New Brands Use Creators to Reach Global Markets

Global brands are using creators to enter new markets, bypassing traditional media buys and translation efforts. The NFL is leveraging this strategy to expand internationally, and companies like Bolt are adopting similar tactics to win local audiences. The league has spent two decades building in London, is expanding into Germany, where audiences have gravitated to the sport, and is pushing into Brazil and beyond. Each of those is a market where the NFL cannot simply assert relevance. It has to be earned, locally, by voices the local audience already believes.

American football is a difficult thing to take abroad. It carries decades of tradition that mean little outside the United States, rules that newcomers find baffling, and, until recently, a season structure that went quiet for months at a time. If creators can build genuine fandom for that, they can build it for almost anything.

Sam Friedman, the NFL’s senior director of content partnerships and creator strategy, described creators as the linchpin of expansion at Creator Economy Live East in New York. She leads the league’s social and influencer work within its global marketing organization. Since 2022, she has built the NFL’s creator programs from the ground up, including its first creator partnerships with YouTube and its first Super Bowl concert on Roblox, featuring Saweetie.

Friedman framed her approach on stage by noting that fans trust creators in a much different way than the league’s own advertising. A creator can recommend, explain, and contextualize the game for an audience that would tune out a traditional campaign. The league builds ownable moments rather than buying impressions, from creator flag football activations to leaning into organic cultural moments like the crowd singing “Country Roads” at its overseas games. It runs formal creator programs such as Creator of the Week, its YouTube partnership that in one season paired 27 creators across 23 weeks to produce more than 200 shorts and over 51 million views. The league treats this as permanent infrastructure, not a campaign. Friedman pointed to a dedicated creator team and an always-on approach, and returned repeatedly to a single phrase to describe the result. There is no off-season now.

The reach may look similar on a spreadsheet. The trust does not. The mechanism is the same one an independent local creator demonstrates every day. Picture a coffee brand launching in France. The old approach pairs a big English-speaking lifestyle influencer with a French voiceover, and the numbers look fine while conversions stay flat, because viewers cannot tell the brand is truly for them. Hand the same budget to a French creator filming in her own kitchen, in French, answering every comment about where to buy, and the content starts working. Reach barely moved. Belief did.

This redefinition is simple enough in theory: distribution has been commoditized; anyone can reach anyone. Trust has not, and in a new market trust is the entire game. Creators are simply the most efficient supply of it. Brendan Gahan, co-founder and CEO of Creator Authority and a veteran of influencer marketing who ran one of the first YouTube creator activations back in 2006, draws the distinction sharply. “Advertising can buy awareness in a new market. It can’t buy action,” he said. “Creators move audiences because the impactful ones have a parasocial relationship with their audience. They’re not fans in the traditional sense. It’s more of a one-to-many friendship, and the most powerful form of marketing has always been a recommendation from a friend.”

In a market where a brand is starting from zero, that recommendation is the difference between being seen and being chosen. As Gahan put it, particularly with younger audiences who set trends and drive discovery, “you’re not buying reach, you’re buying the first time someone considers you.”

There is a catch, and it is the reason this is a genuine strategy rather than a free lunch. Using a creator to enter a market means ceding control of the message to someone who understands that market better than you do. The brand does not get to dictate the script, because the moment it does, the content stops sounding native and the trust evaporates. For companies built around tightly managed global brand guidelines, that surrender is the hardest part, and it is precisely what makes the approach work. It also demands real infrastructure. The NFL did not achieve this with a one-off sponsorship; it built a standing creator function and a market-by-market roadmap. Bolt tracks local audience share creator by creator.

Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at the influencer marketing firm Linqia, who hosted the NFL conversation alongside Gahan, offered the line that generalizes the whole thing. “Every company is a content company at the end of the day,” he said. Bendes has spent more than a decade building creator strategies for brands like Unilever, PepsiCo, and McDonald’s, and his point lands with particular force on the question of global growth. A company that thinks of itself as a content company understands that culture, media, events, and merchandise are one connected ecosystem, and that creators are how a brand inserts itself into the moments a new audience already cares about.