Behind The Feed: Creator life lessons from the World Cup

The World Cup is over, and while Spain took home the trophy, a handful of content creators walked away with a win of their own.

This is the biggest sporting event in the world, and it proved something about how brands are actually choosing who gets the VIP treatment: every creator who got invited had one thing in common, they were already posting to their community before an invitation arrived.

And it wasn't just one or two brands — pretty much every industry got in on it:

• NYX built city-wide activations in LA, Miami, New York, and Dallas, and even sent creators to a World Cup game.

• TikTok sent 30 creator correspondents to matches, with access to training sessions, press conferences, and the pitch itself.

• Don Julio 1942 threw a full waterfront takeover at Chelsea Piers, hosting tastemakers and VIPs for match-day parties.

• Meta invited influencers to an exclusive, invite-only corporate and VIP hospitality experience.

And brands don't hand out that kind of access for nothing. There's a lot of discourse online about how influencers and creators shouldn't get special treatment, but that perspective tends to shift once you realize the creator economy was already valued at $250 billion a few years ago, with Goldman Sachs projecting it'll nearly double to $480 billion by 2027.

And before you start thinking you need hundreds of thousands of followers just to get noticed, it's worth knowing that plenty of the creators getting picked for these opportunities aren't huge names at all — they're micro and nano creators who got chosen because of the specific niche and audience they'd already built, not their follower count.

That emphasis on real, already-built communities isn't random, either — it ties directly into a bigger shift happening because of A.I. Audiences are getting better at spotting AI-generated content, and they're scrolling right past it. So brands are pulling money out of purely digital, algorithm-fed content and putting it into real, in-person moments instead. According to a report from the ANA and The Harris Poll, 70% of marketers say they're increasing investment in physical touchpoints this year, and 80% of companies have already increased their experiential marketing budgets. And it's actually working: brands using experiential marketing see three times the word-of-mouth of those that don't.

In-person activations, like the ones brands ran at the World Cup, aren't just random activations — they're the real counter to A.I. slop, because human creators saying real things at a real event is what audiences actually trust right now, and brands know it.

So what does this actually mean for you, if you're over here posting content with zero brand deals and no VIP invites yet?

It means you don't get discovered at the big moment — you get discovered because of the months, sometimes years, of consistently showing up in your niche beforehand. Brands aren't casting a wide net when the big moment hits; they're scanning for who already built an audience and a point of view long before it started.

So if you're waiting to "go all in" until you have more followers, a nicer camera, or an actual invite to prove you've made it, you're doing it backwards.

So start now, build your community now and show up every day.