From Sidelines to Center Stage: How Creators Are Redefining the Sports Experience

Underscore Client Claire Kittle at the final stop on the HOSS Tailgate Tour in San Francisco.

The Super Bowl,The NBA All-Star Weekend, and the 2026 Winter Olympics; the modern sports tentpole is no longer confined to a single weekend, a TV broadcast, or a hashtag campaign. Today’s biggest sporting moments have become year-round platforms, and increasingly, creators are at the center of how brands activate them.

Brands are evolving beyond the expensive Super Bowl ad spot and standard influencer seeding. Instead, they’re building large-scale in-person activations, partnering with creators, including those outside of traditional sports verticals, and empowering talent to act as embedded hosts and broadcasters. The days of creators just posting reaction videos are over. Now, they’re operating as relatable broadcasters, providing a human perspective to massive, high-production events, creating excitement and even a fear of missing out. Creators bridge the gap between high-spend TV campaigns and digital-first audiences who crave authenticity and access.

At recent tentpoles like the NBA All-Star Weekend, brands leaned into this shift. Talent such as Timothy Granaderos, Daven Gates, and Janette Ok became embedded storytellers, bringing audiences into the different layers of the weekend. A key shift is that brands are no longer limiting themselves to sports-specific creators. Instead, they are expanding into adjacent verticals, including fashion, culinary, lifestyle, and culture, broadening the reach and redefining who sports content is for. 

Timothy Granaderos is an actor and model, known for his roles on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and Hulu’s T@gged, not a sports creator. Daven Gates, aka OneStopChop is a culinary creator. Jeanette Ok is a fashion creator who brings her love of sports into her creations and content. The strategy of branching out verticals for these events makes the sport more accessible to periphery audiences and passive viewers, extending their reach beyond existing diehard fans. 

These perspectives hold similar cultural gravity to traditional athlete partnerships, and often drive deeper engagement among audiences who might otherwise tune out because they don’t see themselves accurately represented or targeted. As the space matures, brands aren’t limiting themselves to broad, generalist creators with mass reach and instead recognizing the value in investing in niche-targeted talent. Specialized creators often deliver higher audience trust, stronger engagement, more measurable conversion, and access to harder-to-reach demographics.

Perhaps the most significant evolution is the rise of immersive, IRL brand activations, amplified through creator partnerships. Modern brands are building physical experiences around sports tentpoles and inviting creators not just to attend, but to host. With Gen Z increasingly expressing a desire to unplug and connect offline, this strategy offers powerful upsides. When creators convene their communities in person, brands benefit from loyalty, word-of-mouth amplification, and multi-format content that extends beyond a single post. There’s also a growing opportunity for brands to partner with creators who host their own activations centered around sports tentpoles, turning creators into cultural programmers.

Sports tentpoles are no longer one-off campaign bursts, they’re now cultural anchors that brands can use to build sustained creator partnerships. Today’s most forward-thinking marketers understand that authenticity at scale requires specificity. Niche creators bring credibility, non-sports voices bring new audiences, embedded hosts bring narrative depth, and IRL activations bring community.

Brands are now fully bought into creators who own targeted, niche spaces because they provide what traditional media cannot: the ability to make a massive global event feel personal, accessible, and important.