4 Ways to Score with World Cup Advertising
As the USA gears up to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Europe faces a sobering reality. The beautiful game will be called soccer rather than football. Ouch.
But 48 teams heading stateside isn’t the only thing kicking off. For brands, June 11 marks the start of one of the biggest advertising tournaments worldwide. Forget 90 minutes. The race to win consumers’ hearts will run for months across TV screens, social feeds, streaming platforms, and even on the side of your morning bus ride. Expect club anthems, national heroes, and brand mascots all trying to dribble their way into cultural relevance.
And here’s the thing. We’ve seen it all before. Big names, big bets, big emotions. Yet despite the World Cup being one of the world’s largest sporting spectacles, there’s surprisingly little research on how brands can turn this once-every-four-years spotlight into both short-term sales success and long-term brand-building glory.
The stakes are as high as the spend. In 2022 alone, FIFA raked in over $1.8 billion in sponsorship revenue, while global advertising spend tied to the tournament crossed an eye-watering $2.4 billion. Add in talent partnerships with A-list players commanding fees rivalling Hollywood stars and you’ve got a media buy as nerve-wracking as a penalty shootout.
But here’s the kicker. It doesn’t have to be a gamble. Like the game itself, there are rules. Patterns. Playbooks. With the right strategy, brands can stop shooting from the halfway line and start scoring top-corner goals with consumers who are emotionally charged, culturally tuned in, and ready to buy.
System1’s Measures of the Match
Much like football, our Test Your Ad platform has its own Star Players helping brands measure and decode the commercial triggers behind winning sports ads. Together, they give you a science-backed view of both the long game and the short bursts of impact your advertising can deliver.
Here’s the starting lineup:
- Star Rating: The Emotional Winger
At System1, we know that emotion drives behavior. That’s why emotional response sits at the very heart of our methodology. We use consumer surveys to capture feelings across the seven universal emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman (plus neutrality) to understand how an ad lands emotionally.
Each response is weighted by emotion to create our Star Rating, the IPA-validated metric for long-term brand-building potential and share growth. Positive emotions carry more weight than negative ones, but here’s the key: it’s the neutral reactions you need to avoid. When people feel nothing, they do nothing. And that’s when you need your short-term striker, the Spike Rating, to come on the pitch.
- Spike Rating: The Striker for Short-Term Goals
Spike Rating measures the immediate impact of your ad on sales, click-throughs, website traffic, and engagement. Here, emotions are treated equally – a dose of Fear or Anger can be just as powerful as Happiness or Surprise in getting people to act.
It’s also weighted by brand recognition speed. Think of it as emotional intensity × brand fluency = short-term activation. The faster your brand comes to mind and the stronger the feeling, the better chance you have of scoring quick wins.
- Fluency Rating: The Goalie That Keeps Your Brand Safe from the Back
Finally, we have Fluency Rating: the percentage of viewers who can correctly link your ad back to your brand. Like a goalkeeper, it might not always get the headlines, but without it, you’re wide open. Low fluency means your competitors can easily score with your audience, stealing share of mind and, eventually, share of market.
Distinctive Assets Play Best as a Team
Rule number one for crafting the perfect FIFA World Cup ad is making sure your brand has distinctive assets that shine through. When you share the stage with superstar players and official World Cup IP, it is easy for your brand to get overshadowed, losing valuable commercial impact.
The numbers prove the point. Soccer fans show 11% more happiness and 12% less neutrality toward soccer-related ads, an emotional trend linked to stronger commercial rewards. But with brand recognition (Fluency Rating) stuck at just 83%, brands risk losing out on up to 20% of the potential commercial impact because viewers remember the moment, not the brand.
Fortunately, there are ways to turn your advertising into a title-winning team by calling up your star players: brand codes, also known as your distinctive assets. In System1’s recent research with Effie, The Creative Dividend, we found that these assets drive both memorability and profit. And here’s the hat-trick moment: there’s even a golden number for how many assets you should embed to maximize brand recognition.
So, forget the starting eleven. When it comes to brand assets, number 7 is your true playmaker, the one who’ll have you hitting the back of the net in consumers’ minds time and time again.
A great example of a brand playing this game to perfection is Aldi. They’ve taken their star striker, Kevin the Carrot, and given him a starring role across both Olympics and World Cup campaigns. Even amid all the on-field drama, Aldi keeps its brand at the top of the table by using a winning lineup of familiar codes: a distinctive brand character, a consistent voiceover, clear logos, signature creative styles, and memorable sonic cues. It’s a strategy that ensures Aldi always keeps its brand front and center, no matter how big the occasion.
Competitive Context Wins Every Time
In our pioneering research with sports marketing agency Fuse titled The Sport Dividend, we uncovered an eye-catching pattern in sports advertising. Ads set in a truly competitive context delivered a +0.5 uplift in Star Rating, System1’s measure of long-term brand-building potential. In other words, showing players in real, high-stakes action beat ads focused on training clips or off-the-pitch stories among fans.
The lesson? Lean into the drama of the game. Show players doing what they do best, hitting the back of the net on the big stage. Globo really played a blinder in 2022, racking up major points with fans through a nostalgia-fueled, pride-packed ad celebrating decades of iconic Brazilian footballers and unforgettable matches. The campaign was a true crowd-pleaser, landing a 4.8 Star Rating and perfectly capturing the tension, the thrills, and the ultimate glory of victory, all to kickstart the passion of national fans before the big game.
But remember, you don’t have to stick to the same formation with real match footage every time. One of our favorite examples comes from Pepsi Max, where Messi, Pogba, and Ronaldinho kicked off a virtual showdown in a video game-style battle for the 2022 World Cup crown. It was a real game-changer, mixing humor with high stakes and giving fans the chance to see amateurs go toe-to-toe with legends in a brilliantly over-the-top, arcade-like setting.
Sporting Superstars Can Be a Game-Changer
There’s good news for brands investing in talent for the 2026 World Cup. Players really do pay back with fans. While a sporting superstar might not be as consistently powerful as a brand character, there’s clear evidence that in the world of sport, the long-term payoff is real.
We already know, thanks to Orlando Wood’s Lemon and Look out, that celebrities are brilliant short-term strikers, driving immediate spikes in sales and attention, but often fail to deliver long-term brand growth. That still holds true year-round. Yet, when it comes to World Cup advertising, sporting stars rewrite the script. Their short-term activation power remains, but now they also boost long-term brand-building potential by +0.3 Stars.
Why? During cultural moments like the World Cup, audiences are already primed to see players on-screen. They arrive with built-in emotional appeal, tied to national pride, anticipation, and the drama of the game. The spotlight makes them instantly relevant, memorable, and top-of-mind. But here’s the caveat: signing Messi or Ronaldo doesn’t automatically guarantee you’ll lift the trophy. To truly maximize your star player’s impact, the creative needs to work with them, not against them.
The data shows that testimonials or scripted camera stares risk lowering your Star Rating, while ads that show players with agency, natural movement, spontaneous reactions, and authentic emotion score far higher. Forget the rigid video game animations and robotic lines. Let players be human. Let them be themselves. That’s when fans connect, brands benefit, and the scoreboard lights up.
Play with Purpose
In 2023, telco brand Orange released one of the most emotive and surprising ads of the year, celebrating female football achievements (and since this is a French ad, let’s keep “soccer” on the bench for the second half). The mission was clear: tackle bias towards women’s sport.
Partnering with the French Football Federation, Orange used digital manipulation to overlay a female team’s moves with those of famous male players. At first glance, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. But then comes the big reveal: you’ve been watching women’s football the whole time. What makes this ad shine is Orange’s authentic connection to the game. They didn’t just slap a logo on a World Cup-themed campaign. They embedded themselves in fan culture, positioning the brand as a champion for women’s sport.
And they didn’t stop there. By staying consistent with their strategy, they built authenticity, trust, and emotional resonance, even releasing a follow-up version just a year later. Tackling a meaningful issue with a trusted partner and long-term commitment, Orange has turned their name into one that truly belongs on the team sheet of football and the World Cup.
And this isn’t just a one-off wonder, it’s a tried-and-tested game plan. In our research with Fuse, we found that when brands play the right passes by establishing meaning, the results speak for themselves.
That meaning can come through a clear connection (like health food brands linking sport to better health), a shared purpose (as Orange did so powerfully), or value creation (if you’re IBM, maybe it’s delivering extra data and match-day insights to fans). When brands build these strong partnerships with the game, the scoreboard lights up: on average, there’s a +0.4 Star Rating uplift and a +0.15 Spike Rating boost, meaning you score on both long-term brand-building and short-term activation impact.
Think of it like making a tackle. Time it right and you win possession. Miss the ball, and you risk getting sent off before you’ve even taken your shot on goal.
Create with Confidence
System1 helps the world’s biggest brands kick off winning campaigns by predicting and improving the commercial impact of their ads. With the 2026 World Cup fast approaching, it’s time to learn how to develop creative that hits the back of the net with fans across the globe.
Our Test Your Ad platform lets you test at any point in the creative process, from early-stage script to final whistle finished film, while our expert consultants act as your team manager, providing guidance and actionable recommendations to help you win big on the world’s biggest stage.
Speak to the team today and start planning your World Cup advertising hat-trick.