LinkedIn Teams Up with NOCAP Sports to Launch Career Creator Campaign
As the NIL landscape matures, brands are increasingly turning to athlete-driven storytelling as a powerful way to reach Gen Z and early-career professionals.
For LinkedIn, this presented an opportunity to spotlight its career-focused tools, including AI Job Search, Job Match, and LinkedIn Games. At the same time, it created a chance to authentically engage college athletes and connect with a generation navigating the critical transition from the playing field to the workforce.
We launched three NIL campaigns that paired athletes’ brands and voices with LinkedIn’s mission of making career growth more accessible. The activations focused on career storytelling, using LinkedIn Games to foster easy connections, and showcasing personalized job tools.
Across these campaigns, 17 athletes from multiple sports and universities participated, delivering a combined 70M+ impressions, 250K+ engagements, and tens of thousands of conversions.
Top-performing athletes, such as Hunter Dickinson, Mikey Matthews, and Naji Elder, drove standout engagement, with the LinkedIn Games campaign alone generating 6.6 million impressions and 38,000 conversions at an efficient $2.40 CPM.
NOCAP’s Brand Solutions team, led by John Martinelli and Sarah Fuller, worked closely with athletes to develop authentic UGC content aligned with their personal experiences, future career goals, and LinkedIn’s campaign objectives. Creators translated their career insights into engaging social content, while paid amplification was strategically deployed to boost top-performing creatives, particularly in the Los Angeles market.
The results clearly demonstrated the impact of athlete-driven NIL campaigns. LinkedIn garnered national media coverage with Hunter Dickinson’s post in outlets such as Sports Illustrated and On3, while campaign engagement rates far outpaced industry benchmarks for creator campaigns.
Surveys conducted at UCLA, University of Washington, and Santa Clara University revealed that student-athletes are seeking step-by-step career guidance, networking opportunities, and peer success stories, further validating LinkedIn’s role as a trusted platform for career readiness.
LinkedIn’s success proves that college athletes aren’t just compelling brand storytellers; they are becoming the next wave of influential creators and workforce leaders.
About NOCAP Sports
NOCAP Sports is redefining the business of college athletics by building solutions that help athletes earn, empower brands to grow, and enable universities and collectives to generate the sustainable revenue needed to excel in today’s sports landscape. Through a combination of technology and services, NOCAP connects athletes with meaningful opportunities, delivers measurable ROI for brands, and creates long-term financial pathways for universities. Learn more at www.nocapsports.io or contact our sales team at sales@nocapsports.io.
About LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, with more than 1 billion members in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. Its mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. Members use LinkedIn to build networks, discover opportunities, showcase skills, and advance their careers. With offerings such as AI-powered job search, personalized job matching, and LinkedIn Games, the platform continues to innovate in helping individuals and organizations navigate the future of work. For more information, visit www.linkedin.com.