In the months leading up to the Paris Olympics, NBCUniversal determined that attempting to persuade Gen Z—a group notorious for its fragmented media consumption and inclination toward social media over TV or streaming platforms—to tune into the Summer Games through linear TV or streaming apps would be a futile effort. 

So, rather than try to drive Gen Z viewers (and the older, pre-teen end of Gen Alpha) to its owned channels, NBCU has opted to bring the Olympics to these young viewers by partnering with over two dozen creators across YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Meta. And this so-called “Paris Creator Collective” isn’t just a strategy for the 2024 Olympics—it’s also the first step in NBCU’s long-term plan to establish a loyal audience of Gen Zers and Alphas ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics four years from now.

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“So much of what our marketing strategy is for Paris, Milan, LA [and] the future is really bringing the Olympics back into the cultural zeitgeist,” Lyndsay Signor, senior VP, consumer engagement, sports strategic marketing at NBCU, told Ad Age. “We want to make sure that our content, our creative, our marketing is hitting people where they are with the types of content that resonate with them. [The Creator Collective] works together with our broader marketing strategy of getting the Olympics in front of as many people as possible in a way that’s engaging—so that, ideally, they become lifelong fans if they aren’t already.”

Signor and Geo Karapetyan, senior VP of platform and device partnerships at NBCU, began assembling the Creator Collective—a blend of creators along with a handful of current or former Olympians—roughly two years ago after realizing “we could no longer really hold all the [Olympics] content to ourselves and expect that everyone was going to come and find us,” Karapetyan said. 

The duo collaborated with teams at YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Meta and Overtime, a Gen Z sports media company, to build its roster of 27 creators spanning niches from beauty and fashion to comedy and lifestyle. Collectively, the creators have an audience of 157 million across the five platforms, Signor said.

The Creator Collective is one layer in NBCU’s broader “content creation operation” around the Olympics, which also includes partnerships with a slew of high-profile celebrities—such as Megan Thee Stallion, Sabrina Carpenter and Snoop Dogg—as well as a 10-person NBCU content team shooting content on the ground in Paris for NBCU’s social channels, Signor said. An additional social team of over three dozen NBCU employees gathered in Stamford, Connecticut are editing and uploading the content from those on-the-ground employees to NBC’s social accounts, as well as celebrating breakout Olympic stars such as “pommel horse guy” Stephen Nedoroscik, she said.

Though NBCU has given the creators access to the sidelines of various Olympic events, “we’re not asking them to go in and do X’s and O’s type of sports coverage—we’re asking them to bring the Olympics to their fans and their audience in a way that would be interesting to them,” Signor said. 

Several creators in the NBCU program, such as Molly Carlson (a diver on Team Canada), have leaned into various plotlines that have emerged out of social media, including Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen’s fixation on the chocolate muffins served in the Olympic Village’s dining hall. Others have teamed up on videos with other creators in the collective—as gymnast Katelyn Ohashi and actor and influencer Harry Jowsey did on Instagram—as they’ve explored the streets of Paris between Olympic events. 

Another element of the Creator Collective is the opportunity for brands to sponsor content made by the roster of creators in the program. Those sponsored posts have largely been limited to Overtime’s channels rather than the creators attending the Olympics in partnership with the social platforms. Google, Chase, Xfinity and Lionsgate have all partnered with Overtime on brand integrations or “presented by” sponsorships of the media company’s TikTok content in the past week.

The creator lens

A driving force behind the Creator Collective is Gen Z’s propensity to engage with pop culture moments or events (such as the Olympics) through the lens of social media creators. Roughly two-thirds of Gen Z consumers in the U.S. now “spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself,” according to the latest edition of YouTube’s Culture & Trends Report.

“Because fans have these very personal and daily relationships with creators, their connection to those creators is a very familiar and trusted one,” said Angela Courtin, VP of brand marketing at YouTube. “NFL games, the Olympics, Coachella, the Met Gala—these are events that used to feel like they were at arm’s length, and now they feel like you’re having a front-row seat to the action, whether that’s the red carpet, a stadium [or] an Olympic poolside. It just brings that to life. And I think there’s no replacement for that.”

NBCU embraced that shift in Gen Z’s media consumption by having Alex Cooper, host of the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy,” host live watch parties of various Olympic events, including women’s gymnastics and women’s soccer, on Peacock.

On top of the six creators YouTube sent to the Paris Olympics with NBCU, the platform is also pairing up an additional 24 creators with international TV networks Claro and Eurosports, as well as the International Olympic Committee, Courtin said. “I think everyone has gotten into the mode that creators are really essential to amplifying and engaging audiences,” she said. 

With its Olympic program, NBCU is following in the footsteps of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, which have leaned into creators as “correspondents” producing content around pop culture moments such as awards shows, music festivals and, increasingly, sporting events. Earlier this year, YouTube invited a group of creators to Coachella to effectively act as a window into the music festival for their fans through on-the-ground video content, Courtin said.

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TikTok, meanwhile, has recently tasked creators such as Tefi Pessoa and Joe Aragon (aka “Cinema Joe”) with reporting live from the red carpets of the Met Gala and the Oscars, respectively. Rollo Goldstaub, TikTok’s global head of sports partnerships, views the NBCU Creator Collective as the latest example of the overarching trend of Gen Z consumers wanting deeper access to these types of events—whether through creators attending them or, in the case of the Olympics, the athletes sharing their experiences from the Olympic Village on social media, he said. “We’ve noticed those behind-the-scenes narratives can work as well as any sort of highlight or other official content,” Goldstaub added. 

A January 2023 survey from TikTok and consumer insights platform Suzy found more than one-third (36%) of TikTok users were interested in seeing behind-the-scenes content from the Olympic Village, and another 39% said they wanted to see TikTok content featuring their favorite athletes or teams.

But for YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Meta alike, the Creator Collective is their first true foray into a large-scale creator program surrounding the Olympics. Snapchat, for example, has been partnering with NBCU on Olympics content since the 2016 Summer Games, but “this is the first time we have had a dedicated program with creators around the Olympics,” said Anmol Malhotra, head of sports partnerships at Snapchat, in an email. “We are excited to see how we can scale and replicate something similar for future events.” A Meta spokesperson similarly called the Creator Collective a “first program of its kind” for that company, in an email.

Creating for Gen Z

Clarke Peoples, a TikTok influencer in the Creator Collective, has approached the program as an opportunity to “connect in real time with [her] followers” by letting their feedback on her posts shape her content. Before the Games, she hosted a handful of TikTok livestreams in which she asked them about which aspects of the Olympics and her trip to Paris they were most interested in seeing her make content about—and several users sent her DMs after those streams, too, suggesting additional topics they’d want her videos to touch on, she said. 

“I just really want my audience to feel like they’re almost there with me, and I don’t want it to seem too planned out or that I’m creating content that no one really wants to see,” Peoples said. Indeed, several of the TikToks she’s posted from the Olympics are direct responses to comments she received on previous posts. One commenter, for instance, noted her resemblance to Team USA gymnast Jordan Chiles, which prompted Peoples to reply to that comment with a video of her and Chiles lip-synching together.

“I think it’s very cool to be able to have that sort of connection to [a creator] and it’s almost like a friend of yours out covering this event,” Peoples said of her followers and how the Collective works. “Maybe they know ‘Oh, she’s going to definitely ask a question about this, because we’ve been blowing her comments about it.’ Or ‘she’s going to give us an inside look at this thing I think is very exciting.’ … being able to have your favorite TikTokers going out and covering things that typically maybe only a specialist or an athlete or former athlete or whatever would comment on, and it’s very technical. That, you might not really connect with very much.”

YouTuber Carter Kench, another participant in the Creator Collective, also prioritized his audience when making YouTube Shorts and vlogs from both Paris and the U.S. Gymnastics trials in Minneapolis in late June. He’s focused his vlogs, in particular, on capturing behind-the-scenes details not typically shown on NCBU broadcasts of the Olympics, “like the merch stands, the food—all this extra stuff I’ve never seen before” and sharing that exclusive look at the Games with his followers, he said.

“I can only see this accelerating,” YouTube’s Courtin said. “I can see Milan, and obviously LA in ’28—I just think this is going to get bigger, because I think the influence and the power that creators have to generate interest and enthusiasm in the games will only heighten … and I think it’s really exploded in terms of the interest that broadcasters and the IOC have in bringing creators [to the Olympics].” 

NBCU, for its part, is planning to continue making creators a substantial element of its Olympic marketing, Signor said. 

“If you were born in 2002 or after, you have not had an Olympics in the United States. And we’ve found whether it’s the World Cup or any global event, there’s definitely a different energy and awareness and buzz when these world events are actually in the States,” she said. “We know that Gen Z, younger millennials and even Gen [Alpha] are definitely consuming more on social, and we hope that [the Creator Collective] will start to kind of turn up their interest in the Olympics for when we get to Los Angeles in ’28 and they’re a little bit older.”