He claimed that brands pay for temporary exposure on someone else’s social media account, but once the campaign ends, the audience and followers remain with the influencer, not the brand.
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(Also read: Influencers are new architects of consumer trust)
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“Today, I am shutting down our influencer marketing budget at Go Zero,” announced the founder of Go Zero, a company that manufactures sugar-free, low-calorie ice creams.
To explain the reason behind his decision, Shah cited the example of a creator video that was posted in March.
Shah said nobody on his team had a clear answer, not because they were unaware, but because of the way influencer marketing is typically measured.
“Nobody had a clear answer. Not because my team is unaware, but because the way most of us do influencer marketing has no clean answers,” he wrote.
According to Shah, Go Zero was running around 30 influencer collaborations simultaneously, but he still could not accurately measure the return on the company’s marketing spend.
“We were running 30 collabs at a time. Pitch, negotiate, ship, chase, repeat. Main woh banda hoon jo har city ka sales data daily track karta hai. And I could not measure the ROI on my own marketing spend,” he said.
Shah said the problem was not the money being spent, but the lack of visibility into what those campaigns actually delivered.
“That is what broke it for me. Not the money. The blindness,” he wrote.
He went on to compare influencer marketing with renting attention rather than owning it.
“Because here is what we were actually doing. Renting. Har mahine attention ka rent. Aur mahina khatam toh sab khatam,” Shah said. “The reel sits on someone else’s page. Their audience, their followers, their growth. We paid for a visit,” he added.
Shah said his decision was influenced by companies that have invested in building their own content teams instead of relying heavily on influencers.
He pointed to Sprout Social, claiming that employee creators made up less than 8% of the company’s content last year but drove almost 30% of its video impressions, with that share growing 680% in a year.
He also cited Starbucks, which hired two full-time content creators on year-long salaries, including one who had previously worked as a barista, and Dell, which has trained nearly 1,200 employees to post content across 84 countries.
“The biggest brands in the world are building owned content engines. Most of Indian D2C is still renting,” Shah wrote.
Instead of spending on influencer collaborations, Shah said Go Zero will hire two full-time content creators, with one producing content in Kannada and the other in Hindi.
“So we are done renting. Go Zero is hiring 2 full-time content creators. One who thinks in Kannada. One who thinks in Hindi. The entire collab budget is now their salaries,” he wrote.
“Every reel, made for our channels, owned by us. Every follower earned there stays with us. Every month builds on the last one,” Shah added.
Shah said he plans to publicly track the outcome of the experiment.
“And I will post the results here, quarter by quarter. If this bet is wrong, you will watch me be wrong,” he concluded.
(Also read: Couple quit ₹35 LPA tech jobs for content creation, earned over ₹1 crore in just one year)
