Adidas built a five minute film for the World Cup, casting Lionel Messi, Timothée Chalamet, David Beckham, Bad Bunny and Zinedine Zidane, in a Hollywood-style production. Posted on Adidas’s own TikTok, “Backyard Legends” got 6.5 million views. Then a creator called BABOY posted the same film. It got almost 12.7 million views.

The same footage, featuring the same stars, but it brought in almost double the audience, delivered by someone with no studio budget behind them.

That gap is the story of this World Cup's marketing, according to a new cross-platform social listening study from Nectar Social, which analyzed 2.4 million posts across Instagram, X, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube between May 12 and July 15.

For decades, World Cup marketing has run on one formula: sign the biggest name available, put them in a polished spot, buy media around it. Beckham has fronted World Cup campaigns for two decades. This year Adidas, McDonald’s and Airbnb all still ran the traditional celebrity play, but the data suggests is that it may no longer be the winning formula.

Numbers showing a shift in the power of endorsements

Across top performing sponsored posts, Nectar Social’s data shows that creator partnerships pulled a median 929,000 views. Celebrity endorsements pulled 573,000. Creators also won on value, not just volume: their median earned media value was $62,000 against $56,000 for celebrities, and 10 of the top 15 posts by EMV were creator led.

Misbah Uraizee, CEO of Nectar Social, told me that the pattern held across the dataset rather than in one standout post, explaining that “we do see this as a structural change, not a World Cup-specific blip”.

The clearest single comparison sits inside one brand’s own budget. McDonald’s paid Thierry Henry and David Beckham for a spot that generated $211,000 in EMV on roughly 4 million views. In the same window, a creator partnership with betting platform Kalshi generated $291,000 in EMV on roughly 126 million views across the same campaign period with the same category of spend, but creating a wide gap in return.

Airbnb saw a version of the same split. A celebrity post with Abby Wambach, co-posted with Visa, brought 23.4 million views but only 31,000 likes and 250 comments. A creator-led ticket giveaway for Airbnb brought in 11.8 million views, roughly half the reach, but 1.3 million likes and 8,000 comments, and more than triple the EMV.

Why creators are winning

Uraizee’s explanation is not that fans are tired of celebrities, but that the change lies more in how the formats are interpreted. “It’s less about celebrity fatigue and more about what platforms and audiences reward: content that feels native rather than paid,” she says.

Creators tend to fold a brand into a format their audience already trusts, rather than announcing a partnership outright, and that reads as native content rather than an ad. The Adidas comparison bears this out again. The creator repost of “Backyard Legends” carried no separate framing. It just showed up as BABOY’s content.

Adidas also ran a hybrid version of this play during the tournament. Creator John Nellis built a bus tour teaser before revealing Paul Pogba. Creator @elefutbol turned Lamine Yamal’s first Spain goal into fan facing content that pulled 11.7 million views and 2.2 million likes. In both cases, the creator supplies the audience and the entry point, using the celebrity as the payoff, rather than the pitch.

Uraizee says this is the direction brands should take from the data, not a wholesale exit from celebrity marketing. “The data doesn’t say to drop celebrities. Instead, we need to rethink their jobs,” she analyzes.

Brands are still learning how to measure success

Part of why this shift hasn't shown up in budget conversations yet, Uraizee says, is that most sponsorship deals are still evaluated on reach and share of voice, metrics that celebrities frequently win on television and often win on social too. The gap only appears once a brand looks at engagement and EMV relative to spend, and that isn't the standard way sponsorship deals get priced.

“Once brands see that a celebrity post can pull four times the views of a creator post and still generate less than half the EMV, that’s a hard number to ignore in the next planning cycle,” she says.

Uraizee expects the pattern to accelerate at the next global sporting event on home soil for many major sponsors. She points to TOGETHXR, the media company Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Simone Manuel and Chloe Kim launched with executive Jessica Robertson in 2021, as a preview of where Olympic sponsorship money may go next: directly to athletes building their own platforms, rather than to a single global endorsement deal.

“That’s the dynamic we’d expect LA28 to accelerate: athletes becoming the creators and the story themselves, not just the face brands use for a campaign,” she says. A home Olympics changes the calculation further. Uraizee argues that investment in local and niche creators, and in athletes’ own channels, can outperform one global celebrity buy in a market where the audience is already paying attention. “LA28 is a home market opportunity to go hyperlocal in a way a single global endorsement can’t,” she says.

The challenge of scaling content creation

The advantage creators hold in this data depends on their content not feeling like advertising. Uraizee warns that this is exactly what brands could undo by chasing the trend too hard.

If brands start treating creators as cheaper celebrities, tightly scripting them and demanding on brand messaging, they risk flattening the quality that made the format outperform in the first place.

Holding that discipline is harder to scale than simply signing a bigger name, and Uraizee says it’s the part most likely to get lost as more marketing budget moves toward creators. For a sport that has sold itself through its biggest stars since Pelé, and had a final dominated by superstars like Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal, that would be its own kind of shift.