Brand

Meta Taps NIL Club to Deploy Hundreds of College Athletes in Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Campaign

Published on April 29, 2026

Meta is using NIL Club‘s platform to activate hundreds of college athletes nationwide in a campaign for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the latest brand to tap the platform’s team-based model as an alternative to traditional Influencer Marketing.

Atlanta-based NIL Club announced the Meta activation on April 28, describing it as part of the company’s tournament strategy. Through the platform, athletes receive exclusive discounts on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and promote the product through their own content and social channels.

NIL Club’s platform includes more than 650,000 registered student-athletes across 2,000-plus schools and 20,000-plus team-based groups. The company says those athletes collectively represent nearly 1.7 billion social media followers and have driven more than 4 million verified conversions across campaigns.

Rather than activating individual creators, NIL Club enables brands to engage entire teams simultaneously. According to the company, athlete-driven content achieves engagement rates of 5.6% to 8.4%, compared to approximately 1.9% for traditional influencer campaigns. Previous campaigns with Subway, SoFi, and Amazon Prime Student have delivered millions of verified conversions.

“Brands are starting to realize one-off influencer deals just don’t scale,” said Mick Assaf, CEO of NIL Club. “College athletes already have the attention and the audiences. We’re just giving brands a way to tap into real team communities instead of one-off posts and making sure athletes actually get paid together at scale.”

Broader Context

The Ray-Ban campaign arrives as Meta faces pressure over its broader smart glasses strategy. A coalition of 77 civil society organizations, including the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on April 13 demanding that the company halt plans to deploy facial recognition features on Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses, including a feature reportedly known internally as “Name Tag.”

The organizations argue that the technology poses risks to domestic violence survivors, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, and that design changes or opt-out mechanisms cannot adequately address those concerns.

Meta sold more than seven million Ray-Ban and Oakley units with its technologies in 2025, according to EssilorLuxottica.