5 thoughts about... talent joining Substack

Alex is the Managing Director of major UK talent agency InterTalent. He represents his clients alongside overseeing the agency's creative strategy, day-to-day operations & acquisitions.

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🤔 5 Thoughts about… talent joining Substack.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting to know the team at Substack. Partly to know how I can do better when it comes to my own newsletter, but mainly to talk about how our talent at InterTalent can use the platform to their advantage.

An influx of celebrities have joined Substack recently. Pamela Anderson, Jameela Jamil, Piers Morgan and many more have launched newsletters to add another string to their bow. In a world where the ‘written word’ is having a resurgence through LinkedIn, Blogs, Books and all sorts, it makes sense that well-known talent might want to leap too. Diversifying your output has become the theme over the past few years. Things have changed. When I first started as an Agent, your clients only had one clear path and didn’t go near anything else for fear of losing credibility. Not now. Now, unless you have lots of things going on and multiple ways to reach an audience, you’re seen as not doing enough. Not visible enough. Not diverse enough.

However, Substack hasn’t been an easy one for talent to get on board with. Now, clearly, I’m a massive advocate for the platform given I’m on here. I get it. I love it. But getting our clients to onboard isn’t easy. Some feel that writing takes too much effort. Some think no one cares what they have to say. Some just don’t see the potential yet.

So while I was at Cannes Lions a couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to grab a coffee with the co-founder of Substack, Hamish McKenzie, who was over from San Francisco. I’d recently seen his TedTalk which was impressive, and I wanted to delve into what I needed to know to then pass on to our talent. It’s not for everyone but given I decided 2 years ago to launch a Substack while running a talent agency (which is not the norm and raised a few eyebrows amongst my competitors), I thought I could be more knowledgable on why talent should think about joining and what it can bring to their strategy.

So yes, these are all positive reasons why your talent should join the Substack community - I won’t hide from that - but it’s definitely worth considering.

So here are 5 things I learned from my coffee with Hamish about why talent should consider joining Substack.