Substack expands brand sponsorships as marketers deepen creator strategy

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Substack brand sponsorships expand

Highlights

Substack expands its brand sponsorship program with new formats enabling brands to gift one-month subscriptions and sponsor individual creator posts to widen paywalled access.
Retail and consumer brands like Rothy’s report a 75% foot traffic increase at in-person events generated from Substack creator collaborations, demonstrating measurable consumer engagement.
Major brands—including Rare Beauty, The RealReal, Tory Burch, Hinge, and The Knot Worldwide—see Substack as a key platform for deepening creator relationships and building owned content strategies.

New sponsorship tools and brand adoption

As first reported by Business Insider, Substack is becoming a more important platform for influencer marketers and brands seeking closer ties with creators and their audiences. The company’s push accelerates after cofounder Chris Best said in June that Substack is launching a native brand sponsorship program, building on campaigns already active on the platform.

This week, Substack is expanding that program with new sponsorship formats. One option lets brands gift a one-month subscription so readers can access paywalled content, while another allows companies to sponsor a single creator post and make it free to read.

Dan Robbins, who joins Substack this year as head of brand sponsorships, says in a Thursday blog post that brands can "earn real standing instead of shouting through feeds and swipes." He adds that Substack wants advertisers to treat newsletters as a place to go deeper, thank communities, and support audiences that can help grow a business.

Several companies are already building a presence on the platform through their own publications, including Rare Beauty, The RealReal, Tory Burch and Hinge. The Knot Worldwide also says it is bullish on expanding onto Substack, with vice president of global consumer marketing Kiara Kempski saying the company is starting a publication for The Knot and moving editors there to build owned content.

Retail and consumer brands test creator-led campaigns

Rothy's is among the brands using Substack both to identify creators and to convert those relationships into campaigns and events. Anna Doré, the company’s vice president of brand and communications, says the platform stands out at a time when algorithm-driven feeds often surface the same content and make trusted tastemakers more valuable.

The footwear brand points to several creator relationships that begin with organic mentions and later develop into sponsored partnerships. Emily Sundberg, writer of the business newsletter Feed Me, posts about wearing Rothy's flats on her wedding day, and the brand later sponsors a pizza party for her readers.

Fashion writer Erika Veurink features Rothy's shoes in a New York Magazine article that goes viral, then enters a longer-term relationship with the company. That work leads to a vintage pop-up for Veurink’s readers at a Rothy's store in New York City, drawing more than 200 people and lifting foot traffic by 75% that day.

Rothy's also works with Denna Nazem after she mentions the brand in her travel newsletter, then collaborates with her on an in-person event tied to a Nordstrom launch. For the brand’s 10th anniversary, Rothy's partners with five Substack creators, including Veurink, Hunter Harris, Rose Anderson, Noora Raj Brown and Plum Sykes, to write essays about personal growth.

Other marketers see similar value in the platform’s more personal creator-audience dynamic. Sophia Sesto, Poppi’s vice president of culture, says Substack helps brands understand creators more deeply and use those insights to shape future collaborations, including travel-related activations that place products more naturally into creator content.

In our earlier coverage of OpenAI’s launch of visual ads in ChatGPT in India, we explained how the company is opening a new ad channel for brands while limiting placements to Free and Go plan users. We also outlined OpenAI’s approach to labeling ads separately from organic responses, providing only aggregated measurement data, and giving users privacy and control options.

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