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As you might be aware, this Sunday, February 8th 2026, is no ordinary Sunday. It’s the sort of Sunday that comes but once a year. That’s right: it’s the Super Bowl, America’s unofficial holiday, and the subject of every newsletter/roundup/thinkpiece/recap that’s going to be clogging your inbox from now till next week.

So yes, you might already be sick of Super Bowl content long before the game’s first snap. You might not care about celebrity cameos in big-budget brand tie-ins. You might not like sports all that much. And though it’s hard for me to conceive of such a thing, you might not even be all that interested in game-day snacks. (Not even guac? Come on now.)

But you are, willingly or not, subscribed to this newsletter, which means that you do seem at least a little bit interested in the creator economy. If that’s so, I have news(letter) for you: the Super Bowl is your day, too. Because just as the big game has long since asserted its status as one of the signature events within American culture, it’s also become a proving ground for creators, and one of the biggest days in the calendar year for our industry.

Due to the nature of linear time, I cannot assess what happened in this year’s matchup, either from a sporting perspective (as I’m writing this, I don’t even know which teams will be playing) or from the creator angle. But what I can do is give you a look at creators’ expanding roles in the 2024 and 2025 Super Bowls—an expansion that offers hints of what’s to come this year.

And now, the kickoff…

The Top Event of All Time (of the Week): the 2026 Super Bowl (of Creator Marketing)

In order to properly cover all the various angles of how creators are changing the face of the Big Game, and in an homage to a football game’s four quarters, we’re going to divide our analysis into four sections:

1. Creators’ activity during Super Bowl Week
2. Creators as Super Bowl ad stars
3. Creators vs. celebrities
4. Creators as NFL partners

First Quarter: The Leadup

We wanted to quantify just how embedded creators have become in the brand activations hosted during Super Bowl Week—the parade of parties, brand experiences, and other events thrown leading up to the Big Game, all sponsored by the NFL. Looking at 2024 and 2025, we found that the pool of brands leveraging creators in Super Bowl-week activations, and the size of the NFL’s official creator team (more on that in a moment), expanded from 103 brands and creators in 2024 to 148 brands and creators in 2025.

However, on a per-brand and per-creator basis, average totals for EMV, post count, impressions, and engagements dropped between these two years. In other words, the base expanded, but not all these new additions were particularly productive.

However again, this decline can be at least partially attributed to environmental factors. The 2024 Super Bowl was in Las Vegas, a city better suited to large-scale brand activations than practically anywhere on earth. In 2025, the Super Bowl venue was New Orleans: not exactly a bad place to throw a series of massive parties, but not quite on the same scale as Vegas in terms of the level of infrastructure surrounding these brand activations. With the Super Bowl shifting to the Bay Area this year, we could very well see a bounce-back in 2026.

A total of 28 brands and creators saw Super Bowl Week activity in both 2024 and 2025. Of this group of 28, just nine saw either partial or across-the-board YoY growth in key metrics from 2024 to 2025:

Super Bowl Week EMV Growth, 2025 vs. 2024

Good on Amazon for once again throwing off the curve for everyone else. Apart from the occasional surprise—what are you doing here, NBA? Wrong sport!—this is a very streaming-heavy list (YouTube TV, Kai Cenat, Streamlabs, Discord), pointing to the dominance of that form of content creation and consumption, and its overlap with sports content. As we’ve reported previously, that’s only going to increase across all major leagues in 2026 and beyond.

So what’s the takeaway here? 

First Quarter Game Notes:

• Brands, including the NFL itself, are expanding their creator efforts both during and in the lead-up to the Super Bowl. 
• While average per-brand or per-creator metrics declined from 2024 to 2025, this was largely the result of altered facilities and infrastructure between Super Bowl venues. 
• The expanding pool of creators and brands involved with promotional events, as well as the NFL’s continued investment in creators throughout the 2025-2026 season, points to a big Super Bowl for creators in the Bay Area this year.

We’re on to Cincinnati…

Second Quarter: The Ads

Creators aren’t just making a push in the build-up to the Super Bowl: they’re popping up all over during the Big Game, too.

While we saw this trend emerge in 2024 with NERDS x Addison Rae, E.L.F. x Benito Skinner, and more, creators took on more of a starring role during the ads in 2025. As everyone knows, Super Bowl ads are like the Super Bowl of ads, so having creators step into the spotlight in front of the whole world was an incredibly validating moment for the industry.

Here’s are the brand/creator team-ups that made the biggest impact on Super Bowl Sunday 2025, and for the following few days after the game:

Top Creator Super Bowl Commercials by EMV, 2025

It was a big year for Alix Earle, who also featured in a notable Hellmann’s commercial (more on Hellmann’s in a bit). But it was also a notable Super Bowl for Verizon, who replaced Beyoncé, its ad star of 2024 (along with Tony Hale!) with a squad of creators. The ‘creator squad’ was a popular strategy across multiple brands, indicating not only that good things come in packs, but that you can afford five people, or probably more, for what it takes to pay Beyoncé.

For many of these brands, creators sparked a notable surge in social media performance metrics, especially compared to brands that engaged in traditional celebrity ads during the Super Bowl. That surge cemented itself not only YoY growth, but in February totals that marked best-of-2025 numbers for numerous creator-focused brands:

Compared to February 2024, these creator-focused brands saw improvements across:

EMV:

• Poppi (+74%)
• Carl’s Jr. (+293%)
  • Call it the Alix Earle Effect

Impressions

• Gatorade (+124%)
• Poppi (+42%)
• Carl’s Jr. (+161%)
  • I hope Carl’s Jr. paid Alix Earle in burgers. They’d probably go well with Poppi.

Engagements

• T-Mobile (+77%)
• Poppi (+199%)
• Gatorade (+29%)
• Carl’s Jr. (+644%)
  • Nearly a full sweep, indicating that creator content is a surefire means of driving digital engagement even (or especially) in Super Bowl ads.

Post Count

• Poppi (+31%)
• Carl’s Jr. (+201%)

Creator Count

• Poppi (+20%)
• Carl’s Jr. (+222%)

Some pretty clear winners there: two great tastes that taste great together, united by the power of Alix Earle.

In contrast, none of the following brands, all of which are planning 2026 SB ads, and many of which also had 2025 ads featuring celebrities, saw their highest monthly 2025 totals for performance metrics in February:

• Dove
• Intuit TurboTax
• Uber Eats
• Liquid I.V.
• Instacart
• Lay's
• Bosch
• Pringles
• MANSCAPED
• NERDS
• Ferrero Rocher
• PepsiCo
• Grubhub

That’s a lot of information. To help you digest and palate cleanse during halftime, here are your game notes for the Second Quarter:

Second Quarter Game Notes:

• Creators are especially well-suited to making sure that Super Bowl ads garner greater performance metrics on social media, relative to brands' other content throughout the year.
• Poppi and Carl’s Junior saw both highpoints in February 2025 and dramatic YoY growth relative to February 2024 thanks to Super Bowl ads featuring powerhouse creator Alix Earle.
• Brands that feature creators in Super Bowl ads perform particularly well in engagements across social media, demonstrating creators’ unique advantage as partners.
  
  

Third Quarter: The Celebs

Sorry to spoil the fun, but I always skip the Halftime Show. I just don’t love choreography as much as I love getting another helping of wings.

But what I do love is being able to offer definitive answers to frequently asked questions—in this case, how do creator-led ads compare to celebrity-led ads? We get that all the time, and here’s what we have to say about it.

Top Creator Super Bowl Commercials by EMV, 2025

We do see a higher-end scale here than what we saw for creators, though plenty of celebrity-focused ads not featured on this chart garnered lower EMV than the examples we saw for creators. Additionally, it’s worth noting that the Dunkin’ ad is technically also a creator ad, because Druski was there too (he played one of the ‘friends’).

One area where creators have a clear advantage over their celebrity counterparts? Posting about their own ads, which is something that celebrities are a bit spotty at. To the shock of no one, Ben Affleck wasn’t sharing a ton of content about his ad. Nor did Willem Dafoe or Catherine O’Hara for Michelob Ultra (imagine Willem Dafoe posting on Instagram. Like, imagine him sitting down and doing that). However, the Uber Eats trio fulfilled their contractual obligations, as did Meg Ryan, so you never know.

What did we learn, besides (once again) that we can’t count on Ben Affleck?

Third Quarter Game Notes:

• Celebrity-driven ad campaigns didn’t necessarily result in 2025-leading totals for brands in February, though viral discussion did help brands overperform in engagements as a specific metric.
• Compared to creators, celebrities post about their Super Bowl ads sporadically, and are less of a sure thing than creators in terms of direct social activity and digital engagements.
• However, social media discussion/references to celebrities’ appearances in top ads do tend to drive online buzz, with results varying depending on the brand-celebrity pairing.
• The social media discourse around creator ads in 2025, as measured by EMV/engagements/impressions, was on par with social media metrics for most of the top celebrity ads.
  • In other words, there wasn’t a drop-off in digital performance between many celebrity ads and top creator-centric ads.

And now we enter the deciding frame…

Fourth Quarter: The Future

Regardless of how creator-centric ads performed in 2025—which, again, was overall pretty well—there’s one big reason why we can expect continued creator contributions at future Super Bowls: because the NFL wills it.

During the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 NFL seasons, we saw a massive expansion of the NFL’s signature creator programs, from Creator of the Week, which saw a different creator attend every game throughout the season and document the experience, to the Super Bowl Week festivities, which saw a heavier creator presence than ever before.

Not only did the NFL expand its work with creators, they also managed to capture some of the biggest names in the creator universe, ensuring that the league’s message was heard far and wide, loud and clear.

Some of the NFL’s top creators by YoY growth across key metrics include names you’ll probably recognize:

Notable NFL Creators by EMV, 2025

No big deal, just coverage across some of the biggest creator names in sports, fashion, lifestyle, tech, and whatever it is that MrBeast does (gamified altruism for children?). Shoutout to dedicated NFL enthusiast Tom Grossi, who’s outsourcing some of the biggest names in the business, and accompanied the NFL on its jaunt to Brazil to open the 2025-2026 season, where he livestreamed the Chargers versus the Chiefs. Congrats on the success Tom, and sorry about your Packers. Hopefully the former outweighs the latter!

Because there was plenty of success for Mr. Grossi to go around:

Notable NFL Creators by YoY EMV Growth, 2025

While Tom Grossi and MrBeast garnered the greatest growth, let’s not neglect the presence of streaming sensations like iShowSpeed, who featured heavily in Super Bowl Week activations, or competitive eater Matt Stonie, whom I’ll be emulating this Sunday.

With the resources and determination to capture every market, and a passion-driven product capable of turning powerhouse creators into everyday fans, the NFL is primed to shape the future of the creator economy at large. That journey continues this Sunday. To track it in action, here’s what you need to know:

Fourth Quarter Game Notes:

• The NFL’s creator program is showing signs of success, with a diverse array of prominent creators displaying their impact. 
• Many creators saw increased content production in 2025, or were new to the NFL’s partnerships altogether. While other creators saw reduced activity, this is a natural part of any brand looking to test various strategies and build a cohesive creator community. 
• Top performing/growing NFL creators in 2025 included:
  • Tom Grossi
  • Annie Agar
  • Katie Feeney
  • Marques Brownlee
  • Kristin Juszczyk
  • MrBeast
  • iShowSpeed
• Regardless of growth or declines for any individual creator, the NFL’s increased commitment to content creators is undeniable.

Got all that? Good. It’s game time. Let’s play ball!

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