Before there were social media influencers, there were bloggers. But as more writers and creators create email newsletters about everything from cooking to fashion trends on platforms like Substack, it seems we’re coming full circle.

“It’s the biggest new platform that I know of since I don’t even know,” Tiffany Lopinsky, co-founder and COO of affiliate marketing platform ShopMy, told Marketing Brew.

As platforms change (and, in some cases, face a potential ban), Substack has emerged as a way for writers and creators to engage with their biggest fans in a direct and often intimate-feeling way. Brands and brand founders are also noticing the value of Substack as an affiliate marketing channel with its more than 3 million paying subscribers, even in spite of some recent backlash over its content moderation policies.

“Social media has just become overloaded,” Libby Strachan, director of brand marketing at Free People, told us. “I think going back to the old-school blog world was almost inevitable.”

Read it and click: Melanie Masarin, founder of non-alcoholic apéritif brand Ghia, created her Substack newsletter, Night Shade, in 2023 to write about her interest in fashion and travel while seeking to build a follower community through longer-form content.

“Sometimes, when you’re the founder of a visible brand, it feels like there’s this unilateral image of you,” said Masarin, who has around 6,000 subscribers. “It’s nice to be able to add a little bit of depth and show some behind the scenes for the more engaged people who are interested.”

• In addition to plugging Ghia every now and then, Masarin said she’s worked with fashion resale platform Vestiaire Collective and travel app Amigo on co-branded newsletters, and she uses commissionable and affiliate links generated through ShopMy.

Continue reading here.—KH

Deloitte Global and US CMO Suzanne Kounkel was among the millions of fans celebrating the night the New York Liberty won the WNBA Championship, but not for the same reason Liberty fans were.

On the night of Game 5, Spike Lee was seated directly behind a Deloitte logo on the court at Barclays Center and was at one point photographed on his hands and knees right above it as he watched the nail-biting finals matchup.

The front-and-center placement of Deloitte’s logo in the midst of the deciding game meant that Kounkel’s phone was blowing up throughout the night, she said.

Deloitte isn’t a consumer-facing company, but the average fan of popular women’s leagues like the WNBA and the NWSL may be familiar with the brand thanks to the many years it has been splashed on basketball courts and around soccer stadiums as part of a more than decade-long effort to make inroads into the sports space.

As Deloitte tracks brand amplification like the kind it saw during the WNBA Finals, it is expanding into women’s sports even further as the sponsorship landscape in the space continues to crowd.

Read more here.—AM

It’s been just over two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter, and as the platform has grown more bot-heavy and right-leaning in the time since, platforms like Mastodon and Threads have emerged as alternative places to post.

Now, it seems, Bluesky is having a moment.

Since the election, the platform—which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey helped start in 2019 before leaving the board last year—has gained more than a million new users, surpassing 15 million users total.

The shift comes as rumors of Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration became official and after he spent millions supporting the former president during his most recent campaign and used X as an increasingly pro-MAGA platform in the lead-up to the election.

High-profile users who have emerged (or re-emerged) on the platform in the last week include New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, author John Green, and billionaire Mark Cuban, with Cuban posting “Hello Less Hateful World” to mark his entrance. Some new entrants have compared the site to the early days of Twitter.

Exit, stage left: Calls for users to quit X continued to grow last week ahead of a policy change that went into effect Friday that allows the platform to use all user data to train its AI model, and amid a high-profile prediction of a possible Truth Social merger.

It’s not just individual posters that are heading out. The Guardian announced Wednesday that it would no longer be using X, calling it “a toxic media platform” and noting Musk’s ability to use it to “shape political discourse.”

• Fellow news outlets PBS and NPR have also left the platform since Musk took over, as have many of the platform’s top advertisers.

Read more here.—KH

Executive moves across the industry.

• Heineken USA elevated longtime executive Alison Payne, who most recently worked in the brewer’s global commerce leadership unit, to the CMO role beginning in 2025.
• REI tapped Abigail Jacobs, formerly SVP of integrated marketing and brand at Sephora, as its CMO.
• Keurig Dr Pepper hired Drew Panayiotou, who most recently served as global marketing chief of Pfizer, as CMO of US refreshment beverages.