NBCUniversal has spent the past two years quietly re-engineering how content creators fit into the world’s largest live sports production. What began as an experiment during the Paris 2024 Games has since been refined into a structured program that treats creators not as promotional extensions, but as an operational layer within Olympic coverage itself.

Lyndsay Signor, Senior Vice President of Sports Marketing at NBCUniversal, and Geo Karapetyan, Senior Vice President of Global Platform Partnerships across Peacock and NBC Olympics, lead work across two forces reshaping sports media: platform-native creator culture and the operational complexity of producing global live events at scale. Together, they oversee the Milan Cortina Creator Collective, NBCUniversal’s creator program for the 2026 Winter Olympic Games (Feb. 6-22), developed in partnership with YouTube, Meta, and TikTok.

The program builds on the company’s Paris 2024 Creator Collective, which generated nearly 300 million video views across platforms and extended Olympic storytelling beyond traditional sports audiences. For Lyndsay and Geo, however, success is not defined by reach alone. It hinges on whether creators can operate authentically within a tightly controlled broadcast environment without compromising either creative independence or production integrity.

“We’re trying to reach everybody,” Lyndsay says. “It’s more than just a sporting event. It’s something that we feel like everyone at all ages can really get into and get inspired by.”

Building a Creator Model Inside a Broadcast Giant

NBCUniversal has worked with creators for years across sports properties, including the NFL, Premier League, and Sunday Night Football. What changed with the Olympics was the recognition that one-off influencer activations were no longer sufficient.

Historically, creators were brought in for limited shoots or isolated moments. The Creator Collective flips that approach. Instead of fitting creators into existing workflows, NBCUniversal designed a parallel system that gives them sustained access, creative freedom, and operational support across the Games.

Geo, who leads platform partnerships and Olympic social distribution, describes the Collective as a product of close collaboration between marketing, partnerships, research, and platform teams.

“When Lindsay and I sat down before Paris, we realized we couldn’t just bring creators for the entire Games,” he says. “We needed to divide it up. We needed waves.”

Those waves are mapped against competition schedules, location constraints, and storytelling priorities, effectively treating creators like a rotating production unit rather than a promotional layer.

Creator Selection: Not Sports-First by Design

One of the most deliberate choices behind the Creator Collective is what it does not optimize for: traditional sports fandom.

While NBCUniversal knows it will reach sports fans through broadcast, Peacock, and official social channels, creators are tasked with something different – bringing in audiences who may not normally engage with Olympic coverage.

“For Milan Cortina, if I look through our roster, maybe one or two are really sports creators,” Geo says. “Otherwise, they’re touching so many different aspects and speaking to so many different communities.”

That thinking emerged directly from Paris. Some of the strongest-performing creators were not Olympic specialists at all, but lifestyle and culture creators whose audiences engaged organically with the Games once they were immersed on the ground.

Lyndsay emphasizes that the goal is not to find “Olympic influencers,” but creators whose communities reflect the diversity of Olympic viewers.

“It’s not about saying, ‘Let’s get that Olympic creator,’” she says. “It’s about having creators focused on fashion, food, all the angles; how can they get obsessed with the Olympics and show their fan bases why it’s so amazing?”

Access as the Differentiator

The Creator Collective is built around access, both physical and editorial.

Creators embedded in the program receive behind-the-scenes access to broadcast studios, production sets, and operational moments most fans never see. In Paris, creators were brought to NBC’s studio overlooking the Eiffel Tower, granted on-set access typically reserved for top broadcast talent, and encouraged to create content without rigid scripting.

“They had almost full access to everything,” Lyndsay says. “And we really let them create content that made sense for them, not trying to put them in a box.”

Geo notes that some of the most successful content emerged spontaneously, particularly when creators collaborated with each other across platforms.

“They would organically create content together and distribute it from their own platforms,” he says. “That was one of my favorite parts of Paris.”

For Milan Cortina, NBCUniversal is replicating those elements, including studio tours at the International Broadcast Center and character-driven moments developed with the local organizing committee.

Operational Reality: ‘Air Traffic Control’

Behind the creative freedom sits a highly structured operational backbone.

Lyndsay likens the internal process to air traffic control. Creators arrive in waves, rotate through locations, attend competitions, and coordinate with multiple NBCUniversal teams, all while producing content in real time.

“We have a team that’s very used to operations,” she says. “Where are they? What are they doing? What content is going out? How do we amplify it back in the States?”

That structure proved essential in Paris and will become even more complex in Milan Cortina, where events span multiple cities hours apart.

“We know there will be things we didn’t account for,” Lyndsay adds. “And we’ll fix it on the fly.”

Geo highlights the role of NBCUniversal’s research team, which helps align creator waves with competition calendars and narrative arcs.

“We sit down with the research manuals and map out what stories we want creators to have access to,” he says. “That’s how we craft the program.”

Platform Partnerships as Co-Architects

Unlike traditional influencer programs, the Creator Collective is built with platforms, not merely distributed through them.

YouTube, Meta, and TikTok are involved in creator identification, sourcing, and strategic alignment. Their continued participation from Paris to Milan Cortina reflects what Geo describes as mutual investment.

“Our relationship with YouTube is stronger than it was even in Paris,” he says. “They saw the success and committed more to us as part of that.”

For NBCUniversal, those partnerships help ensure that creator content is native to platform norms while still serving broader Olympic objectives.

Redefining Success Beyond Metrics

The Paris Creator Collective delivered nearly 300 million views and billions of impressions across NBCUniversal social channels, according to the company. But both Lyndsay and Geo point to softer signals as equally important indicators of success.

“The thing that told me something was working was the conversation,” Geo says. “Friends back in the U.S. saying, ‘I saw so-and-so at this event on Instagram.’”

He recalls a moment involving creators appearing organically in the feeds of people completely outside the program’s intended audience.

“They didn’t know these creators were working with us,” he says. “They were just showing up in their algorithm.”

From Lyndsay’s perspective, algorithmic resonance is a leading indicator of broader cultural saturation.

“If they’re authentic to their audience and that content resonates, we see Olympic content bubble up everywhere,” she says. “You just can’t get away from the Olympics over those two weeks.”

A Template for Future Cultural Moments

Internally, NBCUniversal has already begun applying lessons from the Creator Collective beyond the Olympics. Creators who proved effective in Paris have been tapped for other major events, reinforcing the idea that this model is not a one-off experiment.

The broader implication is a shift in how large media companies think about creators; not as distribution shortcuts, but as cultural translators who can carry major moments into spaces traditional coverage cannot fully reach.

As Geo puts it, “We figured something was working. Now, we just have to improve and refine it.”

For Lyndsay, the long-term goal is not to replace broadcast storytelling, but to complement it in a way that reflects how audiences now discover and experience culture.

“If we can put the Olympics in front of more people in ways that feel authentic to how they already consume content,” she says, “then the bigger operation benefits, too.”

As NBCUniversal prepares for Milan Cortina, the Creator Collective stands as a case study in how legacy media can adapt, not by abandoning its strengths, but by building new systems around them.

And for Lyndsay, that balance remains the guiding principle.

“We want people to experience the Olympics on NBC and Peacock,” she says. “Creators help us do that by meeting audiences where they already are.”

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