What distinguishes buying from building attention at the FIFA World Cup?
- Lucy
- Jun 23
- 5 min read
For me, the World Cup is an excellent excuse for a midweek pint and pizza with friends, and an even better one to trawl through every brand activation going on. Being hosted in America has somewhat reduced my ability to actually watch the games in a pub (I’m UK-based, so kick-offs regularly land somewhere between 9pm and 2am), but it has also meant the marketing around the competition is bigger and louder than ever.
I have significantly more confidence judging whether a marketing campaign is good than I do judging whether Kane really should have been allowed to retake that penalty in England’s first match. So fortunately, it’s the activations I’ll be breaking down, not the football.
And with the tournament in mid-flow, my timeline is full of every promotion currently running. Right now, brands are spending an estimated $10.5 billion trying to get into that conversation. Within that, a handful are succeeding without spending much at all. And a much smaller handful have worked out how to do both.
So which side is just making noise, and which side is building a world?
The case for spending the money
There’s nothing wrong with spending money on marketing, I’m very much in favour of that.
When you’ve paid somewhere between $35 million and $200 million for a sponsorship slot, hiring the most famous people on the planet is a rational move to truly capitalise on the attention you’ll get. And there’s no doubt that that’s what the big names have done.
Adidas’ “Backyard Legends” pulls Messi, Timothée Chalamet, Bad Bunny and Jude Bellingham into a single 90s-coded street film, and it’s working: the brand says it’s already sold around $292 million of World Cup product off the back of it.
Nike’s “Rip Up The Script,” casts Kim Kardashian and LeBron James as they cause chaos on a film set, and it became the most-reposted spot of the tournament’s opening fortnight. But almost entirely because the cast reposted it to their own followers, and their cast is endless.
LEGO went small but big on their cast: Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé and Vinícius Jr. (you would be forgiven for thinking all ads are using a mix of the same football players. How much money are Messi and Ronaldo making?) built the World Cup trophy out of LEGO bricks, and the clip hit 314 million views across the players’ accounts in 24 hours.
None of that is really a content strategy. It’s a distribution strategy wearing a content strategy’s clothes, and to be fair to all three, if the job this quarter is to sell shirts and trainers to as many people as possible before the final whistle, a celebrity is the most efficient broadcast tower you can rent. The tactic isn’t the problem. The problem is mistaking reach for a relationship.
The case for spending nothing at all
Now the side that isn’t spending anything.
FIFA’s own rules accidentally produced the best ads of the tournament so far, for brands that didn’t pay for a second of it. FIFA enforces a strict “clean stadium” policy, in which any venue not officially sponsoring the tournament has its branding covered for the duration of the tournament. Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara became “San Francisco Bay Area Stadium,” its famous logo hidden under a tight white tarp. Levi’s response was to post the shrouded sign set to the “nobody’s gonna know” audio, captioned “Welcoming the world to the beautiful [redacted] stadium!” The post landed 766,000 likes and nearly 9,000 comments. The audio clip alone has been watched 9 million times. And I’m sure we’ve all seen it posted hundreds of times on our LinkedIn feeds.
Heinz, watching the same rule play out, released a “FIFA-friendly” ketchup bottle, in on the joke. Playing into their consistent messaging of how it still has to be Heinz: combining their long-standing brand campaign with a cultural, reactive moment.
Air Transat simply compared its own flight prices to World Cup ticket prices. Generating thousands of organic interactions and driving traffic to their socials and website.
These are all excellent examples of your customers doing your marketing for you: when people genuinely love it, when the campaign starts a conversation, it will organically capture attention that even those paying millions of dollars for can’t compete with.
Money and conversation are not on the same axis. But there is a limit to it as well. These are all sparks; one moment of attention they’ve been able to capitalise on really well. But then there’s nothing here for customers to come back to next month.
Sparks prove the point, rather than building anything that outlasts them.
With Adidas, Nike, and LEGO: once their film stops showing, the conversation stops with it.
For Levi’s, the spark has already happened, and they likely won’t be able to ue this same angle to the same effect again.
So, who has been able to build a world rather than create some stadium noise?
Lay’s “No Lay’s, No Game” is now in its fourth year, running across roughly 90 markets, which on its own tells you something. Nobody keeps funding a stunt for four years running. You only keep funding infrastructure. The ad’s premise is simple: watch the game with Messi, Beckham and Henry (yes, Messi again!). The activation makes that almost literally true.
A WhatsApp group chat and broadcast channel, with roughly 14 million followers between them, sends fans voice notes, memes and reactions from those same ambassadors throughout the tournament. Then there’s “Fan of the Match”: a genuinely ordinary customer gets pitchside access and a moment on the stadium jumbotron at every single one of the 104 games. The ad and the real activation are telling the same story. It’s consistent in the best way possible, bringing real people into the world they’re building, and putting true fans (of Lays and Football) right at the centre. As well as being consistent with the celebrities they associate with: they’re always using Messi, Beckham, and Henry (and Alexia Putellas in the recent ads).
You’re building up an association of football with Lays, David Beckham with Lays, talking about football with Lays.
I also really love their angle in their additional World Cup ads on ‘Bandwagon fans’. (Playfully) mocking Americans for being bandwagon football fans, very much from the angle that all fan types are welcome with Lays.
But this is possible with a lower budget too.
Wynwood is a great example that isn’t even a global sponsor. It’s a Miami neighbourhood’s own answer to the tournament, and I’m including it because it’s the purest version of this mechanic I found anywhere. “Let’s Wyn” hid 48 country panels across the district as a scavenger hunt, and every panel a fan finds and photographs feeds a live public fan tracker. The centrepiece is a ten-foot sculpture called The World Ball, which physically assembles itself from the panels of whichever countries reach the round of 16 (the round before the quarter finals, my football knowledge tells me). It’s encouraging literal, physical customer participation, and what better way to bring them into the story?
Most founders reading this don’t have $200 million or Messi’s number saved in their phone, and that was never really the point of any of this.
We all know you can buy attention. Nike more than anyone.
But what can you do to make your customer talk about it? What can you do to generate organic conversation with your audience that would outlive any singular marketing post you could put out?
A celebrity can perform your brand’s feeling for an afternoon. But only a customer can keep it running after you’ve stopped paying for it.
Focus on the latter.
Ad links:
Adidas:
Nike:
LEGO:
Coca cola:
Uncanned emotions: watch here
Lay’s
Epic watch party: watch here
Bandwagon campaign: watch here
