Substance over gaming the feed.

Balenciaga is paying Substack creators. The fashion house is opting for what seems like an audience-first approach to content marketing.

I think a lot about surface level vs substantive storytelling so it’s encouraging that brands are rethinking their investment in the algorithmic serfdom that is most social media feeds and looking elsewhere for deeper, more personal relationships. It better reflects how most of us like to live our lives IRL. It’s more human, more intentional.

Few brands would feel good about funding the machine that does… this.

You only need to read the opening chapter of GIRLS® by Freya India to see how engagement-driven recommendation systems can have profoundly human consequences. In her example, it's teenage girls. Grief in, revenue out. A sleight of hand that's come to define a generation's anxiety.

Not to mention the broader cosmetic and stylistic singularity across seemingly every art form that took hold over the last two decades. Taste conducted by algorithms.

A brief thumbscroll on this very feed will likely provide some head-scratching moments – once you look under the bonnet of some of the content that stopped the aforementioned thumb in its tracks with a good headline, decorated with lots of other people’s thumbs. I can’t stop thinking about thumbs.

The shift probably won’t happen overnight, feed-based ‘brand building’ is something we're hooked on. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. But the signs of a move away from one-size-fits-all media are clear.

Every day, articles from Substack land in my inbox. Writers who I've chosen to hear from. It's digital, with analogue soul. There is no feed to game. And trust IS the distribution.

So here’s to spending less time beating the machine, more time on the actual work. And to substance-first platforms that punish brands with nothing to say.

If the algorithm vanished tomorrow, would anyone subscribe to you?