Results Are In: NBC’s Olympic Creator Bet Won Gold — Inside the Playbook
CMO Jenny Storms gives me the exclusive on how her team reversed the Games’ ‘losing relevance’ with U.S. audiences
I cover the creator economy at Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter that’s being sampled today for paid subscribers to The Ankler. I interviewed the co-hosts of TBPN about their rapid growth and revenue strategy, wrote about YouTube’s new studio era and covered how video podcasts are taking over TV. Email me at natalie@theankler.com
Today I have a really interesting interview for you about how NBC leveraged creators at the Milan Cortina Olympics last month. But first I want to acknowledge the shocking implosion of one of the creator economy’s biggest success stories: Will MomTok survive this?
It’s not just two Disney shows in limbo after a three-year-old video leaked of TikToker and reality TV star Taylor Frankie Paul throwing barstools at her ex-boyfriend (and injuring one of her young children in the process). The debacle also threatens to unravel an entire web of online and IRL business opportunities that was spun when a group of Utah-based moms agreed to become the stars of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
When Mormon Wives premiered in 2024, it thrust Paul and her friends into the national spotlight. But last Monday, production on the show’s upcoming fifth season was paused amid Paul’s involvement in an incident last month — between Paul and her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dakota Mortensen — that led to a domestic assault investigation. Then on Thursday, ABC scrapped the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, starring Paul, after TMZ published video footage from a separate 2023 incident involving her and Mortensen that led to her arrest, portrayed in the debut episode of Mormon Wives in 2024. My Ankler colleague Elaine Low has a full breakdown on the mess.
Questions loom about what Mormon Wives could look like if production resumes with or without MomTok leader Paul. But there are seven other cast members who could carry the show forward, including breakout Whitney Leavitt, 29, who finished sixth on season 34 of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars and is currently performing as Roxie Hart in a Broadway production of Chicago; Mayci Neeley, 31, whose 2025 memoir was a New York Times best seller; and Jennifer Affleck, 26, who also competed on DWTS and is reportedly signed on for an Orange County-set Mormon Wives spinoff.
Another big question is how brand partners will respond, which might be why the Mormon Wives cast have mostly been careful in their public comments about Paul. Many are repped by the same management company, Select, also a producer on the show. Some have Hollywood agents, including Leavitt (Gersh) and Jessi Draper (CAA). Though the women often appear in one another’s videos and attend events together, they have all pursued separate career opportunities and brand deals. The coming weeks will be critical as they navigate their future with the franchise.
Now for my conversation with Jenny Storms, the chief marketing officer for NBCU Television & Streaming — which I’m previewing for you today and which paid subscribers to my standalone Ankler Media newsletter, Like & Subscribe, got exclusive access to yesterday. (Interested in staying ahead of all the news in the creator economy? You can sign up to receive Like & Subscribe in your inbox here.)
During the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics last month, you perhaps saw Not Gonna Lie host Kylie Kelce learning to curl, or Dancing With The Stars pro Rylee Arnold teaching figure skater Ilia Malinin a few dance moves, or Jordan Howlett sampling the lava cake at the Olympic Village.
NBCUniversal brought more than 25 creators to Italy, the company’s second Olympic Creator Collective program after a successful launch at the Paris Games in 2024, where the content produced amassed more than 300 million views. NBCU is still crunching the numbers, but preliminary results show substantial growth in performance for Milan-Cortina, which overall has generated more than 4 billion impressions across NBC social channels. (That’s up 437 percent from Beijing 2022.)
NBCU also brought back another program piloted in Paris, Project Fortius, which helps Olympians grow their social media audiences by sharing audience insights and best practices and introducing them to people at all the major platforms. After helping 15 Paris athletes — including sprinter Noah Lyles — add a total of 3.8 million new followers, the company tapped 10 athletes — Malinin, skier Mikaela Shiffrin and Paralympic ice hockey player Jack Wallace among them — ahead of Milan. Their audiences have since grown by more than 2 million followers.
I spoke exclusively this week with Storms — coming off a globetrotting February of the Olympics, Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Weekend — about how creators helped make the Olympics relevant with young fans again. After years of the Olympics “losing relevance” in the U.S., Storms tells me, Milan Cortina became the most-watched Winter Games since Sochi 2014 and anchored a month the company dubbed Legendary February.
Keep reading for my interview with NBCU’s Storms, where we get into:
How NBC “ripped up the playbook” after Beijing — and rebuilt the Olympics for a social-first world
The early Paris bet (and Paris Hilton stunt) that proved the strategy could work
Why NBC treats creators as storytellers — not just distribution — and how that unlocked real scale
What actually worked in Milan Cortina, including the most-watched moments across social
How access — not budget — became NBC’s secret weapon
The behind-the-scenes tools (like Instagram heat maps) driving athletes’ huge social media growth
Why NBC is already planning for a “very noisy” L.A. 2028 — and what comes next