Influencers may still be far from replacing traditional celebrities in splashy Super Bowl spots, but creators are playing an increasingly pivotal role in brands’ overall marketing strategies surrounding the Big Game this year. 

Though most aren’t casting creators in their Super Bowl TV ads, more brands are asking influencers to spearhead their social media content strategies both in the lead up to and during the Big Game. Nerds and e.l.f. Cosmetics, which will both air their first national Super Bowl commercials, hired macro-influencers to appear in teasers to drum up excitement on social media. 

Nerds’ teaser centers on TikTok darling Addison Rae teaching choreography to a mysterious off-screen student, while e.l.f. cast Benito Skinner, aka “Benny Drama,” as the beauty brand’s Gen Z intern Kooper in a teaser stuffed with traditional celebrities such as artist Meghan Trainor, Ronald Gladden from “Jury Duty,” and “Suits” stars Gina Torres, Rick Hoffman and Sarah Rafferty.

“The way I look at it is there’s two Super Bowls in terms of attention—there’s the week prior, basically, and the Super Bowl itself,” said Nick Miaritis, chief client officer at VaynerMedia. “They both have equal levels of relevance—if not more in the pregame—that your brand can achieve that is unparalleled the rest of the year. And unlike the Super Bowl stage, which gives you the attention of people leaned in looking at the ads, during the week prior, you’ve got to hack at it and be relevant on social media to as many audiences as possible.” 

For Nerds, e.l.f. and a growing number of brands, grabbing consumers’ attention ahead of the Super Bowl has increasingly meant working with creators. And the NFL itself is heavily leaning on creators for its pregame programming across social media this year, said Ian Trombetta, the league’s senior VP of social, influencer and content marketing. 

More on the Super Bowl: Watch the NFL’s ad teaser

Creators head to Las Vegas

Though the NFL has been collaborating with content creators for the last few years through efforts including its TikTok Tailgate pregame livestream celebration, this year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas “far and away will be the most creators that we’ve ever had on the ground in a Super Bowl city,” he said.

The NFL is expanding its influencer strategy this year beyond its initial focus on big-name creators and celebrities, partnering with micro-creators including third-grade teacher Mary Martinez, whose football-themed classroom lessons attracted social media attention, and creators in different content niches, such as artist Devon Rodriguez, who will be bringing his talent for speed sketching portraits to the NFL Honors awards presentation ahead of the Big Game. 

The NFL will also be extending its partnerships with several of the creators it’s worked with on its Creator of the Week and Access Pass programs—which allowed influencers to create short-form video on the field throughout the football season and leverage the NFL’s archived footage for social content, respectively—to the Super Bowl, Trombetta said. Creators including MrBeast, model Haley Kalil, comedian Adam Waheed and YouTuber Ryan Trahan will all be in Las Vegas filming content for the NFL, he said, beginning the Monday before the Super Bowl when the teams arrive in the city. 

Once the creators arrive in Las Vegas, “they’ll essentially be [the NFL’s] reporters on the scene,” Trombetta said, offering their viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the events leading up to the Super Bowl and putting out a “plethora of content every single day.”

These creators will also be producing content for the NFL during and after the Super Bowl across YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit and X, formerly Twitter, he added. The influencers may also be highlighted beyond social media and appear in the CBS broadcast of the game or on the jumbotron at Allegiant Stadium, Trombetta said. 

The creators won’t just be making content for the NFL’s social channels. The league will also be pairing them up with its social media producers to film content around Las Vegas for CBS and NFL sponsors including Nike and Procter & Gamble, Trombetta said—a system he calls the NFL’s “live content correspondent program.” 

“We know that some of the audiences that they’re going to reach may have more of a passing interest in sports and football,” he said. “So, for us, when we can engage [those audiences] on their terms, through creators that they love and trust, we’ll hopefully drive as many viewers as possible to the game itself.” 

More news: What Gen Z wants from Super Bowl advertisers

Other brands without spots in the Big Game are leveraging influencers for their marketing around the Super Bowl. Tums, for example, is partnering with comedian Desus Nice for its “Prop Bites” campaign, which allows consumers to place free, food-themed bets—like whether more Super Bowl watchers will eat spicy or mild guacamole—on DraftKings, said Amy Sharon, brand director at Tums. Nice has promoted the gamified campaign on the brand’s social channels, and Tums is bringing him to Las Vegas to kick off its “Prop Bites Food Casino” activation the Friday before the Big Game, she said.

‘Far more accessible and affordable’

Brands are already partnering with influencers on sponsored social media content at a higher rate for this year’s Super Bowl than last year, according to data from influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. The agency has tracked a 55% year-over-year increase in mentions of the Big Game across both sponsored and organic posts across social media in the weeks leading up to the game. Billion Dollar Boy attributes at least one-third of that jump, or roughly 18%, to an increase in sponsored posts tied to the Big Game. 

“There’s only a certain number of spots in the game, but there are tons of brands who want to engage audiences around the Super Bowl,” said Ed East, founder and CEO of Billion Dollar Boy. “So, digital creators are a far more accessible and affordable route where you can have comparative impact. Traditional celebrities, because of their recognizability on a national level across all age groups, are still dominating on TV, but I think we’ll only see a rise [of creators] on digital.” 

More from Ad Age: Top 5 brand TikToks to know about right now

Invisalign is another brand teaming up with influencers for pregame social content. Though the brand has partnered with the NFL itself for several years and featured football players across its Super Bowl marketing, Invisalign is pivoting its social strategy this year to focus on Gen Z female consumers, said Kamal Bhandal, VP of global brand and consumer marketing for Invisalign.

Earlier this season, the brand partnered with designer Kristin Juszczyk, who this week secured a licensing deal with the NFL after a Kansas City Chiefs jacket she made for Taylor Swift went viral. Juszczyk will be creating content for Invisalign in the lead-up to the Super Bowl, too, Bhandal said. The brand, a title sponsor of the NFL Honors awards ceremony, is also bringing on Megan Patricia, aka “Overtime Megan,” to serve as Invisalign’s red carpet correspondent, she said.

“We have more than 350 [NFL] players who are in Invisalign treatment, but we wanted to tap into that female audience and the rise of the female shopper,” Bhandal said.

With the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, it’s all but assured that Swift herself will be in attendance, Trombetta said. And brands seeking to join in on buzzy online discussions that emerge during the Super Bowl—including those around Swift, such as her fashion choices and her interactions with beau and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce—will likely be looking to influencers to start the conversation on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, said Victoria Bachan, president of creator management company Whalar Talent. 

But TikTok creators may not be able to incorporate Swift’s music into their videos after her label Universal Music Group NV and the social platform failed to reach a new licensing agreement. 

Bachan anticipates fashion will be a larger theme across influencers’ unsponsored Super Bowl content this year, with new creators potentially dissecting game day looks of different celebrities or influencers in attendance. 

VaynerMedia’s Miaritis is “surprised that more brands aren’t turning toward the people who have massive followings and distribution on the internet and who also crossed over into mainstream culture to star in Super Bowl ads.” He attributes much of the continued hesitancy from brands to cast creators in their ads to the enduring belief among marketers that the stars of Super Bowl ads need to be “instantly recognizable” and quickly capture viewers’ attention in their brief 30-second runtime in order to justify the high costs associated with an in-game spot. 

Nerds has yet to confirm whether Addison Rae will appear in its first-ever in-game spot, but Brian Camen, senior director of content and public relations at parent company, Ferrara, said the decision to leverage Rae’s massive popularity as an online influencer, an actress and an artist for its teaser was a “no-brainer.”

“There was really no hesitancy whatsoever about having an influencer like Addison in our teaser,” Camen said. “Having her in the teaser allows us to extend the conversation about our brand, even before our Super Bowl spot airs. What we see year-over-year as marketers is that celebrities extend the conversation [around Super Bowl ads] to a wider time, and Addison is no longer just a TikTok star—she’s an icon of her generation.”

Creators behind the camera

Some creators aren’t satisfied to simply wait around for marketers to cast them into their Super Bowl spots. For the third year in a row, brand consultant Robyn DelMonte, aka Girlbosstown, is creating a series of TikTok videos in which she pitches potential ideas for in-game ads in hopes that one of the brands featured in the series will pay to send her to the Super Bowl. In 2022, SoFi sent her and a friend to the Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium and had her produce content for the brand, she said. 

Over the past week, DelMonte has shared campaign concepts for Stanley, Duolingo, Bumble and Spotify, among several others, and is already seeing “the most traction of any year that I’ve done this,” she said. Several brands have popped up in her comments section requesting she develop a Super Bowl campaign idea for them, and others reached out via email discussing how they could potentially bring her to this year’s Super Bowl.

She considers her videos outlining Super Bowl campaign ideas as “an audition tape and data to show to brands next year, when they start planning for Super Bowl commercials, that clearly this gets a lot of traction and it would be smart to tap somebody like me to help with this.” 

“My biggest goal is to work on a Super Bowl commercial one day,” DelMonte said. “I had a couple of meetings this year, but nothing came to fruition. But the crossover between quote-unquote ‘creators’ and traditional media happens every single day, even subconsciously. We’re talking about these people in traditional media—why not just take that next step? Especially if we want a Gen Z and millennial audience to actually tune to live TV … I think [bringing creators to TV spots] is definitely the wave of the future.”