When the US Open begins in New York later this month, amid the bustling crowds, sponsor pop-ups and iconic Manhattan food outposts, there will be a new content machine operating in the background. Creators will film their outfits, review the food and give followers a look inside brand experiences and premium seats, broadcasting the spectacle of being at the Open to millions of people beyond the gates.
Brands are spending tens — and in some cases hundreds — of thousands of dollars to make sure they have a place in that content. During the US Open, influencer management company DBA consistently sees three to four times more brand interest and partnership opportunities for its tennis-adjacent talent than at other tennis events, according to vice president of talent Kirstin MacGowan.
“Brands are increasingly investing in culturally relevant sporting moments,” she says, “and the US Open’s relevance extends well beyond tennis.”
A private suite for a single US Open session can cost roughly $50,000 to $150,000, says Alex Georgy, founder and CEO of BWB Agency, and that’s before accounting for agency fees, design, hospitality, content production or talent.
Paying multiple creators or celebrities to attend
Paying multiple creators or celebrities to attend and post can add another six figures, pushing a larger activation into the several-hundred-thousand-dollar range. Those activations are becoming more elaborate, too. Three to five years ago, Georgy says, a brand might have simply invited a group of guests to a suite. Today, hospitality is increasingly paired with paid talent, highly designed spaces and professional content production intended to reach far beyond the people physically attending.
“The suite used to be the experience,” she says. “Now it’s often just one piece of a much bigger campaign.”
Underlying that investment is the cultural currency that comes with simply being there. For creators, attending a Grand Slam can signal something to their audiences beyond an interest in tennis; for brands, the appeal lies partly in associating themselves with that cachet.
“Being at Wimbledon or the US Open now says something,” Georgy says. “It signals access, taste and that you’re moving in certain circles.”
But brands are no longer the only ones interested in using that access to reach the millions of people outside the gates. While they remain the primary route through which many influencers get into tennis’s biggest events, tournaments are increasingly cultivating their own relationships, from granting media credentials to commissioning content.
As more money and attention flow into
As more money and attention flow into the space, the challenge is how to capitalize on the cultural cachet of the Grand Slams without diminishing what made that access desirable in the first place. The new economics of access
For brands, creator hospitality around tennis can range from a ticket or suite invitation to a fully funded trip incorporating flights, hotels, dinners and other experiences.
Both official tournament sponsors and brands with no formal relationship to an event use the calendar as an opportunity to host talent, MacGowan says. Creators don’t necessarily require large appearance fees to make those invitations appealing either. “A lot of them just really want to do it for the content, because it’s incredibly culturally relevant,” MacGowan says. For someone whose business depends on continually producing material for an audience, a Grand Slam can provide days of fashion, food, travel, celebrity and lifestyle content alongside the tennis itself.
The US Open is particularly conducive to this growing creator ecosystem. Its New York location puts it close to much of the talent brands want to work with, while the event itself is, as Georgy puts it, “loud, social, celebrity-heavy and very brand-friendly”. The tournament is increasingly building its own relationships with creators as a way to reach their audiences directly.
In 2025, the US Open introduced its first
In 2025, the US Open introduced its first formal content creator credential, granting media accreditation to 54 creators. Collectively, that group generated more than 5.5 million social engagements, according to the United States Tennis Association (USTA). “They’re getting the same access as journalists,” says Jeanmarie Daly, director of media and photo operations and special events at USTA.
Credentialed creators can use the media center and work areas, attend general press conferences and ask players questions. The program initially prioritized creators whose audiences extend beyond tennis, with a focus on areas including food and beverage, fashion and lifestyle, health and wellness, music and entertainment. This year, Daly says, the tournament also plans to expand opportunities for creators interested in covering the sport itself.
Separate from its credential program, the USTA partners directly with creators whose expertise, storytelling styles or audiences can complement its own social output. Recent partnerships have included Sportsball explaining the US Open’s revamped mixed-doubles format and Righteous Eats covering the food and beverage options on-site. “We’re not looking to directly replicate anything that existing creators already have a unique lens and an audience for,” says Jonathan Zipper, senior director of social media at USTA.
It’s not always about getting the US Open
“It’s not always about getting the US Open brand out in front but, rather, growing interest in tennis as a whole.”
At the Australian Open, those relationships have been part of the tournament’s strategy for more than six years and have become increasingly formalized. Tennis Australia brought management of its creator program in-house from an agency two years ago and now employs a full-time staffer dedicated to the strategy year-round.
The number of influencers and creators attending the tournament reached 260 this year, up 64% year-over-year, while their content generated 348 million impressions, a 95% increase. Like the US Open, the Australian Open also treats selected creators much like traditional media: this year, 50 received media passes and were subject to the same rules as journalists. “We think that the word media, or the concept of media, is evolving,” says Brie Stewart, director of content at Tennis Australia.
“It’s not that papers, radio, TV news, all that kind of stuff don’t matter. It just means that there’s another mediader effort to position the tournament as more than a sporting event. Stewart describes the strategy as part of the “festivalization of the Australian Open”, with fashion, beauty, gaming, food and beverage, family and music all forming part of the experience around the tennis
The hope is that those additional entry points
The hope is that those additional entry points can ultimately lead people back to the sport itself. One recent invitee was Australian creator Jerry Davis, whose content had largely focused on AFL, basketball and baseball. After receiving a media pass, Stewart says, he became interested enough in tennis that he began covering it independently and attending junior club tournaments.
“For me, that just ticks all the boxes of what we’re trying to achieve,” she says. “It is our duty to get as many people loving the sport as we possibly can.”
Data suggests that creators can provide that bridge. UTA, DBA’s parent company, found that “Avid Creator Fans” — people who actively follow and engage with online creators — are 19% more likely to be interested in the US Open if their favorite creator covers it.
Preserving what makes the access valuable
The same cultural expansion that makes the Grand Slams attractive to creators and brands also creates a tension: their value depends in part on each tournament remaining distinctive. That is particularly evident at Wimbledon, where tradition, aesthetics and exclusivity are central to the event’s appeal. “The best Wimbledon content tends to feel a little more restrained and polished,” Georgy says.
If it feels too obviously commercial, it sticks
“If it feels too obviously commercial, it sticks out.”
Unlike the US and Australian Opens, Wimbledon does not currently offer a dedicated creator credential. Instead, it has experimented with smaller initiatives, including working with YouTube to invite creators on-site and building visits around activities such as playing grass-court tennis or preparing strawberries before the tournament.
Will Giles, managing editor of content at Wimbledon, says creators can “bridge that gap” between the tournament and people who may not automatically understand its appeal, but the goal is to have them translate the experience rather than reshape it around themselves. “We want Wimbledon to still feel like the hero of it,” Giles says. “It’s more about bringing people here to experience the magic of Wimbledon, rather than it necessarily being about, ‘Oh, there’s an incredible name here.’”
That approach doesn’t mean sticking exclusively to people who already fit neatly within Wimbledon’s existing audience.
The tournament is intentionally working with creators in areas such as fashion and food and using them to reach growth markets like India. “Wimbledon is unsurprisingly quite well saturated for tennis fans, and in the UK,” Giles says. When looking for new audiences, “the more unusual the better”. For Giles, protecting Wimbledon’s culture doesn’t mean resisting change.
Wimbledon is an incredibly traditional event,
“Wimbledon is an incredibly traditional event, but it embraces innovation as much as possible,” he says. “This event turns 150 next year, but we are very cognizant of the need to evolve with the times.”
There is a limit, however, to how far any tournament can become optimized for content without weakening the experience creators are there to capture. “The risk is that the tournament starts to feel like a backdrop for content rather than the reason everyone is there,” Georgy says.
“But when it’s done well, creators can help make tennis feel more current and accessible, as long as the content still reflects what makes each tournament distinct.”
That balance matters to brands, too. The cultural cachet they are trying to borrow depends on the tournament maintaining enough of its own identity for the association to mean something. If every Slam becomes simply another hospitality backdrop, part of what makes access valuable disappears with it.
What is all this attention worth? As brands devote increasingly large budgets to creator campaigns around tennis, the return on that investment can be difficult to quantify. MacGowan says brands look at metrics including earned media value, impressions and engagement, while Georgy points to a broader mix of content performance, cultural relevance and relationship-building. UTA’s data suggests sponsored content tied to the US Open can outperform creator campaigns more broadly.
According to the company’s Creators data team, creator-sponsored
According to the company’s Creators data team, creator-sponsored US Open content generates 48% higher impressions than typical creator-sponsored content. MacGowan says brands often approach tournament activations primarily as an awareness play, using the experience to build an association between themselves and the lifestyle surrounding the event. Georgy adds that brands tend to evaluate a broader combination of outcomes: “Did the content travel, did it feel premium, did people talk about it, did it help the brand show up in the right cultural context?” Some of the value may never appear in an engagement report.
“Sometimes the relationships built in the suite are just as important as what gets posted publicly,” she adds. For tournaments, the calculation is different but similarly difficult to reduce to a single metric. Tennis Australia measures impressions, engagement and sentiment, Stewart says, but its larger objective is whether someone watches tennis, attends an event or picks up a racket because a creator introduced them to it.
The USTA is making much the same bet by giving access to people whose audiences extend well beyond tennis. As the value of that attention grows, however, so does the incentive to control who can commercially capitalize on it. At the US Open, MacGowan says, brands that purchase suites or tickets but aren’t official partners can face restrictions on using tournament intellectual property in sponsored creator content.
That can force companies to build campaigns around
That can force companies to build campaigns around a tennis-adjacent moment rather than the tournament itself — a “get ready with me for a tennis tournament,” for example — and she says creators have previously had to remove content featuring protected US Open imagery. “If you’re not going to be an official sponsor, you’ve got to rethink your strategy here,” she says.
Those restrictions protect an increasingly valuable proposition. Official sponsors may be paying not only for association with the tournament but for category exclusivity, meaning a competitor cannot simply buy hospitality, invite a group of creators and turn the US Open into the backdrop for its own campaign. The dynamic underscores how blurred the lines around these events have become.
A creator can arrive as a brand guest one day and receive media accreditation another; a tournament can provide the setting for a sponsored campaign while simultaneously commissioning creator content of its own. Brands want the cultural currency of access, tournaments want the audiences creators can bring, and creators increasingly operate somewhere between guest, marketer and media.
“I almost think it’s an expectation now that this is just a part of the sport,” Daly says. “To a certain extent, a lot of fans consider themselves content creators and influencers.”
For a sport that spent decades selling the prestige of getting inside the gates, the opportunity is no longer simply being there. It’s finding ways to translate what makes being there valuable to the millions of people watching from outside them.
Source: www.vogue.com
