What's more valuable: An influencer's reach or a brand's own creator?

When Kiran Shah, founder of the D2C sugar-free ice-cream brand Go Zero, announced on LinkedIn that he was shutting down the company's influencer marketing budget entirely and redirecting that money to hire two full-time in-house creators, he probably did not expect the post to turn into an industry referendum. But that is exactly what happened. Within days, marketers, creator-economy founders and agency heads across the country were arguing over a question that has been simmering under the surface of Indian advertising for a while now: when a brand builds its own creator instead of renting someone else's, is it making a smarter long-term bet, or trading away the one thing influencer marketing was built to deliver in the first place, an audience it does not already own.

Shah's post read like a confession as much as a strategy note. Go Zero was running close to 30 influencer collaborations at a time, and when he asked his team what a specific paid reel from March had actually delivered for the brand, nobody had a clean answer. That gap, between spend and attribution, is what pushed him to redirect the entire influencer budget towards the salaries of two full-time creators, one making content in Hindi and the other in Kannada, both producing exclusively for Go Zero's own channels. Shah's framing was blunt: paying a creator for a single collaboration is renting attention, since the reel, the followers and the algorithmic goodwill it builds stay on someone else's page once the contract ends. Building an in-house creator, by his logic, means every video adds to an asset the brand actually owns.

It is not an idea unique to Indian D2C. Global majors such as Starbucks and Dell have both experimented with employee-led or brand-owned content programmes in the past. But for a category as influencer-dependent as India's direct-to-consumer space, Go Zero's move counts as a genuine provocation, and it forces the wider industry to confront a tension that has been building for a couple of years now. As influencer marketing has matured in India and acquisition costs on the platform side have climbed, brands are increasingly asking whether that spend buys them something they could not, over time, build for themselves.

Renting vs owning attention
Strip away the sentiment around Shah's post, and the debate underneath it is really about arithmetic. For a brand running dozens of paid collaborations a month, every reel is a fresh negotiation, a fresh production cost and a fresh, often unclear, return. An in-house creator flips that structure: the upfront investment is heavier (salaries, equipment, a content pipeline) but the marginal cost of each additional video trends towards zero, and the audience being built compounds on a channel the brand controls. That is a calculation Shradha Agarwal, Co-Founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, a full-service digital and marketing agency, believes brands are already running with increasing precision.

“Ultimately, it is a numbers game,” Agarwal said. “Today, brands look at influencer marketing through metrics such as cost per view, reach and, further down the funnel, cost per sale. Influencers initially offered a way to get both content and reach, but brands are increasingly putting paid media behind influencer content anyway. So, the question becomes: can I create the same reach at a lower cost in-house? If I take four creators in-house and build the entire production system around them, and my cost per view drops significantly, then it starts making more sense for the brand.”

Agarwal's point echoes a shift the industry has already lived through once before. The move from expensive celebrity brand ambassadors to influencers, a decade or so ago, was driven by exactly this kind of cost logic, and she sees the current pivot towards in-house creators as its natural sequel. The scale of that earlier shift is itself instructive. According to the EY-Collective Artists Network report, State Of Influencer Marketing In India, the category was estimated to grow from roughly ₹2,344 crore in 2024 to about ₹Rs 3,375 crore by 2026, expanding at a compound annual rate in the high teens. Separate estimates from creator marketplace Kofluence place 2025 spends in a similar ₹3,000 to ₹Rs 3,500 crore range, with the market expected to climb towards ₹4,500 to ₹5,000 crore by 2027. Budgets of that size inevitably invite the kind of scrutiny Agarwal is describing, and that scrutiny is precisely what is now pushing some brands to ask whether renting reach makes sense when it can, in theory, be built.

Why brands are rethinking ownership
Agencies that sit closer to the creator economy's plumbing tend to see the shift less as a replacement and more as a rebalancing. Ambarish Sengupta, VP at Hypothesis, Only Much Louder's creator marketing business vertical, argues that in-house and external creators are, in practice, built to solve different problems for a brand, and that conflating the two misreads what is actually happening in the market.

“Building in-house creators can absolutely be a more sustainable long-term strategy, but only if the expectation isn’t that they’ll replace external creators,” Sengupta said. “They solve different problems. In-house creators help brands build a deeper, more consistent relationship with their audience over time, while independent creators bring something that’s much harder to build in-house: cultural credibility and communities that already trust them.”

That distinction, between consistency and credibility, is where Go Zero's own admission becomes relevant. Even as it builds its in-house team, the brand has acknowledged that distribution on an owned channel takes time to grow, and that brand-created content still has to compete for attention against entertainment, creator-led storytelling, and the same platform algorithms that reward external creators in the first place. Owning the asset does not automatically mean owning the audience.

The case for reach still makes
On the other side of the argument sit those who see authenticity, not just cost, as the harder thing to replicate in-house. Sneh Chheda, Associate Vice President at Schbang Fluence, the influencer and creator marketing vertical of the advertising agency Schbang, is far more sceptical that an owned creator can ever fully substitute for what an external voice brings to a brand.

“Frankly, I don’t think building in-house creators can become more sustainable than relying on external influencers,” Chheda said. “The primary purpose of influencer marketing is the authenticity of the creator and their voice. If you have someone onboarded as an in-house content creator, you will have better control over the content, creative, and how things are communicated. But the authenticity of that voice ceases to exist because the consumer knows that this is a brand talking to them and not an individual. From a consumer behaviour standpoint, an in-house creator will essentially become another brand asset, rather than delivering the authenticity that an external influencer can bring.”

Consumers, in other words, are not naive about who is speaking. The moment a face becomes a payroll employee, the parasocial trust that made influencer content work in the first place starts to thin out, even if the production values improve.

Two roads, not one
“Another important factor is reach,” Chheda added. “With an in-house creator, you are largely talking to people who already follow the brand. Influencers, on the other hand, bring their own audiences and can introduce a brand to consumers who may not have even heard of it. That ability to reach newer audiences is a huge merit, especially for a new brand that wants to build awareness across a broader consumer base. So, having a diversity and plethora of external creators can help brands expand their reach while also retaining the authenticity that influencer marketing is built around.”

This is, in effect, the reach-versus-depth split that Sengupta had flagged earlier, and he sees it accelerating rather than resolving in either direction. Brands, he argues, are simply getting more disciplined about which lever they are pulling and why.

“Nowadays, brands are becoming far more rigorous about ROI and asking tougher questions about what kind of creator investments deliver long-term value,” Sengupta said. “That will likely lead to greater investment in owned creator ecosystems, but not at the expense of external creators. I don’t think this will be an either-or choice. It will be about understanding where owned creators create depth, where independent creators bring reach and relevance, and building a creator strategy that makes room for both.”

Agarwal's read of where influencer marketing is headed adds a sharper edge to that argument. If, as she suggests, the category's original selling points of trust and consideration have already eroded under the weight of mandatory paid-partnership disclosures, then what brands are really buying today is closer to reach alone, and reach is precisely the kind of metric that an efficient in-house engine can start to compete on.

“Influencers were earlier used to drive consideration, trust and affinity towards a brand, but that role has increasingly come down to generating reach,” Agarwal said. “Consumers today may watch an influencer’s video and become aware of a product, but they are not necessarily going to buy it simply because that influencer recommended it. Once influencer marketing becomes a reach play primarily, brands can recalculate it on cost per reach. And with paid collaborations now clearly disclosed, the trust and consideration angle becomes even weaker because consumers know the content is an advertisement. So, if an in-house creator can deliver comparable reach and content at a lower cost, there is a strong economic case for brands to build that capability themselves.”

What is crystallising, once the LinkedIn theatre around Go Zero's move settles, is not a clean win for either side. The industry is not converging on in-house creators replacing influencers, nor is it dismissing Shah's experiment as a stunt. It is splitting the job in two. Ownership buys consistency, cost efficiency over time, and a channel that compounds in value with every video. Outreach buys credibility and access to communities a brand has not yet earned on its own. For creative-side agencies and brand teams watching this play out, the near-term brief is probably less about choosing a side and more about being honest about which problem, depth or discovery, they are actually trying to solve before they write the cheque.