The 10 Smartest Marketing Moves Of The 2026 World Cup So Far

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI - JUNE 16: Lionel Messi of Argentina celebrates after scoring a goal to make it 2-0 during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group J match between Argentina and Algeria at Kansas City Stadium on June 16, 2026 in Kansas City, United States. (Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images)

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The 2026 World Cup is generating somewhere in the range of $10.5 billion in incremental global ad spend in Q2 alone. Most of that money is still being spent the old way: a hero film and a celebrity roster, launched on a date timed for maximum pre-tournament attention.

However, marketers worldwide have gone beyond for the World Cup. Some campaigns mix traditional ad films with sponsorship hacks, platform plays, and one piece of kit design that turned a referee’s uniform into a punchline.

Adidas’ Hollywood production of “Backyard Legends”

Adidas’s anchor film stars Timothée Chalamet organizing a neighborhood street-football match against a legendary trio said to have gone unbeaten for 30 years, directed by Mark Molloy and produced by Smuggler. CGI de-ages superstars like David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, and Alessandro Del Piero into younger versions of themselves alongside current stars Lionel Messi, Lamine Yamal, Jude Bellingham, and Trinity Rodman.

The masterstroke came with the timing. Adidas had already sold approximately $292 million in 2026 World Cup product ahead of kickoff, which means the film was selling jerseys before a single match had been played.

Nike’s “Rip the Script” and the 12-Week Universe

The hero film gets the attention, but the smarter move is what surrounds it. Nike launched a series of lo-fi Polaroid photographs in May with no narrative, designed to generate speculation, before the six-minute “Rip the Script” film dropped in June. That film now anchors roughly 185 follow-up short films running across the tournament window, branded internally as the “Universe of Nike Football”.

A Nike spokeswoman said the film is the most-shared social post in Nike’s history, with more than 250 million views. While Nike is not an official FIFA sponsor and cannot use tournament branding, it has built a campaign about ignoring the official script, then distributing it as a 12-week content stream instead of a single ad, turns that legal restriction into the entire creative premise.

Rexona’s unusually-placed logo on referee kits

Rexona placed its logo directly under the armpits of match officials’ jerseys, hidden during normal play but visible the moment the fourth official raises the board to indicate added time or a substitution, a high-profile instance which may only be on screen for a few seconds, but is almost guaranteed camera time. It is a contextual placement rather than a repetition play as instead of buying space and hoping for impressions, Rexona bought a specific, recurring human action that matches the product's exact use case.

A similar concept ran in Brazil when Avanço deodorant sponsored the armpits of Corinthians’ kit, but Rexona's version is the first to bring it to a global tournament stage. It has also drawn enough attention that Unilever felt the need to explain itself: Rexona's global brand vice president told Footy Headlines the placement was meant to draw attention to fourth officials, who are not usually the center of attention but are involved in some of football's most consequential moments.

Visa go local with “Tap In”

Visa built its campaign around the pun between a contactless payment "tap" and a tap-in goal, the easiest finish in football, fronted by Jason Sudeikis alongside Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland, Christian Pulisic, Jorge Campos, and commentator Andrés Cantor. The wordplay gets quoted, but the better business decision sits underneath it. Visa is also running “Tap Into Impact”, committing $600,000 to organizations supporting small-business development and entrepreneurship in the host cities.

Visa has been an official FIFA partner since 2007, long enough that its sponsorship has become wallpaper most fans have learned not to see. Pairing the joke with a local-economy commitment gives the eighteen-year-old sponsorship something to point to beyond another celebrity spot.

Brazilian beer Brahma’s “Tá Liberado Acreditar”

A survey by Genial, facilitated by Quaest, found only 28% of Brazilians believe the country will win a sixth World Cup title. Rather than paper over that skepticism, Brahma built the campaign on it. With an emotional short film, Brahma argues that Brazil is most dangerous when belief is lowest, citing the team's history of winning its five prior titles in improbable circumstances, and mixes street football, archival footage, and Brazilcore nostalgia rather than centering any individual current player.

System1's Spike Rating, an industry measure of emotional intensity paired with speed of brand recognition, credits the film among the top 15% of effective ads in Brazil, inside one of the country's most saturated ad categories. Skepticism is a harder creative brief than easy optimism, and this is a rare beer ad that is not really about the beer.

AT&T’s multichannel approach with “Knock on the Block”

AT&T's campaign follows a real family inviting real neighbors into their home to watch the tournament together, shot in an actual neighborhood with actual residents rather than actors, with USMNT legend Landon Donovan appearing as part of the social extension rather than the campaign's center.

In a field where every competitor is buying the biggest possible name, buying no name at all is the contrarian bet. It is also the riskiest one on this list. Restraint does not travel as far as a six-minute Nike spectacle, and the campaign needs real media weight behind it before that bet pays off.

LEGO’s “Everyone Wants a Piece” campaign

Created by LEGO’s in-house team with Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, the spot puts Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé, and Vinícius Jr. around a table building a LEGO World Cup trophy, generating 314 million views across the players’ own accounts within 24 hours.

The film ends with a child finishing the build, a decision that reconnects an enormous celebrity cast back to what the brand is actually selling. The view count owes most of its size to the cast, but it’s the closing shot which is focused on everything but the celebrities.

On-site, stadiums have had LEGO fan zones, with figurines of star players, models of the trophy and legendary players, and the chance for younger fans to engage and take their photos.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT hair trick with Lionel Messi

OpenAI's World Cup tie-in started with Messi using ChatGPT to recolor his hair in Argentina's blue and white, with the prompt then added to ChatGPT Images' styles collection so fans could recreate the look themselves.

Moneycontrol reported, citing OpenAI data, more than 17 million World Cup-related prompts globally in a single week. The production cost here is close to zero and the distribution mechanism is the product itself. While ChatGPT is not short on popularity at present, they were able to link the product to a cultural event and expand exponentially.

Lay’s and their “No Lay’s, No Game” WhatsApp platform

The WhatsApp channel tied to Lay's' watch-party platform runs across 90 global markets, with the cast sharing live reactions and behind-the-scenes content throughout the tournament, which CMO Jane Wakely has described as adding flavor and community to the moments fans share together.

This is now a four-year-running property, and the film that gets the headline each cycle is the least interesting part of it. The actual asset is the standing channel, which is now four million members deep, and keeps building for the next cycle, with activations ongoing through time. Unlike other campaigns, this one builds over time, and does not disappear as quickly as it emerged onto the scene.

Levi’s and Heinz turning censorship into the ad

FIFA’s clean-venue rule requires host stadiums to remove all non-sponsor branding, which meant Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara had its red batwing logo covered with a tarp and was renamed San Francisco Bay Area Stadium for the tournament. Levi's leaned in rather than fighting it, changing its own social media profile picture to show the covered logo and posting stadium footage of the shrouded emblem. One Instagram caption read: “Welcoming the world to the beautiful [redacted] stadium!”

FIFA’s same rule extends to concession items in press areas, which is why condiment bottles inside stadiums had their labels covered with tape. Heinz responded by launching a limited-edition bottle with a blacked-out label, marketed as the “Unofficial Stadium Ketchup”. A companion piece of creative paired a taped-over dispenser with the line "It has to be...," leaning on the brand's own slogan to finish the sentence FIFA had tried to censor.

Neither brand paid for sponsorship rights, but both got a bigger moment than most of the brands that did pay, for the simple reason that a logo recognizable enough to need covering is a logo that does not need to be shown at all.