into additional complementary metrics to get the full story.

If a brand’s top goal is to be conversational, high EMV may be more impactful than for one looking to maintain customer loyalty. At Gap Inc., the team looks at EMV as a measure of brand awareness, but considers click-through rates and sales more important for other areas.

“Some of these more nuanced and interrelated senses of how these metrics interact speaks to the fact that you can’t just look at EMV as a singular number and glean your entire performance from that,” said Rawitz.

Editor’s Note: This article was amended on June 4, 2026, to clarify Launchmetrics’ new measurement layers. MIV remains while cultural relevance and identity will be added as additional measurements.