AE launched its Substack in 2025. Balenciaga, Nike, Hinge, Shopify and many other brands followed.
The wrong metric for the right decisions
Follower count is a visibility metric. It measures how many people clicked “follow” at some point in the past, but it cannot establish how many people feel part of the brand’s community. A creator with a 50,000-subscriber newsletter and a 40% open rate generates more value for a brand than one with 800,000 Instagram followers and 0.3% engagement. Brands that understand this are building relationships with creators whose influence is real but invisible to standard dashboards. Brands that do not are paying for the most expensive vanity metric on the market. According to IAB data, advertising spend on creators reached $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year on year. Almost half of marketers consider it a “must have”. But rising spend without updated evaluation metrics simply repeats the same mistake on an ever larger scale. Investing in creators makes sense. The way many brands still measure that investment does not.
Launched in 2023, Louis Vuitton’s Discord server brings together fashion and Web3, offering public channels for enthusiasts and exclusive areas.
The new platforms
Substack began as a tool for independent journalists. Today it hosts brands such as American Eagle, with paid newsletters on lifestyle, style and culture. The model works because the inbox is a different space from the feed: anyone who opens an email has made an active choice and given explicit permission, and brings a level of attention that no scrolling algorithm can replicate. Ashley Schapiro, VP of marketing at American Eagle, told the NRF Big Show 2026 that the inbox offers “a more intimate space for perspective and conversation” than any social feed. Discord has a different structure but a shared logic. It is not a broadcast channel: it is a community environment organised into topic-based channels, where conversations happen in real time and members get to know one another over time. Know is the key word here. Walmart and H&M are following their best creators onto Discord and Reddit because they know that is where the people who trust them are: people who recommend and defend the brand in peer discussions. Sarah Henry of Walmart described the most engaged creators as people who “are building parallel communities” outside traditional social channels. H&M stated that creator-produced content outperforms the brand’s own “always, and by a wide margin.” Reddit is the most counter-intuitive of the three. It is anonymous, critical by nature, and historically hostile to brands that try to enter without understanding its rules. Yet some brands are investing in it precisely for this reason: conversations on Reddit are genuine, uncurated, and influence the purchasing decisions of an audience segment that trusts no official communication. Seen this way, being present on Reddit means understanding what your audience says when nobody is watching. The common thread across the three platforms is the ability to control one’s own presence and the value offered to the community. This is what makes them effective, and what makes them hard to manage for organisations used to optimising every output. Managing them well requires skills different from those of traditional social media management: less production, more moderation and continuous presence, and a tolerance for direct exchange that broadcast channels never demanded. The brands that have understood this are shifting all their effort there. With unexpected results.New Connections (FAQ)
Are Substack and Discord genuinely scalable for a brand, or do they remain niche experiments?
It depends on what you are trying to build. Scaling a Substack presence to hundreds of thousands of subscribers is possible, but it is rarely the most useful goal. Substack works for building a deep relationship with a specific audience, one that carries a level of trust the algorithmic feed does not produce. For brands that need to understand what their most engaged audience really thinks, a newsletter with 10,000 readers who open and reply is worth far more than an Instagram channel with a million followers who scroll past.Are creators who move to Substack and Discord still useful for brand awareness, or have they stopped being tools for reach?
They have stopped being tools for mass reach, but they have not stopped being useful. Their function has changed: from amplifiers of visibility to builders of trust within vertical communities. A creator with 20,000 members on Discord around a specific topic, such as fashion, personal finance or technology, has real influence over that audience’s purchasing decisions. Generic brand awareness is built elsewhere. Deep credibility within a segment is built here.How can a brand build a community of its own without depending on social media?
The first step is to identify a space where the audience has a concrete reason to return, take part and recognise itself. A newsletter, a Discord server or a vertical community only works when it offers access, content, relationships or tools that the public feed cannot replicate.How do you measure the ROI of a presence on channels where engagement is hard to track?
The unit of measurement has to change. On these channels volume metrics say little: what counts is the open and reply rate, the percentage of members who take part at least once a month, how often the same people return to the conversation, and the repurchase rate of community members compared with the rest of the customer base. These data are slower to gather and harder to present on a slide, but they describe something the follower count never has. Bliss can support the brand in choosing the channel, defining the community’s value proposition and building an editorial and measurement system consistent with brand governance and positioning. The aim is not to move followers to another platform, but to turn part of the audience into an ongoing relationship that is less dependent on algorithms. BLISS® © 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDBLISS®© 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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