Good morning. We’re entering the third week of McDonald’s mega-viral Grimace Shake appearing all over our feeds. #Grimace has over 2 billion views on TikTok. Is this the greatest brand marketing accidental win since #gentleminions last July?

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Meta Launches NIL Cohort for Female Athletes

While most of us have been focused on the launch of Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, the company has been angling to compete in another arena as well: partnering with college athlete creators.

Meta announced the opening of its NIL Empower 3.0 incubator program designed to help female athletes maximize NIL opportunities.

• Quick refresher on NIL: In July 2021, the NCAA began allowing athletes to earn money from their name, image, and likeness (aka NIL), something that had previously been prohibited and caused athletes like Deestroying and Ryan Trahan to leave their respective colleges to pursue careers as content creators.

• Since the change, brands have spent upwards of $900 million in deals with college athletes, according to NIL platform Opendorse.

Meta’s earlier iterations of its NIL Empower program in years past have included participants like Penn State basketball player Anna Camden and University of Florida gymnast Leah Clapper.

FYI: Meta’s announcement comes shortly after LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne launched The Livvy Fund, a foundation aimed to help female athletes excel in NIL opportunities. According to Opendorse's 2023 report, athletes competing in women’s sports receive just 23% of total NIL compensation.

The details of Meta’s new program: NIL Empower 3.0 will select 30 female D1-NAIA college athletes for a five-month program run by Meta’s Sports Partnerships team.

• Meta will teach athletes how to build a brand, grow an audience, and monetize on Instagram and Facebook.

• Athletes will also be prioritized for Meta’s incentive programs and with Meta’s partners, which in the past have included sports lifestyle brands like Overtime and Togethxr.

Zoom out: As evidenced by Dunne’s fund and Meta’s incubator program, NIL content and brand deals are just beginning. The industry is headed toward a $10 billion-per-year market, according to Opendorse.

NYC Creators Premiere New Comedy Series

This morning, New York-based comedy creators Alexandra Robinson and Danny Kabouni launched their new YouTube series Bare Minimum, which follows fictionalized versions of the duo “doing the bare minimum to survive in New York City” in 15-to-20-minute scripted episodes.

So how’d they get here? 

• In 2020, Robinson left behind the comedy YouTube channel that she started in high school (and its 200,000 subscribers) to regain her “passion and love for filmmaking,” she said at the time.

• Over the next three years, Robinson graduated from college, worked as a freelance filmmaker and production assistant, and became a resident at Casey Neistat’s Studio 368 in New York City.

• She met Kabouni through 368, where the two hit it off quickly after acting together for a video on Robinson’s new channel.

“It was a small cameo that we filmed in just three minutes…[but] you can kind of see the chemistry that we have from the get-go,” Robinson told us.

Fast forward six months: Robinson and Kabouni collaborated on several more sketch comedy videos that ultimately inspired Bare Minimum. Together, they wrote (and starred in) the series pilot.

Zoom out: In the past, comedy creators like Robinson and Kabouni saw YouTube as a stepping stone toward more traditional sitcoms. Now, the pair believes creators can self-finance and distribute a TV-quality production on YouTube itself.

“There’s a lot of talented comedians in New York that are just limited to social media, and I want to put them on a bigger screen and a bigger pedestal that is YouTube…[to] showcase what New York is all about,” Kabouni told us.

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Ryan Trahan Completes Penny Series 2.0

After traveling across Europe for seven days for the second iteration of his popular Penny Series, Ryan Trahan returned to the U.S. last Friday.

The series results:

• Trahan raised over $400,000 for Water.org to help give over 80,000 people access to safe water.

• The series topped nearly 37 million views combined as of the time of writing, with virtually all of the videos charting on YouTube’s Trending page.

Looking ahead: It’s unclear whether Trahan will continue the series in the near future, though he appears to be happy with this year’s results.

“One thing the Penny Series always teaches me is that true joy isn’t found in things like money or stuff—true joy is found in love,” Trahan concluded in the final video.

👀 Creator Moves

• Jordan Matter is hiring a producer to assist in video ideation and clip cutting.

• MrBeast is hiring a statistics specialist to work with the YouTube API and analyze data for a variety of projects.

• Rooster Teeth is hiring a visual artist to contribute across production for its popular show Death Battle.

🔥 Press Worthy

• How Ryan Trahan’s Penny Series outro music was made.

• Luke Korns directs a behind-the-scenes video of actor Sydney Sweeney for Vogue Mexico.

• Threads is nearing 100 million users.

• Cartoon creators Hubman and Chubgirl release a handbag.

• A TikTok trend that involves jumping off of boats at high speeds results in four deaths.

• Unnecessary Inventions creates a website that automatically adds MrBeast to your thumbnail.

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