of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
Parasocial media is redefining how, where, and why we engage with content. Typically created by an individual voice, an author, founder, or executive, who speaks directly to their audience, this new wave of media has no editorial barriers and no super-strict style calls to hold creators back.
This intimate, one-to-one fodder creates something magical in the media world, which is growing more crowded and jaded by the day, according to Ben Dietz, Founder of Rangelife and Publisher of [SIC] Weekly: “It allows the audience to form a relationship that is direct, emotional, and longstanding, which is consistent and therefore meaningful, valuable and, the thesis goes, is monetizable.”
This flywheel effect makes Substack equally valuable to both readers and writers, which is why it has exceeded 20 million monthly active subscribers and more than 5 million paid subscriptions. The innate, continuous cycle of engagement is also why brands are eager to hop on the bandwagon. Because they are realizing that their typical marketing playbook is no longer speaking the customer’s language.
In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, UK, and AUS/NZ, Future Commerce found that consumers were no longer motivated by transnational, push marketing messages. In fact, 55% of respondents said they would unsubscribe from a brand they typically liked if they received too many marketing messages. While there’s undoubtedly still a place for personalized deals, offers, and product recommendations, Substack offers solace in the chaos. A destination for organic storytelling and exploration that is the antithesis of social networks, which now have the primary objective of nudging consumers closer to product pages and checkout carts.
Substack is where a brand can truly come alive, showcasing how community and culture influence their reason for being.
Substack is Closing Social Media’s Authenticity Gap
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok all have their own reasons for being. TikTok, at its core, is an entertainment platform, while Pinterest’s bread and butter is visual discovery, curation, and, in some cases, ideation. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have become mass megaphones, where brands, creators, and everyday consumers alike can blast their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to specific audiences, whether that be their close friends and family or a broader audience with particular interests.
Substack, however, is designed to give all voices access to content tools and community features that help them create and connect meaningfully. For consumers, that means greater access and autonomy. With overall trust in news sources in significant decline globally, Substack offers a more flexible and open forum that allows creators and subscribers to take control of the media they create and consume. As a result, the platform has achieved a relatively equal split between male (50.43%) and female (49.57%) users, with an audience that skews towards emerging professionals, whose wallet share is growing. Specifically, 24% of users are 25 to 34 years old, while nearly 12% are in the 18-24 demographic.
It is why even companies as large as Shopify, enterprises with robust marketing, PR, and comms teams, are using it as a vehicle to connect on a much deeper level. A way to own their messaging yet remix it in a way that reflects the real-time, meme-ified mode in which the emerging community of consumers, investors, and merchants exchange information.
Brands, meanwhile, have access to a palette of storytelling tools that help them weave richer narratives about their products and people; lore that has shaped who they are and their reason for being. Some, like Free People, have successfully tapped established Substack creators, such as Emily Sundberg, via her newsletter, Feed Me, to run paid partnerships. Other brands, however, are using Substack to build their own editorial platforms to curate content and experiences from their internal and external communities.
Lifestyle-oriented content and narrative-driven content help brand and marketing teams break free from jargon-laden product marketing content. Comments, chat features, and Substack Notes provide direct lines of communication between brands and their communities, as well as opportunities for bite-sized content that entertains, engages, and attracts new followers.
Niche brands that have built rich creative worlds around their brands are especially seeing value in the platform. Saie Beauty, which uses Substack to share announcements, trending tips, and even community insights, reported a 20% month-over-month growth in subscribers, attributed to consistent publishing and cross-promotion. Its name, From the Saie Office, clearly communicates what it’s meant to be: a love letter of sorts from the team to its fans. Women's apparel and workwear brand M.M.LaFleur also reported a 280% increase in Substack-driven sales in a recent period, with revenue per story consistently rising. To serve its audience of professional women, THE—M—DASH focuses on providing how-to styling content and work-appropriate fashion advice.
The Creator Connection
In many cases, Substack also helps bridge the connection between brands and the voices their consumers love. For example, Casey Lewis has become an authority on all things youth culture, starting as an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine, and eventually founding a Gen Z-oriented media company that was later acquired. Now, her popular Substack, After School, provides her with a forum to explore youth culture and expand her reach to other creators, curious consumers, and, yes, even brands. She recently served as the guest editor for American Eagle’s Substack, Off the Cuff, which offered trend insights, analysis, and her distinct POV on the AE subculture.
“The best thing to do is to align yourself with writers or creators who have a point of view that your brand feels they can align with as well,” Lewis said. “It's just like if you're talking to a Fortune 500 company about their social media and you're like, ‘you need to be funnier and more candid and more personable on TikTok.’ And they're like, ‘We're Clorox. We don't know how to be more personable on TikTok.’ Align yourself with creators who are brand safe but who can flex their personality.”
Brands can even tap into their employees to be those creator voices. The RealReal Substack features a core brand “persona” in the form of The RealGirl, while different contributors share their personal musings on brands and trends they love.
Nike, which quietly launched its Substack a few months back, takes a slightly different approach. In the Margins is arguably not a branded Substack. Instead, it is a vehicle for curating and elevating voices in sports writing. The bi-weekly publication is merely “made possible by Nike,” not driven by it, which, honestly, makes it all the more compelling.
The Power of a Consistent, Credible Voice
American Eagle saw Substack as a testing ground to understand the platform and the community, according to Lewis. But if brands plan to invest in the platform, she believes they need to come to the table with a clear long-term objective and a consistent strategy to match.
“It was very clear they were approaching it as a platform we should experiment with,” she shared during the VISIONS Summit: NYC. “But I think when your audience knows to expect you, once you’ve built it, you really have to stay true to that or else they’re never going to be used to reading and engaging with your content. You can tell [when brands] launch and come out the gate really excited, and then they get one issue out, and then they don’t know what to write about next. That’s a bad look for them.”
Dietz called that moment of reckoning, when brands have nothing left to say, “the cliff.”
Corporate comms teams and brand leads may come to the Substack table ready to educate the market on a product release or new campaign, but then business affairs and risk mitigation stifle them. They’re missing the brand personality that should inspire a web of supporting content themes and narratives that drive their editorial decisions.
“Brands launching on a podcast, newsletter, or anything like that, have to figure out a way to have some personality,” Lewis advised, “and that’s really hard for large brands that are uncomfortable with having any sort of personality. But these platforms give brands a chance to engage with a new audience in a different way than their typical marketing emails that literally just get you to shop a sale.”
The Tory Burch brand uses its Substack, What Should I Wear, to expand its worldbuilding efforts and establish a clear and distinct editorial voice on fashion, culture, family, love, and even food. It incorporates a clear brand POV while also bringing in a community of fashion experts, Substackers, and even Tory herself to show how this little corner of the internet has become a valuable space for sharing and connecting.
From Click Optimization to Parasocial Connection
In the world of performance marketing, everything is aligned to a key performance indicator. Every creative choice, whether it’s a photo shoot or a line of copy, is optimized for clicks and conversions. And every touch is cog in the commerce machine, which operates with the sole goal of getting people to add to their digital carts.
Substack and other media platforms, however, operate in a different reality; one where readers feel so innately connected to a voice and, in turn, to a brand, that they begin to build a parasocial relationship with it. Dietz called this out as a significant opportunity; a creative stretch that only the bravest brands seem to be embracing. When these parasocial relationships form, they offer greater elasticity for brands to test and build their “personalities.”
Although the Rare Beauty Substack doesn’t have an individual byline, the brand successfully taps into this parasocial element. Rare Beauty Secrets offers a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, from product development to campaign launches, events, and marketing campaigns. Its attachment to celebrity via founder Selena Gomez is an obvious draw, but incorporating a hearty mix of cultural, creative, and technical content makes it feel like you’re reading an early-2000s-era LiveJournal of a fashion blogger you love.
“The exciting thing about the rise and future proliferation of parasocial media is going to be that we all become much more attuned to the individual personalities of the people that are speaking to us,” Dietz said. “Look at who the people are within your organization who jump off the page. Who are the personalities? And they're not salespeople. This is a key detail because it humanizes the effort. It makes you more relatable to your potential customers, and it also allows your colleagues to realize they could have skin in the game and participate in an interesting way.”
Parasocial media is redefining how, where, and why we engage with content. Typically created by an individual voice, an author, founder, or executive, who speaks directly to their audience, this new wave of media has no editorial barriers and no super-strict style calls to hold creators back.
This intimate, one-to-one fodder creates something magical in the media world, which is growing more crowded and jaded by the day, according to Ben Dietz, Founder of Rangelife and Publisher of [SIC] Weekly: “It allows the audience to form a relationship that is direct, emotional, and longstanding, which is consistent and therefore meaningful, valuable and, the thesis goes, is monetizable.”
This flywheel effect makes Substack equally valuable to both readers and writers, which is why it has exceeded 20 million monthly active subscribers and more than 5 million paid subscriptions. The innate, continuous cycle of engagement is also why brands are eager to hop on the bandwagon. Because they are realizing that their typical marketing playbook is no longer speaking the customer’s language.
In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, UK, and AUS/NZ, Future Commerce found that consumers were no longer motivated by transnational, push marketing messages. In fact, 55% of respondents said they would unsubscribe from a brand they typically liked if they received too many marketing messages. While there’s undoubtedly still a place for personalized deals, offers, and product recommendations, Substack offers solace in the chaos. A destination for organic storytelling and exploration that is the antithesis of social networks, which now have the primary objective of nudging consumers closer to product pages and checkout carts.
Substack is where a brand can truly come alive, showcasing how community and culture influence their reason for being.
Substack is Closing Social Media’s Authenticity Gap
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok all have their own reasons for being. TikTok, at its core, is an entertainment platform, while Pinterest’s bread and butter is visual discovery, curation, and, in some cases, ideation. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have become mass megaphones, where brands, creators, and everyday consumers alike can blast their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to specific audiences, whether that be their close friends and family or a broader audience with particular interests.
Substack, however, is designed to give all voices access to content tools and community features that help them create and connect meaningfully. For consumers, that means greater access and autonomy. With overall trust in news sources in significant decline globally, Substack offers a more flexible and open forum that allows creators and subscribers to take control of the media they create and consume. As a result, the platform has achieved a relatively equal split between male (50.43%) and female (49.57%) users, with an audience that skews towards emerging professionals, whose wallet share is growing. Specifically, 24% of users are 25 to 34 years old, while nearly 12% are in the 18-24 demographic.
It is why even companies as large as Shopify, enterprises with robust marketing, PR, and comms teams, are using it as a vehicle to connect on a much deeper level. A way to own their messaging yet remix it in a way that reflects the real-time, meme-ified mode in which the emerging community of consumers, investors, and merchants exchange information.
Brands, meanwhile, have access to a palette of storytelling tools that help them weave richer narratives about their products and people; lore that has shaped who they are and their reason for being. Some, like Free People, have successfully tapped established Substack creators, such as Emily Sundberg, via her newsletter, Feed Me, to run paid partnerships. Other brands, however, are using Substack to build their own editorial platforms to curate content and experiences from their internal and external communities.
Lifestyle-oriented content and narrative-driven content help brand and marketing teams break free from jargon-laden product marketing content. Comments, chat features, and Substack Notes provide direct lines of communication between brands and their communities, as well as opportunities for bite-sized content that entertains, engages, and attracts new followers.
Niche brands that have built rich creative worlds around their brands are especially seeing value in the platform. Saie Beauty, which uses Substack to share announcements, trending tips, and even community insights, reported a 20% month-over-month growth in subscribers, attributed to consistent publishing and cross-promotion. Its name, From the Saie Office, clearly communicates what it’s meant to be: a love letter of sorts from the team to its fans. Women's apparel and workwear brand M.M.LaFleur also reported a 280% increase in Substack-driven sales in a recent period, with revenue per story consistently rising. To serve its audience of professional women, THE—M—DASH focuses on providing how-to styling content and work-appropriate fashion advice.
The Creator Connection
In many cases, Substack also helps bridge the connection between brands and the voices their consumers love. For example, Casey Lewis has become an authority on all things youth culture, starting as an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine, and eventually founding a Gen Z-oriented media company that was later acquired. Now, her popular Substack, After School, provides her with a forum to explore youth culture and expand her reach to other creators, curious consumers, and, yes, even brands. She recently served as the guest editor for American Eagle’s Substack, Off the Cuff, which offered trend insights, analysis, and her distinct POV on the AE subculture.
“The best thing to do is to align yourself with writers or creators who have a point of view that your brand feels they can align with as well,” Lewis said. “It's just like if you're talking to a Fortune 500 company about their social media and you're like, ‘you need to be funnier and more candid and more personable on TikTok.’ And they're like, ‘We're Clorox. We don't know how to be more personable on TikTok.’ Align yourself with creators who are brand safe but who can flex their personality.”
Brands can even tap into their employees to be those creator voices. The RealReal Substack features a core brand “persona” in the form of The RealGirl, while different contributors share their personal musings on brands and trends they love.
Nike, which quietly launched its Substack a few months back, takes a slightly different approach. In the Margins is arguably not a branded Substack. Instead, it is a vehicle for curating and elevating voices in sports writing. The bi-weekly publication is merely “made possible by Nike,” not driven by it, which, honestly, makes it all the more compelling.
The Power of a Consistent, Credible Voice
American Eagle saw Substack as a testing ground to understand the platform and the community, according to Lewis. But if brands plan to invest in the platform, she believes they need to come to the table with a clear long-term objective and a consistent strategy to match.
“It was very clear they were approaching it as a platform we should experiment with,” she shared during the VISIONS Summit: NYC. “But I think when your audience knows to expect you, once you’ve built it, you really have to stay true to that or else they’re never going to be used to reading and engaging with your content. You can tell [when brands] launch and come out the gate really excited, and then they get one issue out, and then they don’t know what to write about next. That’s a bad look for them.”
Dietz called that moment of reckoning, when brands have nothing left to say, “the cliff.”
Corporate comms teams and brand leads may come to the Substack table ready to educate the market on a product release or new campaign, but then business affairs and risk mitigation stifle them. They’re missing the brand personality that should inspire a web of supporting content themes and narratives that drive their editorial decisions.
“Brands launching on a podcast, newsletter, or anything like that, have to figure out a way to have some personality,” Lewis advised, “and that’s really hard for large brands that are uncomfortable with having any sort of personality. But these platforms give brands a chance to engage with a new audience in a different way than their typical marketing emails that literally just get you to shop a sale.”
The Tory Burch brand uses its Substack, What Should I Wear, to expand its worldbuilding efforts and establish a clear and distinct editorial voice on fashion, culture, family, love, and even food. It incorporates a clear brand POV while also bringing in a community of fashion experts, Substackers, and even Tory herself to show how this little corner of the internet has become a valuable space for sharing and connecting.
From Click Optimization to Parasocial Connection
In the world of performance marketing, everything is aligned to a key performance indicator. Every creative choice, whether it’s a photo shoot or a line of copy, is optimized for clicks and conversions. And every touch is cog in the commerce machine, which operates with the sole goal of getting people to add to their digital carts.
Substack and other media platforms, however, operate in a different reality; one where readers feel so innately connected to a voice and, in turn, to a brand, that they begin to build a parasocial relationship with it. Dietz called this out as a significant opportunity; a creative stretch that only the bravest brands seem to be embracing. When these parasocial relationships form, they offer greater elasticity for brands to test and build their “personalities.”
Although the Rare Beauty Substack doesn’t have an individual byline, the brand successfully taps into this parasocial element. Rare Beauty Secrets offers a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, from product development to campaign launches, events, and marketing campaigns. Its attachment to celebrity via founder Selena Gomez is an obvious draw, but incorporating a hearty mix of cultural, creative, and technical content makes it feel like you’re reading an early-2000s-era LiveJournal of a fashion blogger you love.
“The exciting thing about the rise and future proliferation of parasocial media is going to be that we all become much more attuned to the individual personalities of the people that are speaking to us,” Dietz said. “Look at who the people are within your organization who jump off the page. Who are the personalities? And they're not salespeople. This is a key detail because it humanizes the effort. It makes you more relatable to your potential customers, and it also allows your colleagues to realize they could have skin in the game and participate in an interesting way.”
Parasocial media is redefining how, where, and why we engage with content. Typically created by an individual voice, an author, founder, or executive, who speaks directly to their audience, this new wave of media has no editorial barriers and no super-strict style calls to hold creators back.
This intimate, one-to-one fodder creates something magical in the media world, which is growing more crowded and jaded by the day, according to Ben Dietz, Founder of Rangelife and Publisher of [SIC] Weekly: “It allows the audience to form a relationship that is direct, emotional, and longstanding, which is consistent and therefore meaningful, valuable and, the thesis goes, is monetizable.”
This flywheel effect makes Substack equally valuable to both readers and writers, which is why it has exceeded 20 million monthly active subscribers and more than 5 million paid subscriptions. The innate, continuous cycle of engagement is also why brands are eager to hop on the bandwagon. Because they are realizing that their typical marketing playbook is no longer speaking the customer’s language.
In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, UK, and AUS/NZ, Future Commerce found that consumers were no longer motivated by transnational, push marketing messages. In fact, 55% of respondents said they would unsubscribe from a brand they typically liked if they received too many marketing messages. While there’s undoubtedly still a place for personalized deals, offers, and product recommendations, Substack offers solace in the chaos. A destination for organic storytelling and exploration that is the antithesis of social networks, which now have the primary objective of nudging consumers closer to product pages and checkout carts.
Substack is where a brand can truly come alive, showcasing how community and culture influence their reason for being.
Substack is Closing Social Media’s Authenticity Gap
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok all have their own reasons for being. TikTok, at its core, is an entertainment platform, while Pinterest’s bread and butter is visual discovery, curation, and, in some cases, ideation. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have become mass megaphones, where brands, creators, and everyday consumers alike can blast their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to specific audiences, whether that be their close friends and family or a broader audience with particular interests.
Substack, however, is designed to give all voices access to content tools and community features that help them create and connect meaningfully. For consumers, that means greater access and autonomy. With overall trust in news sources in significant decline globally, Substack offers a more flexible and open forum that allows creators and subscribers to take control of the media they create and consume. As a result, the platform has achieved a relatively equal split between male (50.43%) and female (49.57%) users, with an audience that skews towards emerging professionals, whose wallet share is growing. Specifically, 24% of users are 25 to 34 years old, while nearly 12% are in the 18-24 demographic.
It is why even companies as large as Shopify, enterprises with robust marketing, PR, and comms teams, are using it as a vehicle to connect on a much deeper level. A way to own their messaging yet remix it in a way that reflects the real-time, meme-ified mode in which the emerging community of consumers, investors, and merchants exchange information.
Brands, meanwhile, have access to a palette of storytelling tools that help them weave richer narratives about their products and people; lore that has shaped who they are and their reason for being. Some, like Free People, have successfully tapped established Substack creators, such as Emily Sundberg, via her newsletter, Feed Me, to run paid partnerships. Other brands, however, are using Substack to build their own editorial platforms to curate content and experiences from their internal and external communities.
Lifestyle-oriented content and narrative-driven content help brand and marketing teams break free from jargon-laden product marketing content. Comments, chat features, and Substack Notes provide direct lines of communication between brands and their communities, as well as opportunities for bite-sized content that entertains, engages, and attracts new followers.
Niche brands that have built rich creative worlds around their brands are especially seeing value in the platform. Saie Beauty, which uses Substack to share announcements, trending tips, and even community insights, reported a 20% month-over-month growth in subscribers, attributed to consistent publishing and cross-promotion. Its name, From the Saie Office, clearly communicates what it’s meant to be: a love letter of sorts from the team to its fans. Women's apparel and workwear brand M.M.LaFleur also reported a 280% increase in Substack-driven sales in a recent period, with revenue per story consistently rising. To serve its audience of professional women, THE—M—DASH focuses on providing how-to styling content and work-appropriate fashion advice.
The Creator Connection
In many cases, Substack also helps bridge the connection between brands and the voices their consumers love. For example, Casey Lewis has become an authority on all things youth culture, starting as an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine, and eventually founding a Gen Z-oriented media company that was later acquired. Now, her popular Substack, After School, provides her with a forum to explore youth culture and expand her reach to other creators, curious consumers, and, yes, even brands. She recently served as the guest editor for American Eagle’s Substack, Off the Cuff, which offered trend insights, analysis, and her distinct POV on the AE subculture.
“The best thing to do is to align yourself with writers or creators who have a point of view that your brand feels they can align with as well,” Lewis said. “It's just like if you're talking to a Fortune 500 company about their social media and you're like, ‘you need to be funnier and more candid and more personable on TikTok.’ And they're like, ‘We're Clorox. We don't know how to be more personable on TikTok.’ Align yourself with creators who are brand safe but who can flex their personality.”
Brands can even tap into their employees to be those creator voices. The RealReal Substack features a core brand “persona” in the form of The RealGirl, while different contributors share their personal musings on brands and trends they love.
Nike, which quietly launched its Substack a few months back, takes a slightly different approach. In the Margins is arguably not a branded Substack. Instead, it is a vehicle for curating and elevating voices in sports writing. The bi-weekly publication is merely “made possible by Nike,” not driven by it, which, honestly, makes it all the more compelling.
The Power of a Consistent, Credible Voice
American Eagle saw Substack as a testing ground to understand the platform and the community, according to Lewis. But if brands plan to invest in the platform, she believes they need to come to the table with a clear long-term objective and a consistent strategy to match.
“It was very clear they were approaching it as a platform we should experiment with,” she shared during the VISIONS Summit: NYC. “But I think when your audience knows to expect you, once you’ve built it, you really have to stay true to that or else they’re never going to be used to reading and engaging with your content. You can tell [when brands] launch and come out the gate really excited, and then they get one issue out, and then they don’t know what to write about next. That’s a bad look for them.”
Dietz called that moment of reckoning, when brands have nothing left to say, “the cliff.”
Corporate comms teams and brand leads may come to the Substack table ready to educate the market on a product release or new campaign, but then business affairs and risk mitigation stifle them. They’re missing the brand personality that should inspire a web of supporting content themes and narratives that drive their editorial decisions.
“Brands launching on a podcast, newsletter, or anything like that, have to figure out a way to have some personality,” Lewis advised, “and that’s really hard for large brands that are uncomfortable with having any sort of personality. But these platforms give brands a chance to engage with a new audience in a different way than their typical marketing emails that literally just get you to shop a sale.”
The Tory Burch brand uses its Substack, What Should I Wear, to expand its worldbuilding efforts and establish a clear and distinct editorial voice on fashion, culture, family, love, and even food. It incorporates a clear brand POV while also bringing in a community of fashion experts, Substackers, and even Tory herself to show how this little corner of the internet has become a valuable space for sharing and connecting.
From Click Optimization to Parasocial Connection
In the world of performance marketing, everything is aligned to a key performance indicator. Every creative choice, whether it’s a photo shoot or a line of copy, is optimized for clicks and conversions. And every touch is cog in the commerce machine, which operates with the sole goal of getting people to add to their digital carts.
Substack and other media platforms, however, operate in a different reality; one where readers feel so innately connected to a voice and, in turn, to a brand, that they begin to build a parasocial relationship with it. Dietz called this out as a significant opportunity; a creative stretch that only the bravest brands seem to be embracing. When these parasocial relationships form, they offer greater elasticity for brands to test and build their “personalities.”
Although the Rare Beauty Substack doesn’t have an individual byline, the brand successfully taps into this parasocial element. Rare Beauty Secrets offers a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, from product development to campaign launches, events, and marketing campaigns. Its attachment to celebrity via founder Selena Gomez is an obvious draw, but incorporating a hearty mix of cultural, creative, and technical content makes it feel like you’re reading an early-2000s-era LiveJournal of a fashion blogger you love.
“The exciting thing about the rise and future proliferation of parasocial media is going to be that we all become much more attuned to the individual personalities of the people that are speaking to us,” Dietz said. “Look at who the people are within your organization who jump off the page. Who are the personalities? And they're not salespeople. This is a key detail because it humanizes the effort. It makes you more relatable to your potential customers, and it also allows your colleagues to realize they could have skin in the game and participate in an interesting way.”
Parasocial media is redefining how, where, and why we engage with content. Typically created by an individual voice, an author, founder, or executive, who speaks directly to their audience, this new wave of media has no editorial barriers and no super-strict style calls to hold creators back.
This intimate, one-to-one fodder creates something magical in the media world, which is growing more crowded and jaded by the day, according to Ben Dietz, Founder of Rangelife and Publisher of [SIC] Weekly: “It allows the audience to form a relationship that is direct, emotional, and longstanding, which is consistent and therefore meaningful, valuable and, the thesis goes, is monetizable.”
This flywheel effect makes Substack equally valuable to both readers and writers, which is why it has exceeded 20 million monthly active subscribers and more than 5 million paid subscriptions. The innate, continuous cycle of engagement is also why brands are eager to hop on the bandwagon. Because they are realizing that their typical marketing playbook is no longer speaking the customer’s language.
In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, UK, and AUS/NZ, Future Commerce found that consumers were no longer motivated by transnational, push marketing messages. In fact, 55% of respondents said they would unsubscribe from a brand they typically liked if they received too many marketing messages. While there’s undoubtedly still a place for personalized deals, offers, and product recommendations, Substack offers solace in the chaos. A destination for organic storytelling and exploration that is the antithesis of social networks, which now have the primary objective of nudging consumers closer to product pages and checkout carts.
Substack is where a brand can truly come alive, showcasing how community and culture influence their reason for being.
Substack is Closing Social Media’s Authenticity Gap
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok all have their own reasons for being. TikTok, at its core, is an entertainment platform, while Pinterest’s bread and butter is visual discovery, curation, and, in some cases, ideation. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have become mass megaphones, where brands, creators, and everyday consumers alike can blast their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to specific audiences, whether that be their close friends and family or a broader audience with particular interests.
Substack, however, is designed to give all voices access to content tools and community features that help them create and connect meaningfully. For consumers, that means greater access and autonomy. With overall trust in news sources in significant decline globally, Substack offers a more flexible and open forum that allows creators and subscribers to take control of the media they create and consume. As a result, the platform has achieved a relatively equal split between male (50.43%) and female (49.57%) users, with an audience that skews towards emerging professionals, whose wallet share is growing. Specifically, 24% of users are 25 to 34 years old, while nearly 12% are in the 18-24 demographic.
It is why even companies as large as Shopify, enterprises with robust marketing, PR, and comms teams, are using it as a vehicle to connect on a much deeper level. A way to own their messaging yet remix it in a way that reflects the real-time, meme-ified mode in which the emerging community of consumers, investors, and merchants exchange information.
Brands, meanwhile, have access to a palette of storytelling tools that help them weave richer narratives about their products and people; lore that has shaped who they are and their reason for being. Some, like Free People, have successfully tapped established Substack creators, such as Emily Sundberg, via her newsletter, Feed Me, to run paid partnerships. Other brands, however, are using Substack to build their own editorial platforms to curate content and experiences from their internal and external communities.
Lifestyle-oriented content and narrative-driven content help brand and marketing teams break free from jargon-laden product marketing content. Comments, chat features, and Substack Notes provide direct lines of communication between brands and their communities, as well as opportunities for bite-sized content that entertains, engages, and attracts new followers.
Niche brands that have built rich creative worlds around their brands are especially seeing value in the platform. Saie Beauty, which uses Substack to share announcements, trending tips, and even community insights, reported a 20% month-over-month growth in subscribers, attributed to consistent publishing and cross-promotion. Its name, From the Saie Office, clearly communicates what it’s meant to be: a love letter of sorts from the team to its fans. Women's apparel and workwear brand M.M.LaFleur also reported a 280% increase in Substack-driven sales in a recent period, with revenue per story consistently rising. To serve its audience of professional women, THE—M—DASH focuses on providing how-to styling content and work-appropriate fashion advice.
The Creator Connection
In many cases, Substack also helps bridge the connection between brands and the voices their consumers love. For example, Casey Lewis has become an authority on all things youth culture, starting as an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine, and eventually founding a Gen Z-oriented media company that was later acquired. Now, her popular Substack, After School, provides her with a forum to explore youth culture and expand her reach to other creators, curious consumers, and, yes, even brands. She recently served as the guest editor for American Eagle’s Substack, Off the Cuff, which offered trend insights, analysis, and her distinct POV on the AE subculture.
“The best thing to do is to align yourself with writers or creators who have a point of view that your brand feels they can align with as well,” Lewis said. “It's just like if you're talking to a Fortune 500 company about their social media and you're like, ‘you need to be funnier and more candid and more personable on TikTok.’ And they're like, ‘We're Clorox. We don't know how to be more personable on TikTok.’ Align yourself with creators who are brand safe but who can flex their personality.”
Brands can even tap into their employees to be those creator voices. The RealReal Substack features a core brand “persona” in the form of The RealGirl, while different contributors share their personal musings on brands and trends they love.
Nike, which quietly launched its Substack a few months back, takes a slightly different approach. In the Margins is arguably not a branded Substack. Instead, it is a vehicle for curating and elevating voices in sports writing. The bi-weekly publication is merely “made possible by Nike,” not driven by it, which, honestly, makes it all the more compelling.
The Power of a Consistent, Credible Voice
American Eagle saw Substack as a testing ground to understand the platform and the community, according to Lewis. But if brands plan to invest in the platform, she believes they need to come to the table with a clear long-term objective and a consistent strategy to match.
“It was very clear they were approaching it as a platform we should experiment with,” she shared during the VISIONS Summit: NYC. “But I think when your audience knows to expect you, once you’ve built it, you really have to stay true to that or else they’re never going to be used to reading and engaging with your content. You can tell [when brands] launch and come out the gate really excited, and then they get one issue out, and then they don’t know what to write about next. That’s a bad look for them.”
Dietz called that moment of reckoning, when brands have nothing left to say, “the cliff.”
Corporate comms teams and brand leads may come to the Substack table ready to educate the market on a product release or new campaign, but then business affairs and risk mitigation stifle them. They’re missing the brand personality that should inspire a web of supporting content themes and narratives that drive their editorial decisions.
“Brands launching on a podcast, newsletter, or anything like that, have to figure out a way to have some personality,” Lewis advised, “and that’s really hard for large brands that are uncomfortable with having any sort of personality. But these platforms give brands a chance to engage with a new audience in a different way than their typical marketing emails that literally just get you to shop a sale.”
The Tory Burch brand uses its Substack, What Should I Wear, to expand its worldbuilding efforts and establish a clear and distinct editorial voice on fashion, culture, family, love, and even food. It incorporates a clear brand POV while also bringing in a community of fashion experts, Substackers, and even Tory herself to show how this little corner of the internet has become a valuable space for sharing and connecting.
From Click Optimization to Parasocial Connection
In the world of performance marketing, everything is aligned to a key performance indicator. Every creative choice, whether it’s a photo shoot or a line of copy, is optimized for clicks and conversions. And every touch is cog in the commerce machine, which operates with the sole goal of getting people to add to their digital carts.
Substack and other media platforms, however, operate in a different reality; one where readers feel so innately connected to a voice and, in turn, to a brand, that they begin to build a parasocial relationship with it. Dietz called this out as a significant opportunity; a creative stretch that only the bravest brands seem to be embracing. When these parasocial relationships form, they offer greater elasticity for brands to test and build their “personalities.”
Although the Rare Beauty Substack doesn’t have an individual byline, the brand successfully taps into this parasocial element. Rare Beauty Secrets offers a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, from product development to campaign launches, events, and marketing campaigns. Its attachment to celebrity via founder Selena Gomez is an obvious draw, but incorporating a hearty mix of cultural, creative, and technical content makes it feel like you’re reading an early-2000s-era LiveJournal of a fashion blogger you love.
“The exciting thing about the rise and future proliferation of parasocial media is going to be that we all become much more attuned to the individual personalities of the people that are speaking to us,” Dietz said. “Look at who the people are within your organization who jump off the page. Who are the personalities? And they're not salespeople. This is a key detail because it humanizes the effort. It makes you more relatable to your potential customers, and it also allows your colleagues to realize they could have skin in the game and participate in an interesting way.”
Parasocial media is redefining how, where, and why we engage with content. Typically created by an individual voice, an author, founder, or executive, who speaks directly to their audience, this new wave of media has no editorial barriers and no super-strict style calls to hold creators back.
This intimate, one-to-one fodder creates something magical in the media world, which is growing more crowded and jaded by the day, according to Ben Dietz, Founder of Rangelife and Publisher of [SIC] Weekly: “It allows the audience to form a relationship that is direct, emotional, and longstanding, which is consistent and therefore meaningful, valuable and, the thesis goes, is monetizable.”
This flywheel effect makes Substack equally valuable to both readers and writers, which is why it has exceeded 20 million monthly active subscribers and more than 5 million paid subscriptions. The innate, continuous cycle of engagement is also why brands are eager to hop on the bandwagon. Because they are realizing that their typical marketing playbook is no longer speaking the customer’s language.
In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, UK, and AUS/NZ, Future Commerce found that consumers were no longer motivated by transnational, push marketing messages. In fact, 55% of respondents said they would unsubscribe from a brand they typically liked if they received too many marketing messages. While there’s undoubtedly still a place for personalized deals, offers, and product recommendations, Substack offers solace in the chaos. A destination for organic storytelling and exploration that is the antithesis of social networks, which now have the primary objective of nudging consumers closer to product pages and checkout carts.
Substack is where a brand can truly come alive, showcasing how community and culture influence their reason for being.
Substack is Closing Social Media’s Authenticity Gap
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok all have their own reasons for being. TikTok, at its core, is an entertainment platform, while Pinterest’s bread and butter is visual discovery, curation, and, in some cases, ideation. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have become mass megaphones, where brands, creators, and everyday consumers alike can blast their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to specific audiences, whether that be their close friends and family or a broader audience with particular interests.
Substack, however, is designed to give all voices access to content tools and community features that help them create and connect meaningfully. For consumers, that means greater access and autonomy. With overall trust in news sources in significant decline globally, Substack offers a more flexible and open forum that allows creators and subscribers to take control of the media they create and consume. As a result, the platform has achieved a relatively equal split between male (50.43%) and female (49.57%) users, with an audience that skews towards emerging professionals, whose wallet share is growing. Specifically, 24% of users are 25 to 34 years old, while nearly 12% are in the 18-24 demographic.
It is why even companies as large as Shopify, enterprises with robust marketing, PR, and comms teams, are using it as a vehicle to connect on a much deeper level. A way to own their messaging yet remix it in a way that reflects the real-time, meme-ified mode in which the emerging community of consumers, investors, and merchants exchange information.
Brands, meanwhile, have access to a palette of storytelling tools that help them weave richer narratives about their products and people; lore that has shaped who they are and their reason for being. Some, like Free People, have successfully tapped established Substack creators, such as Emily Sundberg, via her newsletter, Feed Me, to run paid partnerships. Other brands, however, are using Substack to build their own editorial platforms to curate content and experiences from their internal and external communities.
Lifestyle-oriented content and narrative-driven content help brand and marketing teams break free from jargon-laden product marketing content. Comments, chat features, and Substack Notes provide direct lines of communication between brands and their communities, as well as opportunities for bite-sized content that entertains, engages, and attracts new followers.
Niche brands that have built rich creative worlds around their brands are especially seeing value in the platform. Saie Beauty, which uses Substack to share announcements, trending tips, and even community insights, reported a 20% month-over-month growth in subscribers, attributed to consistent publishing and cross-promotion. Its name, From the Saie Office, clearly communicates what it’s meant to be: a love letter of sorts from the team to its fans. Women's apparel and workwear brand M.M.LaFleur also reported a 280% increase in Substack-driven sales in a recent period, with revenue per story consistently rising. To serve its audience of professional women, THE—M—DASH focuses on providing how-to styling content and work-appropriate fashion advice.
The Creator Connection
In many cases, Substack also helps bridge the connection between brands and the voices their consumers love. For example, Casey Lewis has become an authority on all things youth culture, starting as an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine, and eventually founding a Gen Z-oriented media company that was later acquired. Now, her popular Substack, After School, provides her with a forum to explore youth culture and expand her reach to other creators, curious consumers, and, yes, even brands. She recently served as the guest editor for American Eagle’s Substack, Off the Cuff, which offered trend insights, analysis, and her distinct POV on the AE subculture.
“The best thing to do is to align yourself with writers or creators who have a point of view that your brand feels they can align with as well,” Lewis said. “It's just like if you're talking to a Fortune 500 company about their social media and you're like, ‘you need to be funnier and more candid and more personable on TikTok.’ And they're like, ‘We're Clorox. We don't know how to be more personable on TikTok.’ Align yourself with creators who are brand safe but who can flex their personality.”
Brands can even tap into their employees to be those creator voices. The RealReal Substack features a core brand “persona” in the form of The RealGirl, while different contributors share their personal musings on brands and trends they love.
Nike, which quietly launched its Substack a few months back, takes a slightly different approach. In the Margins is arguably not a branded Substack. Instead, it is a vehicle for curating and elevating voices in sports writing. The bi-weekly publication is merely “made possible by Nike,” not driven by it, which, honestly, makes it all the more compelling.
The Power of a Consistent, Credible Voice
American Eagle saw Substack as a testing ground to understand the platform and the community, according to Lewis. But if brands plan to invest in the platform, she believes they need to come to the table with a clear long-term objective and a consistent strategy to match.
“It was very clear they were approaching it as a platform we should experiment with,” she shared during the VISIONS Summit: NYC. “But I think when your audience knows to expect you, once you’ve built it, you really have to stay true to that or else they’re never going to be used to reading and engaging with your content. You can tell [when brands] launch and come out the gate really excited, and then they get one issue out, and then they don’t know what to write about next. That’s a bad look for them.”
Dietz called that moment of reckoning, when brands have nothing left to say, “the cliff.”
Corporate comms teams and brand leads may come to the Substack table ready to educate the market on a product release or new campaign, but then business affairs and risk mitigation stifle them. They’re missing the brand personality that should inspire a web of supporting content themes and narratives that drive their editorial decisions.
“Brands launching on a podcast, newsletter, or anything like that, have to figure out a way to have some personality,” Lewis advised, “and that’s really hard for large brands that are uncomfortable with having any sort of personality. But these platforms give brands a chance to engage with a new audience in a different way than their typical marketing emails that literally just get you to shop a sale.”
The Tory Burch brand uses its Substack, What Should I Wear, to expand its worldbuilding efforts and establish a clear and distinct editorial voice on fashion, culture, family, love, and even food. It incorporates a clear brand POV while also bringing in a community of fashion experts, Substackers, and even Tory herself to show how this little corner of the internet has become a valuable space for sharing and connecting.
From Click Optimization to Parasocial Connection
In the world of performance marketing, everything is aligned to a key performance indicator. Every creative choice, whether it’s a photo shoot or a line of copy, is optimized for clicks and conversions. And every touch is cog in the commerce machine, which operates with the sole goal of getting people to add to their digital carts.
Substack and other media platforms, however, operate in a different reality; one where readers feel so innately connected to a voice and, in turn, to a brand, that they begin to build a parasocial relationship with it. Dietz called this out as a significant opportunity; a creative stretch that only the bravest brands seem to be embracing. When these parasocial relationships form, they offer greater elasticity for brands to test and build their “personalities.”
Although the Rare Beauty Substack doesn’t have an individual byline, the brand successfully taps into this parasocial element. Rare Beauty Secrets offers a behind-the-scenes look at the brand, from product development to campaign launches, events, and marketing campaigns. Its attachment to celebrity via founder Selena Gomez is an obvious draw, but incorporating a hearty mix of cultural, creative, and technical content makes it feel like you’re reading an early-2000s-era LiveJournal of a fashion blogger you love.
“The exciting thing about the rise and future proliferation of parasocial media is going to be that we all become much more attuned to the individual personalities of the people that are speaking to us,” Dietz said. “Look at who the people are within your organization who jump off the page. Who are the personalities? And they're not salespeople. This is a key detail because it humanizes the effort. It makes you more relatable to your potential customers, and it also allows your colleagues to realize they could have skin in the game and participate in an interesting way.”
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