The inbox, once dismissed as a digital graveyard, is having a moment.
At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week 2026, a panel of brand and media executives argued that the newsletter renaissance is less a nostalgia play than a direct response to the broken state of social platforms.
Speaking to an audience of social media practitioners in a discussion moderated by content strategist Lauren Finney Harden; Rare Beauty chief marketing officer Ashley Murphy; Betches co-founder and chief brand officer Sami Sage; and Gen Z expert and UTA executive Shaina Zafar discussed the merits of email and why this relic of the early internet has come to dominate tastemaking.
“Something that we were always given as advice, as we were growing Betches over the past decade and a half, was that having your own owned-and-operated audience was the gold standard,” said Sage, whose media brand Betches now operates three newsletters with roughly 60,000 subscribers. “That’s really what you want.”
All three marketers extolled the virtues of traditional social media, but the conversation kept returning to a recent rupture in its utility. Now that feeds are largely governed by an omnipotent algorithm, followers mean little and content delivery is unpredictable. As a result, most social platforms are still valuable for discovery, but they offer little in the way of reliable distribution or depth of connection.
The panelists also shared their thoughts on newsletter content strategy, which, in a departure from the more manicured presentations of most social media marketing, rewards stripped-down, behind-the-scenes content.
