Creators win the World Cup

Creators have a larger presence than ever at this year’s FIFA World Cup, reshaping how fans are experiencing the games. The tournament’s new partnerships with platforms like TikTok and YouTube have granted top creators unprecedented access to the pitch and pre-and-post-game moments, building a booming second-screen experience of live streams, behind-the-scenes clips and reaction videos. 

On the pitch, players have gone from national stars to massive global celebrities, and fan moments — like the Viking row — have gone viral. Across host cities, brands are innovating with new strategies and increased investment in hopes of capitalizing on the wave of World Cup attention. And it’s not just sports — creators across beats like travel, fashion, food and culture are building new entryways to the games and leveraging the scale of the tournament to build their reach. 

Around one of the last remaining appointment TV viewing experiences, creators are showing their ability to shape culture, even amidst complex restrictions on streaming the games themselves. And brands are spending millions working with creators, making the most of the moment to deploy their message campaigns in new ways.

“Anybody now is a channel, everybody is a station … if you want to really tap into a certain audience or to a younger generation, you really have to work through creators because they have a better understanding of their audience,” said Wisdom Kaye, a fashion creator who played in the inaugural YouTube FIFA Creator Cup on Sunday, an exhibition game featuring some of the top creators associated with the games, like streaming phenomenon IShowSpeed. Creators, Kaye said, have “only helped to grow visibility” for the games. 

Audiences “can resonate with us, because they watch us every day livestreaming YouTube videos. So whenever they see us like, ‘Oh, they are into soccer, they are into football,’ it just takes it to another level,” said creator B Lou, one of the goalies at the game who has shared his World Cup takes and reactions to his channels. 

That sense of fandom has broadened the aperture of interest in the games, said Angela Courtin, the vice president of sports and entertainment marketing at YouTube. She said that YouTube’s roster of creators getting special access to the games and live streams via FIFA generated over a billion views in the first two weeks.

TikTok also partnered with FIFA on a cohort of 30 global creators to share content around the games. Interest in the games is huge: according to the platform, the official @fifaworldcup account has received more than 15 billion views and more than 20 million followers since the tournament began, and there have been more than 7.4 million videos posted around the world using World Cup-related hashtags. As of last week, there had been nearly 227 million visits to the in-app FIFA Hubs, and 30 million unique viewers tuned in to watch at least one episode of the official TikTok FIFA World Cup show. 

“Everyone watches everything on two screens now … creators are able to give you exclusive access and just different perspectives,” said Simone Scott, an independent sports reporter and one of TikTok’s creator correspondents. “Creators already have a built-in community…so if we’re all watching soccer, they want to watch it, too.” 

Other platforms are also getting in on the World Cup action, like Tubi, with a slate of creator-led soccer shows, including one by Jesser, and Snapchat, which said 85 percent of daily users were planning to keep up with the games, tapping users like Alix Earle and Jared McCain for creator coverage.

The level of interest online has provided a huge opportunity for brands looking to reach new audiences, particularly among the companies that are official FIFA sponsors — like Unilever. The company built three “House of Fresh” creator hubs in Mexico City, New York City and Miami designed for content capture and creator activations. 

The World Cup marks Unilever’s largest creator program to date with more than 50,000 creators globally, four times more than the company has ever worked with in personal care, across 35 brands in 120 markets, according to Afke Van de Klashorst, the vice president of integrated brand experiences for personal care. (The company did not share how much they are spending on the effort). 

She described the strategy as a “distributed trust model,” balancing a pyramid of creators with different sized audiences: nano, micro, macro, mega and VIP creators — the latter roughly considered to have more than 5 million followers. 

The VIP creators, “it’s basically their IP that we are leveraging and the reach they are able to get is unprecedented,” said Van de Klashorst. “Whereas at the bottom of the pyramid, with the nano creators, these are followerships of less than 10,000, they are so much closer to the specific consumer that they drive a really key role in the conversion,” particularly around the brand’s special World Cup-edition products, like through a “flood the feed” campaign where user-generated content and nano creators could win game tickets.

“But to activate the nanos and all of those layers in between, the mega VIPs play a critical role because the nanos look to these megas,” she said of the approach. To scale to work with a much larger group of creators around the tournament, Dove is using AI to help with sourcing, vetting and contracting to find creators who can speak authentically to both Dove’s messaging around women and girls and about soccer, said Claudia Tezcan, global Dove brand experience and social director. 

Van de Klashorst said the most effective content has been focused on emotion and the love and passion for the game, which has led to some strategy shifts as the tournament played out. 

The company had planned for a massive activation at their suite for Wednesday’s semifinal game in Atlanta, similar to a stunt they ran in Mexico City where they brought in a celebrity lookalike to promote their brand for young men, Axe, said Javier Tena, the CFO for personal care. But after seeing the success of their creator programming, they have changed the concept to center creators instead.

“We realized, well, is that really going to make a difference versus bringing influencers to the suite?” he said. “The buzz they can create online is quite impressive.”

This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by Washington Post Creator, a team outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.