Disney and ESPN are looking to have a winning game plan and a yearlong celebration for the 2027 Super Bowl, and part of that plan will involve a new football-focused creator initiative.
At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week on Wednesday, Celia Bouza, vp of multi-platform video at ESPN, announced that the fourth iteration of ESPN’s Creator Network, which brings content creators behind the scenes of some of the biggest sports events, will be football-centric ahead of the Super Bowl.
“I’m here to officially announce our Creator Network. It’ll be football-centric for this fall. We are going to do it all over again. We’re going to bring some creators into Bristol. We’re going to send them to Monday Night Football and college football games, and we’ll culminate it all with a full week of all the creators in L.A. for VIP experiences,” Bouza said.
The ESPN Creator Network initiative started in 2022, and several Creator Network alums joined Bouza onstage at Social Media Week to share their experiences.
According to Neha Sridhar, a sports content creator who was part of the 2024 program, the Creator Network opened the doors to opportunities, including providing behind-the-scenes experiences with pro athletes.
“It was my first opportunity to interview these athletes that I had been watching on TV for years and years and years, and getting to make content for a brand like ESPN, seeing how they work behind the scenes, it made everything seem so much bigger than it actually was,” Sridhar said.
Sridhar noted that the program helped provide opportunities in both tennis and Formula 1, adding, “Getting to experience that through ESPN’s eyes was something that I could not even imagine at that time, and it’s only helped me going forward.”
The benefits are mutual, according to Bouza.
The ESPN exec said the company provides access and production support, and the creators help them connect with fans in authentic ways.
“Our content gets better every single time, and it’s really a symbiotic relationship between the creator who’s in-house, or the creators who we work with, and the folks who are pumping out content every single day,” Bouza said.
