Sportsbooks, Super Bowls, J.Lo: How Caesars Entertainment Sparks Growth (HBBIP #126)

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As is the case for seemingly 10% of the Corporate American workforce at any given time, I’ll be attending a conference in Las Vegas this year (more details in a forthcoming HBBIP!). Given, you know, how things are at the moment, the escape from reality that Vegas promises has become the focal point of my entire existence. Never mind that I’ll be visiting in July, when I understand that the city gets a tad toasty—it’s not like I have to go outside anyway.

Since I’m a Director of Research and Insights and all, I started doing some research to generate an insight or two about what I ought to do during my time in the Entertainment Capital of the World. Turns out there are a lot of options! Yet no matter what I was looking into—concerts, gambling, restaurants, shows, shopping—a single name was emblazoned everywhere, standing above the rest.

To the casual eye, it sure looks like Caesars Entertainment has built an empire worthy of Genghis Khan. But how about to my eye? To put it another way: sure, they’ve got Rod Stewart, but how’s their creator marketing?

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Caesars Entertainment

Spoiler alert: their creator marketing is also pretty good.

A hotel, casino, and entertainment brand with a storied history, recent years have seen Caesars Entertainment buoyed by the launch of multiple sportsbooks and acquisitions in the iGambling space, in addition to the development of new properties. If you’ve ever stayed at a Harrah’s or a Horseshoe, or dined at the P.F. Chang’s in Atlantic City’s own Tropicana, you’ve experienced Caesars Entertainment.

As you would expect, creators have represented a promising new frontier for the entertainment space, and Caesars Entertainment has flourished accordingly. First, let’s dive into the numbers behind the brand’s growth. Once we’ve established that, I’ll go into more detail about the content and strategies that have sparked such success for Mr. Caesar.

When we look globally—meaning all the creators from all the regions that CreatorIQ tracks—we find that Caesars Entertainment earned mentions from nearly 9x more voices in 2025 compared to 2020:

Caesars Entertainment Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

Such a nice, steady pattern—why, it’s like the staircase of some kind of grand, classical bit of architecture!

Caesars Entertainment Post Count, 2020 - 2025

We see a similar pattern repeating for content volume, with pronounced jumps between 2021 and 2022, and 2024 and 2025. Caesars Entertainment enjoyed about a 6.5x surge from 2020 to 2025, indicating the brand isn’t just adding any old creator. Instead, Caesars Entertainment is making sure to work with creators who have a lot to say about the brand, and whose content resonates with their audiences.

Caesars Entertainment EMV, 2020 - 2025

On the topic of resonance, look no further than this graph of Caesars Entertainment’s Earned Media Value (EMV), which shows the degree to which content about the brand has increased in virality every year since 2020. Overall, that nets out to a 10x improvement over the course of six years.

Caesars Entertainment Impressions, 2020 - 2025

This is where the pattern of steady growth gets disrupted a little; unlike the other graphs, this wouldn’t make for a good seating plan at Caesars’ amphitheater. I looked into the discrepancy, and found that it stems from multiple mega-viral promotions that year. Given that Caesars Entertainment’s impressions were on a smaller scale during that point in time, it didn’t take as much to warp the brand’s standings in the metric.

Fast forward to 2025, and Caesars Entertainment’s monthly impressions average (74.4M) exceeded the entirety of its impressions total in 2021 (70.5M). The scale on which the brand is performing just keeps getting bigger (you’ll see why soon).

Caesars Entertainment Engagements, 2020 - 2025

It’s a similar story, though to a less dramatic degree, with Caesars Entertainment’s engagements. Following low figures in 2020 and 2021, the brand hummed to life again in 2022, buoyed by a minor thing that we in the business like to call ‘the world opening up again, lifting the entire industry that Caesars Entertainment is part of.’ You love to see it.

How many times in these newsletters have I shown graphs of a brand with notable impressions and engagements growth, then ascribed that growth to TikTok? Given that this is the 126th edition of HBBIP, the count is probably somewhere around 120. Well, this week isn’t going to be the 121st time, because a lot of Caesars Entertainment’s growth is coming from somewhere else.

Caesars Entertainment Share of Impressions by Platform, 2025

Based on this chart of Caesars Entertainment’s 2025 impressions, which more than doubled from 2024, Instagram is driving the lion’s share, with fairly even contributions from YouTube and TikTok, and a decent showing from Facebook.

But Instagram isn’t just responsible for a plurality: it’s also growing faster than other channels:

• Instagram impressions: +131% YoY
• YouTube impressions: +75% YoY
• TikTok impressions: +63% YoY
• Facebook impressions: +133% YoY

None of these growth figures are shabby, exactly, but it’s clear that Instagram is the primary means by which Caesars Entertainment is getting in front of more eyes on social. But also, don’t sleep on Facebook. While Vegas isn’t just for Boomers, I can confirm via my convention-going experience that there are a lot of them there.

Caesars Entertainment Share of Engagements by Platform, 2025

Instagram is also doing numbers as Caesars Entertainment’s primary driver of engagements, swallowing up nearly 71% of the pie. However, the YoY growth picture looks significantly different:

• Instagram engagements: +38% YoY
• TikTok engagements: +183% YoY
• Facebook engagements: +274% YoY
• YouTube engagements: +37% YoY

I don’t often see this kind of growth for TikTok engagements. To me, that indicates a powerful program that’s still expanding and finding its footing after existing at a smaller scale prior to 2024.

Once again, don’t sleep on Facebook! You know how your mom seems to like every Facebook post she comes across, for better or worse? Well, those are the engagements we’re seeing here. It’s a powerful force.

Apart from our parents liking videos of Rod Stewart, where else is Caesars Entertainment’s growth coming from? Well, there’s one big factor. And when I say big, I mean ‘the biggest day in the American entertainment industry’ big. No, not Oscar night. I’m talking about the Super Bowl!

If you cast your mind back to February 2025, you might recall the Eagles obliterating the Chiefs, and Kendrick Lamar obliterating Drake. Those indelible cultural moments took place at the Superdome in New Orleans. But it’s not just any Superdome: as of July 2021, it’s the Caesars Superdome to you, pal!

Here’s a little marketing 101 tip for brands: if you can, try to get naming rights for the place where they’re playing the Super Bowl. You’ll get mentioned in a lot of posts. To be more precise, if you’re Caesars Entertainment in 2025, mentions of ‘Superdome’ will account for $16.8M of your $67.7M EMV total, a cool 25%. In most years, Caesars can credibly claim to be the biggest name in both salads and entertainment; in 2025, the brand proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Apart from Super Bowl content, Caesars Entertainment surged again in November and December, which saw the Las Vegas Grand Prix and the equally grand debut of J.Lo’s Vegas residency, respectively. All through the year, Caesars was indelibly linked with tentpole cultural moments, earning major viral lift via brand partners like Donny Osmond, Kelly Clarkson, Blake Shelton, Celine Dion, Gordon Ramsay, and more. (Now you see why Facebook was driving such momentum.)

So Caesars Entertainment has the hard part down: viral expansion, and carving out a secure cultural footprint. To maintain its momentum, the brand can seek to form additional partnerships with social media creators, elevating them alongside its celebrity-centric roster. It’s a Rubicon worth crossing—after all, that TikTok growth indicates that a new generation is eager to render unto Caesars.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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