Assistant Professor Andreas Bayerl from Erasmus School of Economics is awarded the H. Paul Root Award for his paper "Revenue Generation Through Influencer Marketing", which was published in the Journal of Marketing in 2024. The award is cosponsored by the American Marketing Association (AMA) and the Marketing Science Institute (MSI).
According to the selection committee, Andreas Bayerl’ paper, together with co-authors Maximilian Beichert (Bocconi University), Andreas Lanz (University of Basel) and Jacob Goldenberg (Reichman University), has made a significant contribution to the advancement of the practice of marketing.
Beyond likes and shares: a data-driven case for ROI-focused influencer marketing
Bayerl and his co-authors utilise a large-scale proprietary dataset on influencer-driven sales across multiple platforms, complemented by a series of field experiments, to evaluate the revenue impact of influencer marketing. In contrast to prior research that primarily focuses on engagement metrics, this study shifts the emphasis to actual sales performance. Notably, the authors find, contrary to conventional wisdom, that smaller influencers deliver significantly higher returns on investment (ROI) from direct sales campaigns than their more prominent counterparts. The findings have real-world implications, especially given that influencer marketing expenditures are projected to reach $39.33 billion in 2025.
As such, the paper demonstrates measurable and substantial influence on marketing practice and can be widely adopted by practitioners. Furthermore, the paper is written in a clear, engaging manner that makes complex ideas accessible to practitioners. There is already initial evidence of the widespread impact of this work. As of March 2025, the paper has already accumulated over 32,000 downloads, 61 citations on Google Scholar, and 269 Mendeley readers. It also ranks in the top 4% of research outputs tracked by Altmetric.
About Andreas Bayerl
Andreas Bayerl is an assistant professor in the Department of Business Economics at Erasmus School of Economics. He earned a PhD in Quantitative Marketing from University of Mannheim. His research bridges digital behaviour, marketing analytics, and real-world business impact. With publications in Journal of Marketing, HBR, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Nature Human Behavior, Bayerl’s work blends big data, text analysis, and experimental methods to decode digital consumer behaviour.
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Andreas Bayerl and his co-authors will be honoured at the 2025 AMA Summer Academic Conference, August 22–24 in Chicago. A nice read is this “Research in a Nutshell” article which Bayerl wrote for Backbone, the corporate magazine of Erasmus School of Economics.
For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, mobile phone: +31 6 53 641 846.
