It's No Fluke

Katie Swett Miller is Chief Product Officer at Kit, the leading email marketing platform helping professional creators build, own, and monetize their audience, independent of algorithms. She's spent her career building technology that makes creating online simple, delightful, and empowering.

At Kit, she’s focused on helping creators not just own their audience but truly understand it, through products like Subscriber Signals, Kit’s audience intelligence tool. Previously, Katie built products at Square and Weebly, working at the intersection of AI, commerce, and platform ecosystems to help creators turn ideas into sustainable businesses.

Scott Shigeoka is an internationally recognized curiosity expert, TED speaker, and the award-winning author of Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World. His work focuses on how we can strengthen our well-being and relationships, including as a Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and as the Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute. He is also the host and creator of the Curiosity Mobile, as well as a playwright and artist.

Sharon Mussalli is a media, entertainment and tech executive with a reputation for building and scaling brands from nascent stages to large, profitable businesses with viable longevity. She is currently the CEO of NowThis, the hub for entertainment-focused, series-based, and social-first digital content, leading the brand into its next phase as a network. She works closely with the team to accelerate revenue growth and develop best-in-class, innovative programming that defines the NowThis brand. Under her leadership, NowThis has become a profitable and sustainable business primed to lead the digital media industry.

Sharon has held senior positions at large multinationals like iHeartMedia and Meta, venture-backed startups like Some Spider Studios (exited in 2021 to Vox Media and BDG), and longstanding digital properties like Bustle Digital Group. Her 20+ years of experience have spanned finance, revenue growth and operations, yield optimization, organizational development, operations and general management.

Sharon holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA in Quantitative Economics from Tufts University. She has held several advisory board positions within MIT’s Delta V startup accelerator program and has contributed to MIT’s pricing curriculum at the Sloan School of Management.

Jared Kleinstein is the Founder & CEO of Gondola, a platform helping creative professionals get discovered, credited, and hired, and the founder of Fresh Tape Media, an award-winning creative agency working with some of the biggest brands, leagues, and athletes in the world.
Previously, Jared helped shape the early days of social video at Vine and Twitter, where he led sports content partnerships and worked at the forefront of how teams, athletes, and creators connect with audiences on the platform. And before that, he led strategic partnerships for StreetEasy (acquired by Zillow).
Having experienced the evolution of digital media from the platform, agency, and technology sides, Jared brings a unique perspective on the intersection of sports, storytelling, entrepreneurship, and the creator economy. He lives in Denver with his wife, two kids, and best friend/dog Manchego.

Sara Mengesha is a community strategist and cultural architect with 15+ years of experience at the intersection of culture, entertainment, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Across four continents, she has helped produce and shape more than 10,000 live experiences, from intimate concerts and festivals to global creator communities. Her work spans organizations including Sofar Sounds, Lighthouse, and Creator Now/vidIQ, as well as projects involving artists and creators such as Billie Eilish and Morgan Jay.

As Head of Community & Culture at Stan, Sara leads efforts to turn audiences into active communities, creating spaces where creators and entrepreneurs can connect, collaborate, and build sustainable businesses.

Her philosophy is simple: Community isn’t an outcome. It’s a decision. It takes intention to bring people together and purpose to make those connections matter.

Mikhail Naliukhin is the Global Director of inlab, inDrive’s in-house creative agency. He leads a global multidisciplinary team working across creative strategy, campaigns, design, production, localization, digital and emerging technologies.

Under his leadership, inlab has evolved from an internal production function into a global creative partner supporting one of the world’s fastest-growing technology companies across diverse markets and cultures. His focus is on building creative systems that combine strong human judgment, local relevance and new technology and using AI not to replace talent, but to help people work faster, expand their capabilities and create greater impact

Abbey Fish is the founder and CEO of Tastemaker, a leading community and conference for food creators, brands, and industry leaders navigating the rapidly evolving creator economy. With more than 17 years of experience in digital media and the creator space, Abbey works at the intersection of creators, commerce, technology, and culture. She is also a sociology researcher studying power, legitimacy, and platform capitalism in the creator economy and advises companies and industry organizations on the future of creator-led media and commerce.

Fiona Turko is a marketer with a builder’s mindset: equal parts creative strategist and data-driven operator. Over the years, she has led influencer and creator programs for both scrappy startups and scaling global AI brands (Zapier, Gamma), turning creator partnerships into powerful storytelling and measurable growth.

Her favourite part is where creators, community, and brand meet. She builds campaigns that connect audiences across YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and social—especially in the B2B space where authenticity, credibility and expertise matter most.

And she is interested in how AI is reshaping the creator space, and how brands collaborate with creators not as advertisers, but as true partners and long-term advocates.

David Yankelewitz is the Founder & CCO of Public Display of Affection (PDA), a creative agency that builds brand loyalty through campaigns & activations that speak the 5 love languages. He’s won over 100 advertising awards, including Cannes Lions, OneShow, Clio, and D&AD, and was one of The Drum’s Top 200 Most Awarded ECDs.

His work includes the limited edition Dr. Squatch soap made with Sydney Sweeney's bathwater, Oscar Mayer's bacon-scent alarm clock for iPhone, Verizon's Super Bowl stadium in Fortnite, and Samsung's #DanceAwesome TikTok challenge starring BLACKPINK, which generated 16 billion global views. He lives in NYC, where he paints, bikes, parties, makes jewelry, and designs fashion pieces when he's not zooming with a client or creative collaborator.

Dan Robbins is the Head of Brand Sponsorships at Substack. Previously, Dan held executive roles at PayPal, Roku, and Nielsen. He has also served on the boards of The Ad Council, the Modern Marketing Association (MMA), and The Point Foundation, taught a course on advertising economics as an Adjunct Professor at Cornell University, served as Executive in Residence for Progress Partners, and participated as a juror for the Clio awards and the Effie awards.

His achievements include being named PRWeek Marketer of the Year, a Business Insider Power Player, and a Fellow at the Economic Club of New York. He is a graduate of Cornell University and is based in New York.

Substack gave brands a first look at the next phase of its sponsorships program today at Advertising Week, including three new sponsorship formats designed to create value for brands, creators, and their audiences, as well as the introduction of independent brand measurement through Kantar.

Since announcing the program with an initial group of brand partners in June, Substack has also been bringing more brands into the program and building a growing pipeline of campaigns across different categories.
The three new formats are:

1. The Unlock: A brand sponsors a creator’s paid post, making it free for everyone to read. The creator gets paid, while the brand gives readers access to content that would otherwise sit behind the paywall.

2. The Upgrade: A brand gives a creator’s free subscribers a month of paid access at no cost to the reader, with the creator paid for each person who upgrades.

3. The Masthead: A brand works with writers and creators to curate or commission work around a theme, bringing it together in a dedicated destination on Substack, almost like a digital zine.