The hardest number in creator commerce right now may be the one beauty brands cannot see. Ashley Banks of Iced Media, an agency working in the beauty space, has gone on record with Net Influencer arguing that most beauty brands are measuring creator commerce incorrectly — a claim that cuts directly at how affiliate and influencer programs assign credit, set commission rates and justify budget.

Banks's argument lands at a moment when beauty brands are shifting meaningful spend into creator-driven distribution. Performance marketers know the mechanics: a brand runs a hybrid deal — flat fee plus rev-share — with dozens or hundreds of creators, then reads the results through affiliate-network dashboards that count last-click conversions inside a fixed cookie window. If the measurement layer is broken, every downstream decision inherits the error. Commissions get set too low for channels that actually drive demand. Creators who open the funnel get paid nothing because a retargeting ad collects the last click. Budget flows to the wrong partners.

That is the practical stake in Banks's critique, even before the interview's specifics. Misattribution in creator commerce is not an abstract analytics problem; it is a payout problem. Under a CPA structure, a creator whose content initiates a purchase journey but loses the final click earns zero. Under rev-share, the same dynamic applies, just spread across a percentage of revenue the creator never sees. Hybrid deals partially hedge this by guaranteeing a flat fee, but they also obscure performance truth: when the fixed payment dominates, neither the brand nor the creator learns what the content actually drove.

Beauty is a fitting vertical for this argument. Purchase cycles in cosmetics and skincare tend to involve research, repeat viewing and multiple touchpoints — a tutorial watched on one platform, a review read on another, a promo code entered days later. A short attribution window, common in affiliate programs, structurally disadvantages creators at the top of that journey. The category also skews toward repeat purchase, which means lifetime-value calculations, not single-transaction CPA, may be the more honest measure of a creator's contribution. None of this is new to performance marketers who ran similar arguments during the coupon-site and cashback attribution wars of the last decade. The creator-commerce version repeats the debate at larger scale.

What remains unresolved, on the evidence of the headline alone, is what measurement model Banks proposes in its place. Industry alternatives include multi-touch attribution, promo-code and link-based tracking independent of cookies, post-purchase surveys, and holdout testing that compares exposed audiences against control groups. Each carries tradeoffs in cost, sample size requirements and vendor bias — a point worth holding onto when any platform or network markets its own attribution product as the fix. A network selling last-click measurement has little incentive to fund research that discredits it.

For affiliate and partnerships teams at beauty brands, the interview is a prompt to interrogate current terms: cookie duration, attribution window, whether creator commissions match the value of assisted conversions, and whether dashboards distinguish initiator from closer. For creators negotiating deals, it is leverage — an argument for hybrid structures and longer cookie windows backed by the argument that measurement, not performance, is what their numbers undersell.

The full interview with Banks, published by Net Influencer, details her diagnosis and prescriptions for beauty brands rebuilding their creator-commerce measurement.