ESPN Lines Up a Slate of Football Creators Ahead of Its First Super Bowl (Exclusive)
With ESPN set to host its first ever Super Bowl in 2017, the sports juggernaut is debuting a football-heavy class of digital creators for its Creator Network.
ESPN will name five new creators to its network Tuesday, including a former NFL player, a current flag football star, and others who have tried to bring the game to more people through their original content.
The creators include former Los Angeles Charger Isaac Rochell, who has become a social media personality since retiring from the league; Diana Flores, the captain of Mexico’s World Champion National Flag Football Team, and the face of the sport for women; Chase Murman, founder of The QB Plug; sports analytics creator Leah Cammarano; and sports creator and host Simone Scott.
“We have such a loaded roster of what I’ll call traditional football talent. We really looked at putting this group together as an opportunity to find talent that speaks to different fan communities or speaks to those audiences in a way that’s more unique and social first,” says Kaitee Daley, ESPN senior VP of digital, social & streaming content.
The ESPN creator network leverages ESPN to get access to events, and content is posted to creators’ own channels as well as some ESPN platforms. It launched the creator network in 2022, working with Blue Hour Studios to help it identify creators it wants to work with.
But as Daly notes, ESPN is much more than a TV network these days, with younger consumers increasingly engaging with the brand on the social platforms where the creators operate every day.
“What we’re finding in all of our fan research is that to a to a cohort of people, their association with ESPN is ESPN on YouTube, it’s ESPN on TikTok,” she says. “So it’s important that when we show up in those spaces, we do so authentically and with voices that people are familiar with and trust. Creator Network definitely helps us tap into that, as well as having our full time in house creators like Omar [Raja] and Katie Feeney.”
Daley says that it ultimately serves as a halo for both the creators, and the network.
“Fandom is changing, and fans really want to hear from and engage with content in a different way, and they want to hear from people who they find in many ways to be relatable or aspirational. People are looking for content on their feed that they can look up to and they can root for,” Daley says. “And what we found with creators and why I think it’s important is they have already built those relationships with audiences, and when they partner with us and we’re able to give them access to events, what we see in the comment section is that their communities are rooting for them, and in turn, they’re fans of ours, and they’re rooting for us, and they appreciate that we’ve recognized the hustle that a creator has put into building to where they are when we start working with them.
“So that brand halo effect, if you will, of the person who’s been with someone since day one and then sees them walking around ESPN’s campus all excited, putting on our little putting green outside the studio, that connects them to our brand in a in a more real way, and so I I think it’s important that we continue to think about the person who isn’t consuming ESPN the way that I grew up consuming ESPN,” she adds.
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