We are done renting: Why Go Zero will no longer hire influencers

Shah explained that while the company was running around 30 influencer collaborations at a time, it was difficult to measure the return on the money being spent.Photo: Kiran Shah/ LinkedInWhat if a brand decides to stop paying influencers altogether?That's exactly the move ice cream brand Go Zero has made. Its founder, Kiran Shah, has announced that the company is shutting down its influencer marketing budget and will instead invest the same money in hiring full-time content creators to build the brand's own social media presence.Sharing the decision on LinkedIn, Shah said the shift came after a simple question exposed a bigger problem.A SIMPLE QUESTION CHANGED EVERYTHINGAccording to Shah, he asked his team what returns they had received from a paid influencer reel created a few months earlier. "A few months ago, I asked my team a simple question. 'That reel we paid for in March, what did it get us?' Nobody had a clear answer," he wrote.Shah clarified that the issue was not with his team but with the way influencer marketing is often measured. "The way most of us do influencer marketing has no clean answers," he said. He explained that while the company was running around 30 influencer collaborations at a time, it was difficult to measure the return on the money being spent."I could not measure the ROI on my own marketing spend. That is what broke it for me. Not the money. The blindness," Shah added.'WE WERE RENTING ATTENTION'Shah believes the biggest drawback of influencer marketing is that brands do not own the audience they pay to reach."Here is what we were actually doing. Renting. Every month, we were paying rent for attention. The reel sits on someone else's page. Their audience, their followers, their growth. We paid for a visit," he wrote.According to him, once a campaign ends, the long-term benefit largely stays with the creator rather than the brand.LOOKING AT A DIFFERENT MODELBefore taking the decision, Shah said he studied companies that had built their own content teams instead of relying heavily on influencers.He pointed to examples such as Sprout Social, Starbucks and Dell, saying these companies have invested in employee creators and in-house content."The biggest brands in the world are building owned content engines. Most of Indian D2C is still renting," he wrote.HIRING CREATORS INSTEAD OF INFLUENCERSGo Zero has now decided to redirect its influencer marketing budget towards hiring two full-time content creators. "Go Zero is hiring two full-time content creators. One who thinks in Kannada. One who thinks in Hindi. The entire collab budget is now their salaries," Shah said.He added that every piece of content will now be created for the brand's own social media channels."Every reel, made for our channels, owned by us. Every follower earned there stays with us. Every month builds on the last one," he wrote.Instead of asking applicants to submit a rsum, Shah has invited them to create a 30-second reel in Kannada or Hindi promoting Go Zero, post it on LinkedIn and tag the company.He also said the company would publicly share the outcome of this experiment. "If this bet is wrong, you will watch me be wrong," Shah concluded.- EndsPublished By: Jasmine anandPublished On: Jul 28, 2026 16:41 IST