Go Zero, the healthy ice cream brand, is overhauling its marketing strategy by shutting down its influencer marketing budget and investing instead in an in-house content team. Founder Kiran Shah announced the decision in a LinkedIn post, calling traditional influencer collaborations difficult to measure and unsustainable for long-term brand building.
Explaining the rationale behind the move, Shah said the turning point came when he asked his team about the return on investment (ROI) from a paid influencer reel created earlier this year.
“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. 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 had been managing around 30 influencer collaborations simultaneously, involving pitching creators, negotiating deals, shipping products and following up on deliverables. Despite closely monitoring sales performance across cities, he said he was unable to directly measure the impact of the brand’s influencer spending.
“That is what broke it for me. Not the money. The blindness,” he added.
Shah argued that most influencer marketing functions as “renting attention,” where brands pay for visibility on creators’ platforms without building lasting audience assets of their own.
“The reel sits on someone else’s page. Their audience, their followers, their growth. We paid for a visit,” he said.
To support his decision, Shah pointed to examples of global companies shifting towards owned content strategies. He cited Sprout Social, where employee-generated content reportedly accounted for less than 8% of content but drove nearly 30% of video impressions last year, with its share growing by 680% year-on-year. He also referenced Starbucks, which hired two full-time content creators, including one former barista, and Dell, which has trained nearly 1,200 employees across 84 countries to create and share branded content.
Drawing a comparison with the Indian direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecosystem, Shah said many brands continue to rely heavily on rented reach instead of building their own content engines.
As part of the new strategy, Go Zero will hire two full-time content creator, one focused on Kannada content and the other on Hindi. Shah said the salaries for these roles would come directly from the brand’s former influencer marketing budget.
