The 2026 World Cup has just kicked off. It is the largest marketing event in human history. Most of the spend will be wasted.
Hosted across the USA, Canada and Mexico, FIFA has forecast a global audience of around five billion across the tournament. Every major consumer brand will have an activation plan. Most of those plans will fail by any honest measure.
The reason is a confusion that runs through corporate marketing: the idea that being seen at the event is the same as winning the event. It is not. Visibility is the price of entry. The actual contest is for attention and association, and it is won by a small number of brands every cycle while the rest pay for the privilege of being background noise.
Consider the 2022 tournament in Qatar. Argentina won the trophy. Adidas, Argentina’s kit supplier, took home the harder prize. Nike, who outfit Brazil, Portugal, France and most of the elite squads, lost the trophy moment but won the cultural one through player-led campaigns. Budweiser, banned from selling beer inside stadiums two days before kick-off, responded with a campaign that turned the embarrassment into the most discussed brand decision of the tournament. Coca-Cola did what it always does, blanketing the event without saying much, and most viewers couldn’t tell you a single Coca-Cola moment.
Three habits separate the brands that win from the brands that pay.
The first is treating the tournament as something you produce content around for six weeks, not just paying for a logo placement once. This is where good PR comes in. Most brands do the opposite and wonder why no one remembers them. The real spend is on storytelling, distribution, and the rights to fast turnaround content during matches. Adidas built campaigns around individual players and moments. The brands that bought billboards did not.
Preparing for unpredictability is the second. The most memorable World Cup brand moments are reactive, not scripted. Snickers responded to Luis Suarez biting an Italian defender in 2014 with a “more satisfying than Italian” line that ran within the hour, generating more attention than the seven-figure tournament campaign it sat alongside. Bud Light turned its 2022 stadium beer ban into the most discussed corporate moment of that World Cup. Brands that turn a moment into content within an hour dominate the conversation.
Picking a single, clear association is the third. The losing brands try to attach themselves to “football” in general. The winners pick a country, a player, a story, or a single recurring idea, and stay with it for the entire tournament. Whilst the tournament twists and turns, they also tell a brand story.
For Australian businesses, the Socceroos qualification is a marketing opportunity almost no one will use well. Two or three brands will run narrowly targeted, well-prepared campaigns. The rest will buy LinkedIn ads with stock photos of footballers and call it activation.
The World Cup is a once in four-year test of whether your communication team can move at the speed of the moment. Most companies will fail it. A few will use it to define their year.
Chris Hall is CEO, Primary Comms Group, and Chair at Sport NSW
