NFL goes after Gen Z fans by courting creators on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat

Published

10 months ago

February 7, 2025

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Katie Austin normally publishes fitness content to her Instagram and YouTube channel. But this week, she’s been posting a steady trickle of content from New Orleans.

That’s because Austin, 31, from California, is one of hundreds of creators who have swarmed the Big Easy for Super Bowl 59, getting paid large contracts to make social media content for big-name brands like Electronic Arts and Nike.

Austin was sent to New Orleans this week by Snap and the NFL to give her fans a behind-the-scenes look at the Super Bowl. She’s also involved in integrations around the games with brands like Microsoft and Verizon, for whom she is hosting a promotional fan event.

“I can reach a lot of people myself,” said Austin, who has about 2 million followers across all platforms. “So sending a creator like me to an experience, I am engaging my followers to get that awareness.”

As the 2024 NFL season concludes, viewership and engagement among Generation Z and Generation Alpha has hit a record high, according to the NFL. Austin’s role underscores a new reality where online creators are treated just like traditional celebrities, in an attempt to attract younger audiences to football.

The NFL has made this push in partnership with social apps like YouTube and Snapchat, highlighting the league’s evolving marketing strategies that are increasingly focused on digitally native audiences.

“You start to look at these different cohorts of fans, especially the ones that are a little more difficult to reach through linear and you start to see the role in which creators can play and broaden that audience,” said Ian Trombetta, NFL senior vice president of social, influencer and creator marketing.

For this year’s Super Bowl, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, brands like Nike and EA are sponsoring creators to attend the event and post content.

Austin didn’t say how much she’s getting paid for the content she’s making at Super Bowl 59, but some brands have signed deals of up to six figures with some creators to promote the event, said Victoria Bachan, global president of Sixteenth, a creator talent management company.

“You can no longer really have a media strategy for tentpole opportunities like this that do not include a creator level,” said Bachan.

Brands are increasing their spending on influencer activations for this year’s Super Bowl between 25% and 35%, and they’re diverting funds from traditional TV-only advertising to do so, according to a study by Captiv8, an influencer marketing platform.

The push for creators comes after concerns about younger audiences’ lack of interest in sports had grown. A 2022 Emory Goizueta Business School study found that 27% of Gen Z identify as “anti-sports,” compared with 7% of millennials and 5% of Generation X.

The NFL’s push to engage creators, which began in 2019, has already paid off. The percentage of Gen Z and Gen A who identify as fans has grown steadily for the last three years to an all-time high as the league’s investment in creators has grown, according to the NFL.

Besides Austin, Snapchat sent a handful of other creators to the Super Bowl to post behind-the-scenes content using augmented reality filters.

Meanwhile, YouTube, which secured a $2 billion-per-year deal for the rights to “NFL Sunday Ticket” in 2022, has established itself as pivotal to connecting the league with digital audiences. This year, YouTube will debut as the first official sponsor of the Super Bowl Tailgate, which will feature events with top creators like Kristy and Desmond Scott and a livestreamed performance by rapper Post Malone before the game on Sunday.

To adapt to these changes, the NFL has eased up on restrictions around the use of official league footage by creators on their YouTube channels.

The league and YouTube in January expanded their “Access Pass” program to allow retired NFL players like Cam Newton, Jason Kelce and Kurt Benkert to use league footage in their videos.

“There’s this pathway now that certainly did not exist five to 10 years ago,” Trombetta said. “It’s really cool especially as these athletes showcase more of their personalities off the field.”

Technology

We’re raising our CrowdStrike price target following a beat and raise quarter

Published

2 hours ago

December 3, 2025

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We're raising our CrowdStrike price target following a beat and raise quarter

Technology

Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Published

5 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.

Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected

Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”

Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.

CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.

“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.

Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.

For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.

Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.

Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.

WATCH: Earnings will drive small cap outperformance, says Bank of America’s Jill Carey Hall

Technology

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion

Published

5 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as .5 billion

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.

The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.

Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.

The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.

Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.

Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.

Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.

Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.

“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.

On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.

Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”

The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.

In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.

WATCH: Nvidia GPUs to Google TPUs: Breaking down all the AI chips