Why brands are choosing to own content and rent influence

For years, brands have paid influencers to borrow something they struggle to build themselves: an audience that listens. Now, some marketers are reconsidering whether to keep renting this attention or invest in cultivating their own loyal following. 

Go Zero founder Kiran Shah recently decided to redirect the brand’s influencer marketing budget toward hiring full-time content creators, raising a broader question: are brands moving away from influencer marketing or simply becoming more strategic in how they use it?

From influencer budgets to sharper objectives

Kalyan Kumar, CEO of KlugKlug, an influencer marketing platform, believes brands are not abandoning influencer marketing but becoming more critical about its role.

“Are brands stopping influencer marketing spends? No. They’re just figuring out the right way to do it,” he says.

According to Kumar, the problem is often not the medium but the way brands approach it. Influencer campaigns need to be mapped to specific objectives across the funnel rather than judged purely on views, engagement or coupon-code sales.

Echoing Kumar’s point about aligning campaigns with specific objectives, Viren Sean Noronha, co-founder of The New Thing, a social and culture marketing agency, adds that the industry needs greater clarity on what each collaboration is expected to deliver. He notes that a campaign aimed at driving sales should not be evaluated using the same metrics as one focused on generating earned media or building brand affinity.

Noronha believes that going forward budgets will increasingly be split more strategically, with separate allocations for lead generation, brand building, affiliate programmes and other outcomes.

Owned content can’t replace an influencer’s audience

The biggest limitation of an in-house creator model, according to the experts, is distribution.

Aman Gupta, head of marketing at Farmley, a healthy snacking brand, explains the company has always had an in-house content team alongside external writers, producers and directors. However, Farmley values influencers not mainly for their content creation skills, but for the communities they bring.

Gupta sees owned content and influencers play distinct, complementary roles within a brand’s marketing strategy. An in-house team can provide agility, consistency and a deeper understanding of the brand, while influencers bring established communities, credibility and reach.

Ragini Hariharan, marketing director for beauty and personal care at Himalaya Wellness, also views owned content and influencer marketing as mutually supportive channels, rather than competitors.

“Owned content gives us a consistent, always-on voice to educate and build the brand on our own terms, while influencers give us something owned content structurally cannot – access to communities that already trust the person recommending the product,” she says.

(L-R) Kalyan Kumar, Ragini Hariharan, Viren Sean Noronha, Aman Gupta

Noronha is more direct about the reach challenge. Even if a brand hires creators, he says, their content is unlikely to generate the same engagement on a brand page as it would on the creator’s own page.

“If I am a fashion creator independently, I can talk about 35 brands and rank them however I want. But I cannot do that if I am working for one fashion company,” he says, adding that being employed by a brand can also affect perceived credibility.

The emerging model: own the content, rent the reach

Rather than completely replacing influencers, Farmley sees a hybrid model emerging.

The brand works with different types of creators depending on the objective: niche and micro-influencers for organic word of mouth and celebrities or macro-influencers when scale and trust are required.

Himalaya, meanwhile, says it is working with fewer creators but more deliberately, prioritising audience overlap, relevance and the ability to influence business outcomes over follower count.

“Follower count stopped being the deciding factor a while ago,” says Hariharan.

Kumar goes a step further, arguing that emerging, smaller creators can often be more credible than large influencers who are seen as overly commercialised. He believes brands should constantly seek out fresh talent instead of relying on the same well-known influencers for every campaign.

Should brands hire creators or build the influencer “brain”?

This is where Kumar differs most sharply from Go Zero’s approach.

While Shah is reallocating the influencer marketing budget to hire two full-time content creators, Kumar argues that brands would benefit more by developing their own in-house influencer marketing teams.

“In-house is the influencer marketing effort, not the influencer,” he says.

He explains that brands should have in-house teams who understand the business, its consumers, and the strategic role of influencer marketing, while still bringing in external creators as needed for specific campaigns and target audiences.

Noronha questions whether hiring full-time content creators truly addresses the core issue identified by Shah. 

“If he were not able to measure ROI, I don’t know how having two influencers in-house is going to solve his ROI problem,” he says.

He believes long-term creator partnerships could offer the benefits of familiarity and consistency without making creators full-time employees. Such partnerships also give brands the flexibility to refresh their creator roster.

From one-off posts to longer partnerships

The industry does, however, appear to be moving away from purely transactional creator relationships.

Farmley says longer-term partnerships can help creators understand the brand better and make their communication more natural. One-off collaborations remain valuable, especially for experimenting with new audiences and formats. However, creators who prove successful can then be nurtured into long-term partnerships.

Noronha suggests that D2C brands allocate 50–60% of their influencer marketing budget to long-term content partnerships, and reserve 30–40% for discovering new creators. This approach can help brands maintain a steady flow of emerging talent rather than depending on a static group of influencers.

This strategy also tackles a key issue raised by Kumar: too many brands rely on a limited group of familiar influencers, despite the vast pool of emerging creators who could be just as relevant and effective.

“You can’t measure everything through one link, one UTM or one coupon code,” he explains.

Noronha believes the next shift could be towards performance-linked creator partnerships, with brands tying incentives or bonuses to how content performs. As influencer marketing matures, he expects creators to have more “skin in the game” rather than being treated simply as vendors paid per Reel.