Viraj Sheth just made "doom-scrolling" an actual job title. At Monk Entertainment, the influencer marketing company he co-founded with Ranveer Allahbadia, better known as BeerBiceps, the role involves spending hours on Instagram and YouTube tracking memes, trends and emerging internet culture. It sounds like a stunt. It is actually a pretty good window into how Monk-E thinks about its business.

Because if your job is helping brands figure out what people will care about next week, knowing what the internet is obsessed with today isn't a distraction from the job. It is the job. And Sheth is trying to institutionalize it.

For most influencer campaigns, trend-spotting is difficult to separate from the rest of the work. Account managers speak to brands, campaign teams identify creators, creators produce content, and everyone keeps half an eye on what's trending. But the person watching Instagram at 11:30 PM because a meme might become relevant tomorrow usually isn't sitting inside a line item called "cultural intelligence."

Sheth is essentially asking: what if it was? Instead of treating internet culture as background knowledge, Monk-E is turning it into an explicit function. That distinction matters because influencer marketing is increasingly less about simply finding someone with a large following. The creator is only one part of the equation. The other part is timing. A brand can work with the right creator and still produce a forgettable campaign if the content arrives after the moment has passed. For a company sitting between brands and creators, being early to a cultural shift becomes commercially useful in a way that's hard to fake after the fact.

The doom-scroller role isn't the first time Sheth has tried to turn an unconventional internet behaviour into a recruiting advantage. For recent creator hiring, he used Instagram itself as the top of the funnel, posting a video asking people to comment if they wanted to join Monk-E and explain why. The response reportedly crossed 62,000 comments. Instead of treating that volume as a problem to manage, Monk-E treated it as a talent pool and spent months narrowing the applicants down.

It's a very Monk-E way of recruiting: the company lives on the internet, so why shouldn't the internet also be its hiring funnel? That same logic sits behind the doom-scroller role. If discovering a creator, meme or cultural shift before everyone else can influence how a campaign performs, then someone should be responsible for doing exactly that, not occasionally, but professionally.

The viral job description would be easy to dismiss if Monk-E were a small agency looking for attention. It isn't. Monk-E says it has worked on more than 10,000 campaigns, generated 85B+ views, works with 200+ brands, and exclusively represents more than 120 creators, with a client list that includes Apple, Flipkart, Zomato and Nykaa. Sheth co-founded the company with Ranveer Allahbadia in 2018, and it has since been covered by Financial Express, Hindustan Times and The Hindu, with Sheth himself named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia. That's not a small-agency press footprint. It's the footprint of a company that has made cultural relevance part of its own product.

If "cultural timing" is the pitch, the clearest evidence isn't a job title, it's what Monk-E has actually shipped. Take Xoom Patrol, a six-episode scooter-driven travel series made for Hero MotoCorp, built around creator Vineeth Kumar and a cast of riders across six Indian destinations. Or Pragati Ke Rang, made for Asian Paints, which paired regional YouTube creators like Ankit Baiyanpuria with rural communities to document real village makeovers using the brand's product, an idea built specifically for markets outside the usual metro-first influencer playbook. Or Style My Space, produced for Urban Company, where celebrity friends swap homes and get them redone using the brand's own services.

None of these are traditional influencer posts. They're branded shows, built to run as content in their own right rather than as a one-off collaboration. That's the actual answer to the differentiation question. Any agency can put a brand logo on a creator's video. Building a six-episode IP that a brand's name is structurally embedded into is a different, harder thing to replicate.

This is also where Monk-E's evolution becomes important. The company didn't remain a pure talent-management business. Its current offering stretches across influencer marketing, talent management, digital IPs and production through Monk-E Studios. That expansion makes strategic sense: if you already represent creators, you can help brands find them; if you already manage campaigns, you can produce the content; if you're producing content, you can build larger digital properties; and if you understand creators and brands from both sides, you can potentially build IP rather than just execute individual campaigns. The business starts looking less like a traditional influencer agency and more like infrastructure around the creator economy. That's a much bigger opportunity, and also a much harder business to operate.

The interesting thing about Viraj Sheth's doom-scroller isn't that he's paying people to use Instagram. It's that he's betting cultural timing can be institutionalized. When every agency can approach the same creators, the scarce resource may not be access to the creator. It may be knowing what that creator, and the audience around them, should be talking about next, early enough to build something like Xoom Patrol or Pragati Ke Rang around it instead of just posting about it.

A viral job title gets attention for a week. A slate of branded IPs that brands keep coming back to fund is the harder thing to build, and the thing that actually compounds. The company has already built distribution, creators, brands, production capabilities and cultural relevance. The question now is whether it keeps stacking IPs that outlast a single campaign cycle, or whether the doom-scroller ends up being the most memorable thing it ever built. Because the next version of the creator economy won't just be about who gets the most views. It will be about who owns the infrastructure around those views.

Sources: Monk-E (monk-e.in), Exchange4Media