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 667,000 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.

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For instance, Rare Beauty’s newsletter, Rare Beauty Secrets, is a vehicle for unpolished storytelling that audiences cannot get on Instagram or TikTok; recent editions have explored niche topics like accessible packaging design and the engineering behind a foundation’s pump mechanism. 

The brand learned a valuable lesson early, according to Finney Harden: Tutorial-style content flopped, while raw iPhone footage generated outsized engagement.

“Do not treat newsletters as a sales channel,” Murphy said. “It’s really about relationships.”

Zafar, who oversees UTA’s Gen Z practice and writes her own newsletter, framed the shift in broader cultural terms: Audiences are actively seeking spaces that feel chosen rather than algorithmically assigned. 

“Mini viral,” Zafar said, “is just sharing an article you love with your friends in a group chat. That’s where culture is.”

The panelists broadly agreed that the durability of newsletters as a channel comes down to consistency, point of view, and resisting the urge to repurpose social content from other platforms wholesale. 

In an automated media environment, the human voice is the moat.

Creativity and AI can properly co-exist for brands as long as the right tools are implemented, according to Higgsfield AI’s Mahi de Silva.

The co-founder and chief strategy officer of Higgsfield AI spoke to ADWEEK’s COO, Zoë Ruderman, during a Social Media Week session in New York on Tuesday, where he said his company is focused on democratizing content creation.

“We’re an AI studio, a platform made by creators for creators,” de Silva said. He added, “It’s anything and everything you want to create in multimedia. Images, audio, video, all come together with point-and-click, drag-and-drop ease of use.”

Calling today’s current AI environment the “access era,” de Silva says the only limits to a brand’s creative execution are one’s imagination with his studio’s AI capabilities. And it’s paying off on the bottom line.

For example, the executive pointed out that Eight Sleep, a digital-first brand, achieved substantial cost savings by using the platform.

According to de Silva, Eight Sleep used to spend roughly $30,000 over a three-week period to build an app. As a result of working with Higgsfield AI, the company can now do that work in a day or so for less than $1,000.

“What that frees up is ideation, experimentation, iteration,” he said. “Really understanding what works and what doesn’t work at a tiny fraction of the cost, not just the monetary cost, but the time cost of being able to reach your target audience.”

De Silva acknowledged that not all brands are ready to openly embrace the benefits of multimedia AI in creative campaign building and execution. The exec said several brands used Higgsfield AI’s tools for this year’s Super Bowl and Winter Olympics, but those brand names aren’t public.

“Maybe find him backstage, and he’ll tell you,” Ruderman joked.

Regarding companies he can name, de Silva said that beverage maker Coca-Cola was one of the brands that uses their tools. He believes that by 2027, as AI multimedia tools and companies become more commonplace, more brands will be more comfortable acknowledging and embracing AI.

Towards the end of the session, the former Snapchat executive spoke about the deluge of AI slop and its negative implications, saying that one way brands could overcome this is by recognizing the power of creativity and storytelling with positive use of AI tools.

“If you can harness these tools and your creativity to tell stories and find people where you want them to be or to take them where you want to take them, I think that’s going to be a huge inspiration,” de Silva said.

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At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Snap’s global vp of of smb and mid-market, Sidharth Malhotra, revealed three things he’s noticed to help sellers overcome the totally fragmented path consumers take—at least on Snap.

“We’ve all been taught the marketing funnel. But it’s a problem,” he said, adding: “The journey is no longer linear.”

The value of the traditional funnel has long been up for debate, with both detractors and fervent supporters.

Snap claims you don’t get new consumers from oversaturated channels

Malhotra argued that ad buyers are wasting money on oversaturated channels, where diminished returns are hidden by dashboards that blend many metrics together. And metrics like return on ad spend or cost of return don’t show whether advertisers are actually getting a return on the dollars they spend.

Of course, Snap doesn’t have the overwhelming popularity it used to, especially with TikTok’s surge in recent years. But he indicated that a lot of the ad buyers who are dumping spend into the ultra-hot social media platforms are putting their ads in front of repeat buyers—the age-old problem of marketing to people already in line to buy.

Malhotra pointed out that “40% of U.S. users on Snapchat aren’t showing up on TikTok and 80% aren’t showing up on Pinterest.”

His argument was that Snap is a good place to get first-time customers. 

Don’t hard sell when people are chatting with each other

For Malhotra, Snap is a chill place. “We lean into comfort,” he said. With that in mind, he advised that ads on Snap shouldn’t “interrupt the conversation” by showing a high-quality 30 second video ad.

“Switch gears by going low-fi,” he said. “It looks like an attentive conversation that drives clicks immediately.”

Snap is trying to pitch itself as a place for so-called “conversational commerce” to happen, where smart brands can show up, integrate themselves in the discourse with a subtle video, and grab a new sale. His strategy was to align Snap with AI answer engines, where consumers are gravitating but where the ad landscape is still being worked out.

“Chat and AI is where conversational commerce is going next,” said Malhotra. 

His goal is for Snap to be a major part of that.

ADWEEK’s Social Media Week kicked off with a bang as creator Dhar Mann gave away a $1,000 Old Navy gift certificate to a lucky participant. 

He was reviving a hit collaboration he’d worked on with Old Navy parent company Gap, where people had to guess whether a person’s outfit is Old Navy or designer. Guess right, and you get a grand to spend at Old Navy stores.

The tricky part of the brief was that Old Navy had a message it wanted to send—that its clothing was fashionable but accessible—but Mann wanted to deliver without actually saying those words.

He worked with Damon Berger, Gap’s svp of marketing shared services, whom he met at a YouTube party at Cannes. They first activated the collaboration live onstage at the Advertising Week industry conference last October. Berger was slightly concerned because of how little control he’d have.

“I thought I’d get fired,” he joked onstage at Social Media Week. 

The partnership has since deepened, and Mann said that they’re now doing short-form activations and exploring deeper brand involvement, including a YouTube video released two months ago.

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Mann did not have any brand partners for the first five years of his social media career, he told the Social Media Week audience—something he had some anxiety about, as he saw other creators spin up partnerships. But he told the crowd to be patient. Today, Dhar Mann Studios can afford to be selective about which brands it partners with. 

The company has 125,000 square foot studio facility containing 85 different sets and locations, and its content gets one billion views per month, according to its CEO, former MTV president Sean Atkins. Atkins said that brands that want Mann to stand on stage to hawk a product aren’t the sort of partners the studio looks for.

For creators like Mann, who also partners closely with the NFL and Adobe, brand partnerships have become about finding collaborators who respect the creative vision.

Over the last few week, X eliminated over 20 nontechnical roles, and has laid off Angela Zepeda, the ad industry veteran who joined the social platform in 2024 as its head of global marketing, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Zepeda’s LinkedIn profile indicates she lost her job last month.

The company is trimming talent as its billionaire owner Elon Musk prepares to take his rocket company SpaceX public in an IPO targeting a valuation of around $1 trillion. SpaceX could reportedly file as soon as this week. X was folded into Musk’s AI company xAI in a $45 billion merger last year; then, early this year, SpaceX also joined xAI.

Zepeda was the first true marketing leader appointed at X in the Musk era, filling a role that had been vacant since 2022. 

Her priority at the platform was to distill X’s image and ethos to users and to advertisers, the latter who have historically generated more than 90% of the platform’s revenue. X has lost reams of advertisers, and, as a result, about half of its ad revenue since Musk’s takeover in 2022 (tallying $1.25 billion in 2025 compared to $2.43 billion in 2021)—largely over brand safety concerns sparked by Musk’s lax approach to content moderation.

Last spring, Zepeda told ADWEEK’s editor-in-chief Ryan Joe that X planned to roll out a major brand campaign later that year that would position X as the enduring digital town square. That brand campaign never materialized.

Now, X is hyper-focused on ramping up revenue, offering fresh financial incentives to lapsed advertisers, and bringing on a new chief revenue officer, longtime private-equity executive Jon Shulkin.

Neither X nor Zepeda could be reached by press time. 

X is imploring advertisers who’ve abandoned the platform to return, promising some a sweetheart deal of up to $200,000 in extra value, according to a leaked pitch deck viewed by ADWEEK. 

On one slide, presented to an ad agency with many clients that have not invested in the platform for a number of months, X suggested it would toss in 50% of added value for every dollar spent, up to $200,000 per advertiser. 

Details of what constitutes “added value”—whether discounts, free ad credits, rebates, or something else entirely—were unspecified.

The incentive was framed as a “return-to-platform incentive” in the slide.

The incentive structure is the same as a promotion X ran last year for Omnicom specifically, though the company’s pitch to the holding company also included additional financial incentives like 15% in media credits for spending on X’s inventory via auction, excluding revenue-sharing products.

The platform ad revenues were roughly halved after Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover in 2022. Last year, it brought in about $1.25 billion compared to 2021’s $2.43 billion from ads, per Emarketer estimates. Many advertisers dialed back their investments or exited the platform altogether over brand safety concerns posed by X’s lax approach to content moderation and misinformation under Musk’s leadership. 

More than 20 slides of the leaked deck were dedicated to promoting X’s brand safety credentials, transparency practices, and built-in controls for advertisers that help them avoid “sensitive content.” 

In one slide, X explained how Grok—the AI chatbot operated by X’s parent company xAI and integrated natively into X—is being deployed to aid brand safety. “ALL (sic) posts on X are reviewed by xAI’s Frontier model Grok for Brand Suitability,” it read. It also claimed that profile ads will only show up on X profiles that have been “fully vetted by Grok, which evaluates all compliance with X’s Rules and policies and Brand Suitability.” 

The push aligns with a broader pattern for X, which is increasingly positioning Grok as a cornerstone of its brand safety practice, as reported by ADWEEK earlier this month. The push arrives just weeks after Grok users filled X with a deluge of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real users—a scandal that has prompted a handful of regulatory investigations and lawsuits.

In the slides, X also pitched the platform as an ideal advertising environment for high engagement and high performance. It purported to be “#1 for ad attentiveness,” and said X users are 45% more likely to buy products they’ve seen advertised on X compared to non-X users, according to GWI figures from Q2 of 2024 through Q1 of 2025. 

The company also claimed that, per X internal data from August 2 to Dec 7, 2025, the platform observed a 140% lift in click-through rates, a 43% increase in conversion rates, and a 37% increase in sales. 

Ad performance—and ad-linked sales in particular—has been a fixation of Musk’s as the company looks to recover ad revenues. In February of 2023, Musk wrote in a post: “Almost nobody buys anything on Twitter, but almost everyone on Instagram does.”

As recently as this month, Musk posted an interactive survey on X asking users if they’d ever made a purchase based on an ad they’d seen on the platform. Of some 1.6 million responses, 88% they had not.

Have you ever bought anything based on an ad on this platform?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2026

X did not provide an on-the-record comment by press time. 

X will temporarily bar creators from monetizing their content through its Creator Revenue Sharing program if they share AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without clearly disclosing that it was made with AI. The move comes three days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran, sparking a chain of violent reactions.

X’s head of product Nikita Bier made the announcement in a post on X Tuesday morning, writing: “During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground.” He added that AI platforms have lowered the bar to making “content that can mislead people.” 

Today we are revising our Creator Revenue Sharing policies to maintain authenticity of content on Timeline and prevent manipulation of the program.

During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies,…

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) March 3, 2026

Creators who post AI-made videos of armed conflict without adequate disclosure, Bier said, will be suspended from Creator Revenue Sharing for 90 days. Additional violations will lead to permanent suspension from the program.

Replying to one user, Bier explained that creators would need to click on the menu and select ‘Add Content Disclosures’ where they will find a ‘Made with AI’ label option.

X will be able to check whether videos are AI-generated using available metadata imbued by AI systems in combination with Community Notes, X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking tool, Bier added. 

X debuted its revenue-sharing initiative in mid-2023. Through the program, X Premium-subscribed creators or verified organizations with at least 5 million organic impressions in the past three months who have at least 500 verified followers are eligible to cash out on their content. These users to earn based on engagement—a 2024 departure from previous rules that determined payouts based on ad impressions. 

The policy update comes two days after a Wired investigation found X drowning in misinformation about the conflict in Iran. Various months- or years-old videos were presented as new, some posts included outright disinformation about specific attacks, and  AI-generated imagery and videos spread like wildfire, shared even by the Iranian newspaper Tehran Times.

X has been recently plagued with its own endemic issues related to AI-generated content, too. In late December and early January, the site was overwhelmed with nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real users after users prompted Grok AI, embedded within X, to produce the images. Though the platform eventually tweaked its rules, the changes were far from comprehensive, as users can still use various Grok interfaces to produce such content. 

Meanwhile, the company has also been signaling its willingness to crack down on content that might deter advertisers from spending on X. Last week, X held a webinar for advertisers—the presentation for which was obtained by ADWEEK—promoting its brand safety capabilities. X’s ad revenues are about half of what they were before billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk acquired the platform for $44 billion in late 2022, according to data from Emarketer.

X did not comment by press time.