Example of Influencer Marketing: Running Paid Ads From the Creator's Account

Sachin Bhargava, Senior Director of Digital Product and E-commerce at John Hardy, shares a specific influencer marketing scaling tactic drawn from two decades of direct-to-consumer experience across brands like Gilt Group, M.Weldon, and his own venture, Any Baby. The core insight is that posting from an influencer's personal account rather than your branded account reaches a fundamentally different audience, one that follows and trusts the creator on their own terms.

Bhargava argues that an influencer's followers engage with content very differently when it comes from the creator directly, because those followers built a relationship with that person, not your brand. The tactic he points to as a real example of influencer marketing that drove measurable scaling results is using the creator's account to run paid ads, which lets brands break into entirely new audience segments that a branded account simply cannot access.

If you want a concrete, tested playbook for escaping your existing audience bubble, this one is worth the 70 seconds.