Thursday, June 11th

📊 Did You Know?

Over 50% of brands are already planning creator campaigns around the 2026 World Cup.

(Later, 2026)

⚽ The 500+ Football Creators Every Brand Should Know

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup starts today, I ranked the 500+ biggest football creators on the planet.

Combined reach: 669M+ followers!!

A few standouts:

🥇 Celine Dept (57M) — a Belgian footballer turned her country's most successful creator ever, filming Shorts challenges with Mbappé, Neymar and Haaland.

🥈 IShowSpeed (54M) — his passion-project World Cup song beat Shakira's official anthem on viral numbers, so FIFA put it on the album and gave him the first-ever Fan ID.

🥉 Fabrizio Romano (44M) — the "Here we go" transfer guy, with more followers than most clubs in the tournament.

→ The takeaway for brands: fans now watch creators react to the matches as much as the matches themselves.

The winners this summer won't outspend on TV, they'll lock in the right creators first.

I ranked all 500 by reach, engagement and real-vs-fake audience quality.

👉 Want the full list? Comment "football" on my latest LinkedIn post here

📣 Fox One paid two creators $50K to watch the World Cup

So Fox One stuck two creators in a see-through cube in the middle of Times Square to watch every World Cup match.

Everyone's talking about the cube. But the cube isn't even the clever bit ❌ 

Because Fox One didn't just hire two creators:

→ It posted a real job on Indeed: "Chief World Cup Watcher"

Thousands applied. Two got picked (Austin Franklin and Kevin Akoto), and each is getting $50K to watch all 104 matches from that cube, posting reactions the whole way through.

Here's why it works:

The job posting was the campaign. "We're paying someone $50K to watch football" is a story before a single match kicks off.

Teaming up with Indeed got it way past Fox's own audience. Two brands, one stunt, double the reach.

And the cube keeps giving. A month of matches = a month of content. Every game is a new post, a new reaction, a new reason to tune in.

💡 The takeaway: don't launch a campaign, launch a premise people can't stop talking about. The best ones spread before the product even shows up.

👉️ More info here

🤝 LinkedIn launches its own Creator Marketplace.

💸 Instagram introduces Instagram Plus at $3.99/month, with Super Hearts and Story Spotlights.

🔀 Instagram releases profile grid rearranging.

🔎 Google lets creators customize their search result page.

🤖 Meta launches a creator assistant chatbot.

⚠️ An Instagram hack impacted 20K+ users via its AI chatbot.

⚽ WhatsApp adds new features ahead of the World Cup.

📲 TikTok beta tests TikTok Pro Events, a fandom app launching with the World Cup.

📊 Instagram extends Your Algorithm controls to the main feed.

🛍️ YouTube ends its product tag experiment.

📈 Instagram expands Reels post-view ads to all advertisers.

👻 Snapchat announces World Cup activations.