The term “partnership” gets thrown around a lot. Its cousin, “collaboration” (or “collab”), is used just as liberally.
But most partnerships are sponsorships or advertisements with a fancier name. As traditional media has evolved away from the interruptive, you-have-to-sit-through-this-because-it-pays-for-the-content model of years past, content producers and publishers, increasingly “creators,” have taken the reins and helped force a new model. One where the product they’re promoting is worth talking about and showcasing because it’s part of the content itself.
Creators have had no choice. While premium media production companies and influencers are still surviving, if not flourishing, through the more typical corporate shilling, creators are largely earning their audience with every post and every piece of content. All of which makes sports and creators such a natural marriage. Sports are entertainment and community builders, and most creators are chasing those same things.
Major sports leagues already boast millions of fans, but they’re always chasing the next one. Modern sports marketing is less about turning every consumer into an X’s-and-O’s geek fixated on tactics and transactions, and more about opening new entry points into fandom. It was in this evolving age of sports marketing that Neil Tennant came up. Tennant, who today runs 540 Agency the creator management and marketing firm he founded, was right in the thick of it when he started nearly a decade ago on the social media team at the National Hockey League (NHL).
“There’s always a core basis of serving the hardcore hockey fan,” said Tennant, who began his career with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL (a minor-league hockey circuit whose teams are affiliated with NHL clubs). “At the NHL, [your channels] need to be a place where you can find the highlight; you’ll always service and be there for the die-hard fan.
“However, as we know, the goal of marketing — the goal of social — is to reach new audiences, and it’s an amazing platform to do so. For me, it was always: how can I tie in other pieces of pop culture, sports, and entertainment to widen the aperture and relate to new fans?”
The need to think beyond the games and highlights only intensified when the world, let alone the sports world, largely shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While the games stopped, the leagues’ efforts to develop, reach, and engage fans, new and old, continued. In many ways, it was a golden age of entertainment consumption; people were stuck inside, looking for pastimes and community. Sports leagues and teams still had massive platforms but a dearth of content. Meanwhile, the rise of short-form feeds on TikTok and Instagram Reels was ushering in a new, democratized form of entertainment, one where a user with no followers could amass millions of views if the content earned it.
This confluence of events and trends first manifested at the NHL, where Tennant played a key role in embracing user-generated content (UGC). The NHL solicited, showcased, and even monetized (through sponsorship) a diverse selection of UGC, from outdoor rinks to trick shots and much more in between. As this strategy progressed, so did Tennant’s understanding of the bigger opportunity that lay ahead.
“The most common refrain I hear in the creator economy is ‘I was stuck in my parents’ home in 2020, started making videos, now I have a million followers, and I’m a full-time creator,'” said Tennant. “As we were publishing more UGC, we noticed a lot of talented young men and women across social publishing hockey content. We’d share it, they’d keep maturing on their side, until it made sense for us to formally add them on a capital-C Creator basis — stop sharing their content as UGC and start partnering with them more formally.”
Thus germinated a true capital-S Strategy around creators for the NHL. There was no guidebook, no best practices — it was all so new. As Tennant became more engrossed and gained experience and expertise through, well, doing it: working with creators, learning about them, and analyzing the ecosystem, he developed a deeper understanding of the space and how to think about it from a sports-league perspective.
This wasn’t about simply finding influencers with massive audiences; that would be only a half-step removed from paying Meta itself to buy reach. Tennant described the creator identification and activation framework he devised, which guides how he builds a creator wish list and Rolodex.
“I always visualized it as concentric circles,” said Tennant, who, in addition to managing creators at 540 Agency, consults for brands and businesses across sports, entertainment, and beyond. “At the heart, we had hockey creators. On the experiential side, if there was open ice, I was going to have a hockey creator there who understood how to skate, how to shoot, and how to interact with, let’s say, the ice inside of Fenway Park. So we always had a nucleus of hockey creators at all the events, and always in the mix. I think it’s important to always serve the creator community in that capacity…
“The second circle I always thought about, I called them unicorns,” explained Tennant. “These were folks who were interested in hockey but not outwardly publishing or projecting their fandom. These folks are really hard to find — it might be one IG Story where half the image is an [Edmonton] Oilers jersey, and you just see it and keep it mentally. Then the next time the Oilers are in the Finals, I call them up like, ‘Yo, we’ve got to get you to the game.’
“Keeping a CRM, a Rolodex of those folks, made for the most beautiful, most successful partnerships in my mind, because it’s someone who exists outside of your traditional community — so you’re bringing in a new audience, but it’s also authentic; they also understand what’s going on. I’ve hosted the third category, capital-I influencers, on the glass of the Stanley Cup Final, and they’re texting the whole time. I’d often avoid that scenario. You really want someone who’s engaged and makes sense to both audiences.”
As the strategy matured across the development, marketing, and events sides of creator work, the business operations and opportunities became increasingly integrated, too. And at the bottom line of all this, ticketing, merch, and concessions aside, it’s ultimately brands footing most of the bill. That intersection, where brands could reach the audiences of both sports and creators at once, represented a new kind of opportunity to capture.
Tennant described the dynamic, and the value prop, of commingling those audiences for prospective brand sponsors.
“You almost have a triangle effect between yourself, the third-party brand, and the creator, and how those dots get connected can be very different — very successful or very complex, depending on how you approach it,” he explained. “Sometimes a brand would come and say, ‘Hey, we want to do this, can you help consult? Can you do creator discovery, creator recommendations? We want to do it ourselves, but we understand you have relationships and expertise.’
“Other times, it was me wanting to host and produce an entire experiential activation and saying, ‘Hey, this is an incredible value-add — not only do you get new space within a tentpole event, you also gain access to amazing creators. Can you come on board as the title presenting sponsor and help us bring a concept to life?'”
The creator economy is an economy, and with the integration of creators into business strategy comes the need to justify the time, effort, resources, and budget poured into creator collaborations and content. As you’ll recall, there is no conventional, textbook approach to understanding the full value proposition of a creator campaign, activation, or strategy. The value-add for sponsors from the previous section is the easier one to grasp, but the true return is greater — even if it’s harder to measure.
If these were just traditional commercials, interrupting and borrowing audiences and attention, then it’d be easier to compute ROI. But creator activations are more complex, more engaging, and so require a different, more thoughtful equation. Tennant concedes he doesn’t have all the answers, but he’s spent years in the space and at least has well-informed ideas for a framework that longtime marketers and agencies can understand.
“Not enough time is spent — particularly from a creative marketing agency standpoint — on both the upfront and the postmortem content performance,” said Tennant. “The upfront is pricing and negotiation, a subtopic I could talk forever about. On the post-activation side, I was always trying to come up with a ‘return on creator spend’ number that would put creator performance adjacent to paid media.
“Paid media is a language most marketers can converse in — CPMs and so on. Could we look at creator engagement, views, impressions, cut it by how much it cost in creator spend, and determine some multiplier to see who performed well against the cost?”
Both the costs and the returns can be a bit opaque with creator activations, but that complexity is a feature, not a bug. Because it’s not just sponsor activation, or marketing, or fan development, or experiential, or content — it’s all of those things at once, and often more. That’s why leading creator strategy in sports organizations has developed into such a robust, specialized discipline, often assisted by agencies or consultants to ensure the right creator is selected for the right objectives, and the collaboration is maximized for the best, multi-faceted return possible. Even with the evolution of the creator economy and the influx of new, often AI-infused solutions, creator strategy leadership still requires a human touch: somebody who can step back, set aside their personal biases, and bring to life a partnership that’ll pay off.
“You have to have some taste, a bar, and criteria,” said Tennant, who identifies creators both for 540 Agency to manage and for its consulting clients to work with. “Then, just like any good campaign [leader] or marketer, there are times where a creator won’t be your flavor — say you like heavy metal, and they’re a hip-hop artist; those scenarios happen.
“But the best creator marketers understand who’s a valuable partner and how successful a crossover could be.”
We’re still in the early days of creator marketing, not just in sports, but everywhere. It’s the emergence of a brand-new channel to reach, engage, and develop fans, to activate partnerships, and to pursue short- and long-term objectives. Its ascent has been more sudden than the arrival of digital and social channels. And the many forms creator strategies can take, across a vast spectrum of creators and their respective audiences, skills, and content, add a layer of both complexity and opportunity.
It can be overwhelming to keep up with the breakneck pace of change in the creator space, but the best path forward is to sprint toward the uncertainty, experiment and innovate, and develop frameworks through practice. Creators will help usher in new fans through more diverse entry points, changing the nature of what it means to be a sports fan. The best sports marketing and fan development channel may be right there in the feed, just a few seconds of scrolling away.
