I think it's like all new marketing tactics though. They see the rest of the industry throwing money at "influencers" and try to find some of their own. If they miss they for sure don't want it to be because they didn't spend as much as their competitors so they throw probably too much money at influencers without defining a) the criteria of an influencer ("Casey Neistat is huge, find me another one! And send him 18 of our thing to see if he shows it!") and b) how to measure the ROI from it.
It's not dissimilar from the credit card companies giving affiliate links out to everyone during the beginning of our little hobby and, now that they've been able to get some more analytics around everything, have curtailed it to very few bloggers who send them the most profitable customers.