When Kiran Shah, the founder of Go Zero, posted on LinkedIn that he was shifting the company’s influencer marketing budget to hire two in-house content creators, it sparked intense discussion across India’s creator economy.
Shah criticised the corporate reliance on renting attention, in which companies pay for a single reel and receive an increase in views before having to repeat the process. Instead, he suggested that companies should fund artists who are able to create their own distribution channels.
The post rapidly went viral, prompting the audience to question whether influencer marketing itself was the core issue or if another element cause it. In reality, however, Go Zero discontinued influencer marketing because team lacked the ability to track its Return on Investment (ROI).
However, this breakdown in measurement was not evidence that the marketing channel was fundamentally flawed; rather, it demonstrated that their internal tracking methodology might have failed.
Consequently, the company committed to employing just two full-time, in-house creators, one dedicated to Hindi and the other to Kannada. Go Zero plans to confine its video production entirely to its own official social media profiles.
Instead of giving long-term profit to outside influencers, the brand makes sure that each new follower and view directly adds value for Go Zero.
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So what is ROI, and how can brands measure it?
ROI measures the profit or loss made on an investment compared to how much it cost. Brands measure it by tracking core metrics like financial return, customer lifetime value, and conversion tracking.
For marketing or campaign ROI, they track revenue directly related to a campaign using tools like promo codes, UTM links, or attribution software, then subtract the campaign’s costs, often comparing results against a control period or A/B test to isolate the actual impact.
Channel-specific ROI looks at individual platforms: paid ads are typically measured through Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS, comparing spend to revenue generated, while email ROI weighs platform and content costs against revenue from email-driven conversions.
Social and content marketing are trickier to measure directly, so brands often rely on proxy metrics like engagement and traffic that feed into downstream conversion rates.
Measuring ROI is difficult because customers often interact with multiple touchpoints before converting, making it hard to credit the right channel. Some investments, like brand building or SEO, take months or years to pay off, creating a time lag between spend and return.
This is where Go Zero fails. The company started its paid social media strategy primarily through partnerships with external micro-influencers and multi-creator collaborations.
At any one time, Go Zero was running campaigns with up to 30 creators. Yet, when internal sales data failed to provide ROI or sustainable brand recall linked back to individual sponsored reels, founder Kiran Shah halted all paid collaborations with creators.
The trackability gap in quick-commerce
Shah noted that despite tracking daily sales data across every city, his team could not cleanly answer what a specific paid reel from months prior actually delivered in revenue.
The internal time spent pitching, negotiating, shipping products, and following up yielded plenty of views but zero clear data tying those views back to quick-commerce sales
Once a campaign ended, the audience, followers, and long-term engagement stayed on the influencer’s page, leaving Go Zero with no permanent marketing asset to show for its money.
This decision sparked a debate among Indian D2C marketers. While many founders empathised with Go Zero’s frustration over vanity metrics (likes and views), marketing argue that influencer marketing isn’t broken; measurement is broken.
Without proper tracking, influencer marketing appears to fail.
When it comes to knowing if influencer ads are actually worth the money for a food brand like Go Zero, the truth is that most inputs come from companies that want to spend more on ads. Even so, the data can still be helpful.
The real issue is food brands like Go Zero don’t sell through a website link. Someone sees a reel, then buys the product at a store or on Instacart days later, so normal “click and buy” tracking misses it entirely. It’s not that nothing happened; it’s that nothing was visible.
The fix isn’t dropping influencers; it’s better tracking (like comment-to-cart links or checking if sales rise in cities where creators posted). Go Zero skipped that step and went straight to cutting the channel.
6 metrics brands should actually track
To actually measure influencer marketing properly, brands need to track a few things together, not just one. First, give every creator’s individual post its own tracking link, not one link for the whole campaign, but one per reel, so you know exactly which piece of content drove what.
Second, give each creator a unique promo code and match that code’s usage directly to sales data. Third, use pixel tracking to follow the actual path: did someone click from the reel, land on the product page, and then buy, or drop off somewhere along the way?
Fourth, check for delayed impact: do people who started following a creator come back and buy later, even if they didn’t click anything that day, since food and grocery purchases often don’t happen instantly? Fifth, compare influencer results side by side with paid social, email, and organic search over the same time period, so you can actually tell which channel is doing the real work rather than assuming.
And finally, review the content itself, and figure out which specific reels, messages, or product angles actually moved people, because most brands skip this step and end up wrongly concluding that “influencers don’t work”, when really only some of the content underperformed.
The bottom line is that if a brand isn’t at least doing the first three of these, it isn’t really measuring influencer marketing; it’s guessing and calling it data.
Where creator campaigns go wrong
Go Zero’s real problem wasn’t the channel; it was execution. Sending the same script to 30 creators just multiplies one weak message instead of testing different angles.
Picking creators by follower count instead of relevance also hurts; a smaller, highly engaged food creator usually beats a huge but mismatched influencer. Timing matters too: one random reel in March does little, but several reels spaced out over weeks builds real momentum.
And forcing a hard sell kills authenticity; the best results usually come from creators giving a genuine “I actually love this” recommendation, not a scripted pitch. So the issue was never that influencer marketing doesn’t work; it’s that running it this way was never going to work.
The shift to in-house creators: Renting vs. Owning
Hiring full-time only works if the brand already has an audience to show the content to; owned content doesn’t generate discovery on day one.
Starbucks and Dell both bet on employee-driven content instead of renting influencer audiences. Starbucks hired two full-time creators on 12-month contracts, one an existing barista and one brought in from outside, to build content from within the brand itself.
Dell went bigger: it trained nearly 1,200 employees across 84 countries to create content, turning its own workforce into a global creator network. Both approaches trade the short-term reach of paid influencers for something that compounds over time: content and audiences the brand actually owns, rather than “renting” attention that disappears once the campaign ends.
