Five things the World Cup taught marketers about creators 

CMOs know creators matter. The real issue is managing them at scale

That’s the real talking point from the tournament’s largest creator activation. Unilever worked with 50,000 creators across more than 35 brands in over 120 markets. The numbers validate creators’ pull on brand growth, but scale like that isn’t a marketing decision — it’s an infrastructure problem.

No human organization can brief, vet, contract and measure a creator network that size with people and spreadsheets. Unilever’s answer has been to automate everything except the relationship: AI now handles discovery, vetting, brand-safety screening and briefing, scanning the internet for people already saying nice things about its products. Its wider creator network has grown from 10,000 to roughly 300,000 as a result.

But that scale cuts both ways. Automate the workflow, and creators learn the fastest route through approval is strict adherence to the brief. Anything that doesn’t fit gets flagged, delayed or dropped. The same machinery is also refereeing a compliance nightmare at speed and volume. Creators aren’t trained marketers or regulatory experts. They’re making unscripted claims in real time, and it only takes one to trigger a scandal.

Quality (and access) beats raw volume

Sure, 300,000 creators is an impressive number for a press release. But have you ever gone viral off the back of a single post? 

It’s worth marketers remembering the nuance here. Treat creators as a reach play and you’ll get impression-level results. Treat them as a genuine partnership, leaning on skills the brand doesn’t have, and performance follows.

Take Josimar Dias, who became a hero for his display in goal against Spain for Cape Verde’s first-ever World Cup match. His Instagram following surged from 50,000 to 27.6 million during the tournament, making him the world’s most-followed goalkeeper, per Sprout Social. But his follower count is the least interesting number here. What matters is a 40% engagement rate, nearly 20 times the 2.07% average for comparable creators. That surge has made his recent posts worth a reported $56.3 million in earned media value.

“The World Cup is about more than the drama on the pitch; it’s a celebration of culture, football and the diversity within the game,” said Thomas Markland, founder of the global creator agency HYDP. “The brands that won built their campaigns around more than match tickets and VIP experiences. TikTok’s Creator Correspondents pulled new and existing fans into the tournament by answering their questions and unveiling its secrets. Nike timed its Toma street football series around key matches to celebrate grass-roots football. And perhaps the highlight — Nike’s launch of the Travis Scott Phantom boots, teaming up with Speed, Channing Tatum, Dylan Page and PlaqueBoyMax to attend a Norway game all dressed as Haaland.”

Bottom line: it’s rarely the event itself that defines these moments. It’s the personal stories running alongside it. Lumumba Vea, the Congolese fan who became a symbol of national pride simply for standing like a statue through every game, has racked up over half a billion combined engagements across three pinned Instagram posts, per Sprout Social. Across platforms he’s pulled in 28 million views — 12.8 million on Instagram, 12.5 million on TikTok, 2.87 million on Facebook — while adding nearly 200,000 followers.

A game plan for the broadcast of the future

Sports get followed for all sorts of reasons now — the athletic spectacle, but also the fashion, the off-field drama, the personalities — and consumed all sorts of ways, from feed highlights to podcast recaps. Strip that back, though, and it’s still fundamentally a shared experience. Creators are just the latest, clearest distillation of that.

Not convinced? FIFA’s Creator Correspondent programme handed 30 creators, mostly from TikTok, access that rivaled accredited media, spanning pitchside positions, open training, stadium tunnels and mixed zones. IShowSpeed, meanwhile, went further: his deal with FIFA, Fox Sports and YouTube gave him rights to official game feeds, layered under his usual chaotic reaction commentary. The numbers justified the access. His stream of Portugal’s opener drew 9.2 million viewers — reportedly more than Fox’s own broadcast of the same match.

“This has been the first World Cup where creators have gone from being the amplification layer sitting around the broadcast to effectively becoming the broadcast,” said Amar Singh, svp at MKTG Sports + Entertainment. “Half the audience experiences big moments through a streamer’s reaction before they see the actual replay.”

None of this means broadcasters got it wrong. It means a growing class of fan simply wants to watch differently.

“It was the Creator World Cup because you know YouTube sent 25 creators,” said Emma Harmon, co-CEO of Whalar. “Their streaming views have outpaced all of the traditional media companies, and they’re doing it in this lovely way, with the punditry that they bring, this storytelling that they bring, this daily reaction to what’s happening. That’s what people are following and enjoying, and that’s been the story of the World Cup. It’s been basically a creator-led broadcast.”

Access still beats reach

Marketers love to cite how many creators they worked with — 300,000, 50,000 or whatever the trade release number is this month. But raw creator counts are a vanity metric if the return doesn’t scale with them.

One of the clearest examples of that is Michelob Ultra. Through the first three weeks alone, it worked with just 346 creators across 947 posts — a fraction of what the bigger spenders were running — and still pulled in $11.5M in earned media value, plus 253 million impressions from paid amplification layered on top, according to CreatorIQ’s own analysis. The difference wasn’t budget or volume. It was one relationship: Messi.

It’s the trade-off marketers struggle with. A wide creator net gets you impression-level results since you’re basically buying reach the same way you’d buy a media plan. A single, well-placed access point can outperform all of it, if the person attached to it actually matters to the moment. Michelob didn’t need scale. It needed the right name. 

Clarity is the real skill here. Not Your Mother’s CMO was blunt that its Miami pop-up, built around bringing creators to a match, was never a hardcore ROI play. It was a conversation play since everyone’s talking about the World Cup, fan or not. Its useful intelligence for creators pitching brands. Some clients are buying UGC and cultural presence, not performance metrics. Know which one you’re quoting.

The smartest operators in the space are explicitly rejecting virality as the goal

The value of a creator strategy at a global event isn’t the viral spike, it’s the flexibility a fixed media buy can’t give you.

Charlie Wade, VML Live’s global chief client officer, made the point plainly to Digiday earlier in the tournament: a creator strategy lets a brand stay relevant across the entire tournament in a way a digital buy planned months in advance simply can’t. By the time the World Cup actually starts, that train has left the station. A traditional media plan is locked in before kickoff. It can’t react to a shock result, a breakout player, or a moment that blows up in week three. Creators can.

That’s the practical case for creators over a six-week tournament: not that they’re more “authentic” or cheaper, but that they’re the only lever a brand has left once the tournament is already underway and the plan needs to change.