With two months to go until the start of the 2026 Winter Olympics, official broadcaster NBC is clarifying the role creators will play during the Games. Its parent company, NBCUniversal, is relaunching the Creator Collective that was first established ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
In 2024, NBCU sent 27 creators to the City of Lights, where those social media tastemakers provided on-the-ground coverage and analysis. Two years later, another cohort of 25+ creators will head to the two Italian cities — Milan and the ski resort Cortina d’Ampezzo — that will host Winter Olympic events.
The members of the 2026 Creator Collective include stars from YouTube, TikTok, and Meta. The YouTube contingent includes Cleo Abram and Jordan Howlett, TikTok will be represented by the likes of Anna Sitar and Ashley Yi, and Meta will deliver some Italian flavor via Lionfield and QCP.
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“With the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games, NBCUniversal recognized early on that social media has allowed us to connect with the world in a different way,” NBC Sports EVP of Advertising Sales and Partnerships Peter Lazarus told The Hollywood Reporter. “We saw tremendous results, garnering nearly 300 million views across our Creator Collective, which is why we have brought it back for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.”
NBCU is hoping that those creator cameos will help deliver strong social media returns, as they did in 2024. The network’s digital viewership surged during the Paris Games, and YouTube ended up hauling in 40 billion minutes of Olympic watch time all on its own.
Even if creators contributed to that uptick, their coverage didn’t exactly receive rave reviews. Alex Cooper, for example, brought some of her Gen Z fans to NBC by appearing on the network during the Paris Games. At the same time, detractors argued that Cooper was a poor fit for international sports coverage.
Those complaints have only grown louder as creators have become more present within the pro sports landscape. When YouTube broadcast an NFL game live from Brazil, some viewers felt that they were being force-fed MrBeast, even though he possessed only a limited amount of football knowledge.
It feels as if broadcasters like NBC are at an impasse. Creator integrations are an easy way to get young consumers more interested in sports, but those partnerships also risk alienating older viewers. NBC has been criticized in the past for focusing too much on human interest stories at the expense of raw Olympics coverage, so as the Peacock figures out how to incorporate creators into the Milan-Cortina Games, it should tread very carefully.
