Inside the NFL’s revamped influencer marketing strategy to reach Gen Z and diverse fans

Over 50 influencers and creators will film social content from the sidelines of the NFL’s opening week, which begins Thursday and includes the league’s first game in South America on Friday. The large roster of creators the NFL recruited for the first few games of the season—including popular YouTube streamer IShowSpeed, Allison Kucharczyk (an influencer and wife of NFL defensive end Isaac Rochell) and YouTuber and United Football League player Donald De La Haye, better known online as Deestroying—is just the beginning of the league’s vastly expanded creator strategy for the 2024 season. “Every single week of the NFL season, we are going to have activations going on with creators,” Ian Trombetta, NFL senior VP of social, influencer and content marketing, told Ad Age. “If you think about all the different priorities we have across the league, from our own B2C product, to ‘Sunday Ticket,’ to our streamers, to our broadcast partners … I can assure you that we’re finding ways to bring creators into that entire mix in different ways.” Football marketing news Tracking Super Bowl, NFL and college brand moves Read more here The NFL made creators a core part of its marketing strategy during the 2023 football season, when it launched the “NFL Creator of the Week” program in partnership with YouTube (which gained exclusive rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket in late 2022) and creator agency Whalar. Throughout the season, the NFL granted 27 creators VIP access to the sidelines, locker rooms and other behind-the-scenes areas of 24 games, including the Super Bowl. Look back: Influencers play big role in Super Bowl 2024 The creators, including gaming YouTuber and streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins and comedian Adam Waheed, produced YouTube Shorts for the NFL, documenting their experience at the football games for their audiences and the NFL’s own YouTube channel. The program generated more than 153 million total impressions and over 46.5 million views for the NFL, as well as over 2 million engagements, according to Whalar. @adamw Cant believe this happeend. #NFLProBowlGames #NFLCreatorRow ♬ original sound - Adam W The “Creator of the Week” program is returning for the 2024 season with a mix of old and new creator partners, Trombetta said. Waheed, for example, has already joined the list for the second season of the program alongside first-time participants such as comedians Evelyn Gonzalez and Funny Marco, he said. Trombetta also noted the NFL will continue to provide creators access to exclusive NFL footage to use in their content through the “Access Pass” program it also launched last year. "I plan to keep my approach very similar to last year, which is just being myself," Waheed said in an email. "The great thing about this partnership is that I don’t really have to approach this content any different than I approach my regular content. The NFL and YouTube allow me to bring my unique perspective of comedy to the world of football without too many guidelines." The NFL is also shifting some of the focus of the “Creator of the Week” program to the week leading up to game day rather than just the game itself, Trombetta said. The leadup to the game offers more opportunities for creators, including access to practice, facilities and NFL legends, “that we can co-create content with,” he said. “The game experience is great, but oftentimes [creators] can get a little more intimacy with the players or with the staff if they’re actually operating in the facilities, and that storytelling really kind of leads into the game.” It’s a similar approach to the NFL’s creator playbook in the days leading up to this year’s Super Bowl. The league invited creators including MrBeast, model Haley Kalil and YouTuber Ryan Trahan to Las Vegas the Monday before the Super Bowl, when the teams arrive in the city, so they could spend the week creating content. But while the NFL largely limited its creator strategy to YouTube during the 2023 season, the league is extending its creator collaborations across additional social media and streaming platforms throughout the 2024 season—both in the U.S. and around the globe, Trombetta said. For its Friday game in São Paulo, Brazil, the NFL inked a deal with Brazilian influencer and streamer Casimiro Miguel to broadcast and commentate a local livestream of the game on CazéTV—Miguel’s live sports channel—on YouTube and Amazon Prime Video, Trombetta said. IShowSpeed will film content at Corinthians Arena before and after the game, while Deestroying will bring his “1ON1” competition series to local São Paulo football clubs, according to an NFL press release. The competition involves a wide receiver going up against a defensive back. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dee (@deestroying) IShowSpeed, Deestroying and other Brazilian creators the NFL is also partnering with will collaborate with Miguel and CazéTV on additional content tied to the game, Trombetta said. It will mark the first time a creator is “streaming a game” for the NFL, he added, “and that’s something that we hope will create a template for us going forward.” The game will be broadcast on Peacock in the U.S. IShowSpeed and Deestroying have also made appearances in the NFL’s broader marketing campaigns leading up to the 2024 season. Deestroying made a cameo in the NFL’s “This Is Football Country” campaign by 72andSunny in August, while IShowSpeed was part of an ad promoting the NFL’s flag football championship tournament in July. “We are all about extending the reach of the game as much as we can,” Trombetta said. “If you want to deliver the game and the experience around the NFL to as many fans as possible around the world, creators are a great way to extend the reach—especially with more casual fans and younger fans.” Also read: How the NFL is growing internationally For kickoff weekend, the NFL is also partnering with media partner NBCUniversal on a “Transcontinental Tailgate” to bring a group of seven creators to three NFL games in the span of four days: Thursday’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs, Friday’s São Paulo game between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles and Friday and Sunday’s game between the Los Angeles Rams and Detroit Lions, the NFL said in a statement. The seven creators, including Kucharczyk, social media “grill master” Jack “Chef Cuso” Mancuso and comedy creator Erika Priscilla, have over 60 million combined followers across social media, according to the release. The “Transcontinental Tailgate” creator program follows NBC’s Creator Collective at the Paris Olympics and is meant to bring kickoff weekend “to new audiences through the eyes of the seven diverse creators,” said Lyndsay Signor, senior VP of consumer engagement at NBC Sports, in an email. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Isaac Christopher Rochell (@isaacrochell) As the 2024 season progresses, creators will also be a “key part” of the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” and Black Friday broadcasts on Amazon Prime Video and the two Christmas Day matches streaming on Netflix, Trombetta said. “There’s a lot of interest from Netflix in what we’re going to do with Christmas Day … and I’m sure their talent, as well as our creator network, will be activated there, too,” he said. The NFL is also expanding its partnership with Snap to include a new creator program. Around five Snap creators are expected to share behind-the-scenes footage from the season, according to the platform, similar to how it partnered with NBC’s Creator Collective for the Olympics. Building lifetime fandom The new elements in the NFL’s creator strategy “all ladder up to the idea that we want to reach the elusive Gen Z—and sometimes Gen A[lpha]—audience that’s just consuming media in different ways,” Trombetta said. “And oftentimes, creators can reach them more efficiently or more effectively than a lot of the other means.” Almost half (47%) of Gen Z consumers cited social media videos and livestreams as their favorite form of video content in a survey for Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends report, and over 50% of them said they’d canceled a paid streaming service in the six months before the survey. But 59% of those Gen Zers also indicated social content, particularly creator recommendations, often drives them to tune into TV shows, movies or other content on streaming platforms. Of course, one of the main objectives of the NFL’s creator marketing efforts is to “drive tune-in to the games” on broadcast channels or streaming platforms, Trombetta said. Attracting female and multicultural audiences is also a primary aim of the NFL’s creator strategy, he said. Over half of the new TikTok followers the NFL gained during the 2023 season were women (undoubtedly due to the so-called “Taylor Swift effect”), he said, and the league is prioritizing partnerships with creators who are female and/or multicultural to further appeal to those target audiences, he said. Between July and December 2023, the share of Gen Z and millennial women with favorable opinions of the NFL grew 11 percentage points from 53% to 64%, according to Morning Consult. Sixty-six percent of U.S. women aged eight and up are NFL fans, according to NFL Fan Tracker, the league’s consumer insights measurement tool. That demographic makes up 46% of U.S. NFL fans. @nfl what a moment for travis and taylor ❤️ #taylorswift #traviskelce #kansascitychiefs #micdup #nfl #nflplayoffs ♬ original sound - NFL Nearly half of the NFL’s current creator partners are women, including influential “WAGs” (an acronym for the “wives and girlfriends” of athletes) such as Kristin Juszczyk and Chanen Johnson, Trombetta said. And over 70% of the creators the league has worked with in the past year are diverse, he noted. “Creators are just a great and efficient way for us to continue to reach those fans and offer a different view than just the Xs and Os that our more avid fans may want to see,” Trombetta said. “We’re becoming more balanced in terms of our audience composition, and that's great. That’s a healthy thing for us as a league. It's a healthy thing for our [teams]. And then that leads to, hopefully, lifetime fandom.” ~ ~ ~CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this story misreported some of the details surrounding the NFL’s partnership with Snap.

Inside the NFL’s revamped influencer marketing strategy to reach Gen Z and diverse fans

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