The US Open may revolve around tennis, but the actual game is only a piece of the fanfare. Creator coverage and brand activations generate content and excitement that spills far beyond the court: celebrity attendance, fashion, pop-ups, restaurant guides, and more contribute to the greater stories surrounding this exciting event.
That growing presence is also creating friction. After complaints about noise and ring lights involving creators at the 2026 US Open, Wimbledon confirmed that influencers and similar content creators would not receive official accreditation for its 2027 tournament. The restriction illustrates that creator access at major sporting events is becoming a more contested issue.
For brands, that debate makes it even more important to understand what creator participation actually contributes. The range of US Open content gives companies across all different categories a credible way into the event, but it also makes measurement messy. A creator can feature a product and generate thousands of engagements without making the sponsor memorable—or even naming it. Our analysis found different brand leaders for volume, reach, and engagement per post.
Contents
Methodology
Most US Open creator engagement came from posts that didn’t name a brand
A mention can put a brand in the post without making it part of the story
Activation format was a poor predictor of brand performance
Big creators concentrated attention, but audience size didn’t guarantee results
Fan Week was much more than a warm-up
Honey Deuce won the conversation. Grey Goose got less of the credit
How Meltwater helps brands see what campaign totals miss
Frequently asked questions
Methodology
| Capability | Meltwater Influencer Marketing and Social Listening |
| Analysis window | August 1–September 13, 2026 |
| Sample | 500 tracked creators; 2,211 posts; 10.3 million engagements; 44 brands mentioned in at least four posts |
| Platforms | Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X, and Pinterest |
| Brand identification | Brand names, handles, and hashtags matched in captions. Visible logos or products without a caption mention were not counted as brand mentions. Brand-owned accounts have also been excluded from the analysis. |
| Performance analysis | Posts naming one or two brands were treated as dedicated mentions; posts naming three or more were treated as round-ups. Brand comparisons use dedicated posts only. |
Post, creator, and engagement counts are exact within the sample. Brand-level reach and earned media value are estimates because source figures were distributed evenly across each creator's posts. Rankings do not represent all US Open creator activity.
Download a one-page PDF summarizing the findings of this analysis.
Most US Open creator engagement came from posts that didn’t name a brand
The creators in our analysis generated 10.3 million engagements. Posts naming a brand accounted for only 12% of that engagement.
That leaves a staggering 88% left over — covering everything from match results, personal updates, New York appreciation, and the spectacle of the tournament. There weren't natural roles for a sponsor in every post.
So, the challenge becomes separating the truly anomalous posts from those where a brand could have realistically been mentioned, but wasn’t.
Player content helps make that distinction clear. Professional players produced 5% of posts and 32% of engagement, averaging 9.2x more engagement per post than other creators. Just 8 of 109 captions named a brand specifically.
But one look at their posts and brands are visible everywhere. Elena Rybakina displayed Yonex; Roger Federer's kit featured Wilson, Uniqlo, and Rolex; Serena Williams and Carlos Alcaraz wore Nike. Caption tracking calls these posts unbranded. The visual story says otherwise.
Identifying those gaps requires marketers to look beyond hashtags and caption mentions. Comparing captions with imagery, existing partnerships, and post-level performance shows when a brand was visibly present but uncredited—and when a post had no realistic reason to mention a sponsor. A brand can appear prominently in creator content without receiving clear credit for the attention that content generates.
Summing it up: Treat a missing caption mention as a signal to investigate. Imagery and partnership context reveal whether attention was truly unbranded.
A mention can put a brand in the post, without making it part of the story
Missing mentions are only half of the attribution problem. A brand can appear in the data and still receive very little attention of its own.
Among the creator posts analyzed, 47 were guides, freebie lists, or other types of round-up naming three or more brands. The largest packed 18 into one post. Together, they represented 9% of branded posts but 6% of branded engagement.
Of the 44 brands mentioned in four or more creator posts (the threshold for inclusion in our brand analysis) 15 received at least half of their mentions through round-ups. Mount Sinai appeared exclusively in lists. For Lavazza, FAGE, and Marvel, 98% to 99% of measured engagement came from posts that named two or more other brands as well.
An event guide can reach exactly the right audience. But a line in “18 things to try at the US Open” performs a different role than a post built around one product, experience, or activation. Reporting both as equivalent brand mentions can make campaign activity look stronger without showing whether the brand received focused attention.
Summing it up: Dedicated posts, round-ups, visual exposure, and incidental references do not give a brand equal levels of exposure, so marketers should report on them separately to remain accurate.
Activation format was a poor predictor of brand performance
Product placement or prizes? Food or hospitality? Activation planning often starts with format, making the concept an easy hero when results are strong—and an easy culprit when they aren’t.
To test whether any format consistently outperformed the others, we grouped brands into four categories: products worn on court, on-grounds sampling and prizes, hospitality and access, and food and drink.
Average engagement per post ranged from 994 to 2,454 across these groups, a difference of 2.5x.
Performance varied much more among brands using the same format. Brands in the products-worn-on-court category finished as much as 85x apart, while food and drink brands varied by 57x and hospitality brands by 21x. Overall, activation format explained about 6% of the variation in brand performance.
Every format included both strong and weak performers, so the leading brands do not establish that one format worked better than another. Their results are more useful for showing how different activations led to the content was created and posted:
- Nike’s named apparel and collaborations appeared in on-court posts, making the brand part of the tennis content itself.
- Emirates gave creators suite access and transportation experiences they could document as the focus of a disclosed partnership.
- Chase brought creators into its US Open lounge, giving them a branded setting for content about their tournament experience.
- Cadillac paired its vehicles with courtside access, providing creators with a way to feature the product as part of a broader US Open experience.
- Heytea gave creators a tournament-specific drink to introduce within a beverage conversation already shaped by the Honey Deuce.
Across these different formats, the stronger posts tended to give creators a clear subject: a product to feature, a collaboration to explain, or an experience to document. More research would be needed to definitively prove that execution style caused the performance differences, but what we can observe is how each activation translated into content.
That gives marketers a more useful question when evaluating an activation concept: Does it give the creator a clear, compelling idea to build their content around?
Big creators concentrated attention, but audience size didn't guarantee results
Creator audience size told a similar story. Some brands concentrated their activations among a few creators with large audiences. Others spread their content across a larger group of creators with smaller followings.
Among brands that worked more heavily with smaller creators, Wilson averaged 1,812 engagements per post, compared with 220 for K-Swiss and 416 for Heineken.
Nike and Lotte New York Palace were both featured heavily by Mega creators, (defined as having at least 500,000 followers). Yet Nike averaged 12,130 engagements per post, compared with 342 for Lotte New York Palace.
Neither approach reliably predicted engagement per post. Creator audience size shaped how the content was distributed, but it did not determine how strongly individual posts performed.
Across the brands compared, the highest-engagement post typically generated about one-third of the brand’s total engagement, while its three strongest posts together generated around 70%. That matters for marketers when evaluating campaign success: a strong engagement-per-post average can make performance look consistent, even when a handful of creator posts generated most of the response.
Mention overlap adds another consideration. Two in five creators who named a brand also named at least one other brand during the analysis window, though not necessarily in the same post. That doesn’t make them poor partners, (unless of course, they’re violating an exclusivity clause), but it does affect how likely one sponsor is to dominate over another with their US Open content.
Putting it together: Choose the creator mix based on what the campaign needs: concentrated reach through a few large creators or broader coverage across more accounts. Then review performance post by post. In this analysis, the three strongest posts typically generated around 70% of a brand’s total engagement, so campaign averages often concealed how much depended on a few standout posts.
Fan Week was much more than a warm-up
The first major jump in engagement happened before official tournament play even began.
Fan Week—a largely free festival held before the US Open—averaged 2,639 engagements per post mentioning a brand, 2.8x the rate during the build-up period prior to Fan Week (defined in the analysis as August 1-22). All 44 qualifying brands appeared during the week, making it the strongest phase on a per-post basis and the one with the widest brand participation.
That engagement rate held once official tournament play began. During the main event, posts featuring a brand averaged a nearly identical 2,563 engagements.
For marketers planning influencer campaigns around major events, the comparison shows that audience attention can reach close to peak levels before the main event starts.
The brands and creators active during each phase differed, so the data does not prove that timing alone caused the increase. It does, however, show that pre-event celebrations deserve to be utilized as a major campaign windows — not simply treated as a warm-up.
Product recognition does not always translate into brand recognition
The Honey Deuce case illustrates another attribution challenge: recognition of the tournament’s signature cocktail far outpaced recognition of Grey Goose as the brand behind it.
The tournament's signature drink was the most-mentioned brand asset, with Honey Deuce content producing 4x more engagement than Grey Goose content. Across the 135 posts naming the cocktail, Grey Goose, or both, 66% of them named the Honey Deuce without Grey Goose. Those posts generated 77% of engagement. Grey Goose appeared in 34% of posts but accounted for only 23% of engagement and 16% of reach.
The biggest creators widened the gap. None of 17 mega-influencer Honey Deuce posts named Grey Goose, yet they generated 61% of the product's engagement. Around one-third of posts in each smaller tier connected drink and brand.
We cannot know whether requiring creators to name Grey Goose would have changed how their posts performed. What the results do show is that product recognition and brand attribution are different outcomes. So, marketers need to decide before launch whether success means making the product recognizable, ensuring the company behind it receives credit, or both. If brand naming matters, it should be stated explicitly in creator agreements and measured separately in campaign reporting.
Summing it up: Define product recognition and brand attribution as separate campaign outcomes. If creators must name the brand, make that requirement explicit in their agreements and measure whether it happened.
How Meltwater helps brands see what campaign totals miss
Influencer performance cannot be understood through one leaderboard. A leaderboard can show which brands received the most engagement, but it cannot explain what drove that performance. Marketers also need to know which posts made the brand central, where attribution was lost, and which creators are worth considering for future campaigns.
Meltwater brings social, creator, and campaign signals together in one unified intelligence platform. Social listening and visual analysis reveal where brands, products, and logos appeared when captions tell an incomplete story. Meltwater influencer marketing capabilities support creator research, partnership management, and performance measurement.
That combined view helps answer the harder questions. Which posts made the brand central? Where did the product attract attention without the brand receiving credit? Did engagement come from a broad group of creators, or did a few standout posts drive most of it?
Having those answers gives marketers clearer direction for the next campaign. They can refine creator selection and set more precise expectations in the brief, agreement, and measurement plan.
Frequently asked questions
Which brands generated the strongest creator engagement at the 2026 US Open?
Nike led qualifying brands by engagement per dedicated post, followed by Emirates, Chase, Cadillac, and Heytea. Rankings changed when measured by volume or reach, so “top brand” depends on the objective.
How much US Open creator engagement went to brands?
Posts naming a brand generated 12% of 10.3 million engagements. The other 88% included player updates, match discussion, and other posts where sponsor mentions were not always realistic.
Did Mega creators perform better than smaller creators at the US Open?
Not consistently. Brands working with larger creators often concentrated reach in fewer posts, while those working with smaller creators spread content across more accounts. Neither approach reliably predicted engagement per post.
When was the best time for creator activations at the US Open?
Fan Week produced the highest engagement per branded post and the widest brand participation. Official tournament play generated a nearly identical rate and accounted for 60% of branded engagement.
Why did the Honey Deuce outperform Grey Goose in creator content?
Creators centered the recognizable cocktail more often than the company behind it. Honey Deuce content generated 4× more engagement, and none of the 17 Honey Deuce posts from creators with at least 500,000 followers named Grey Goose.
How should brands measure influencer marketing around major events?
Brands should separate dedicated posts from round-ups, compare caption mentions with visual brand exposure, and review results at the individual-post level. Product recognition should also be measured separately from whether creators named the brand.
