Published June 11
The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off June 11, and if you’re in advertising and haven’t been paying attention, now would be a good time to start. Forty-eight teams. Sixteen host cities. One hundred four matches. Five to 6 billion viewers. And, per WARC Media, an additional $10.5 billion in global ad spend flooding Q2 alone. Who knew the world’s most important unimportant thing commands a whole economy of its own?
CTV Is the new center of gravity
FIFA approved commercial insertions during the three-minute water breaks built into all 104 matches — new programmatic inventory, mid-match, in live streaming environments. Google demonstrated earlier this year that real-time programmatic bidding on live sports CTV actually works when it opened up NBCUniversal’s Winter Olympics stack. The World Cup is a significantly larger test of that infrastructure. Streaming CPMs are hitting $120. Brands priced out of linear are pivoting into programmatic CTV at the last minute — which is a sign of the medium’s maturity and a reminder that planning ahead is, in fact, a thing you can do.
Retail media crashes the party
The biggest winners this tournament may not be the broadcasters. Shoppable ads, real-time offers triggered by match events — “USA scores, get 20% off jerseys for the next 20 minutes” — and one-click purchases are all in play. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Instacart, and major grocery networks are linking upper-funnel World Cup video spend directly to retail media to close conversions during match weeks. The World Cup may become the largest retail-media-powered sporting event in history.
The U.S. Hispanic audience is finally getting its due
Telemundo’s Spanish-language inventory is 90% sold out, with advertiser spend double the 2022 cycle. The U.S. Hispanic audience is the growth engine of American soccer fandom, and brands treating it as an afterthought will be invisible to the most engaged segment in the room. The best campaigns will be bicultural — not English spots with Spanish dubbing, but work built from the ground up for audiences whose soccer relationship runs considerably deeper than yours, probably.
AI creative and agentic buying arrive simultaneously
This is the first World Cup where substantial creative is AI-generated and where AI agents may actively manage live campaigns — automating budget allocation, targeting and creative selection in near real time as match narratives unfold. Call it programmatic progress! The less optimistic framing: AI is already generating backlash when it’s visible and lazy, and whether agentic buying works at the scale of a 39-day global tournament is the most interesting open question in ad technology right now. Place your bets.
Three ads worth your time
Coca-Cola’s “Uncanned Emotions” is the most polarizing spot of the cycle. No star players, no cameos; just legendary commentators Peter Drury and Luis Omar Tapia carrying the emotion on voice and narrative. It also became the cautionary tale when AI visuals elsewhere in the campaign drew immediate backlash — a reminder that audiences notice when production shortcuts show.
Adidas countered with “Backyard Legends,” narrated by Timothée Chalamet, built around a ’90s street-ball aesthetic with Lionel Messi, Bad Bunny and Lamine Yamal. The creative premise: In a tournament where every other brand shows celebrities in their natural habitat, this spot shows them in a grittier environment.
Michelob Ultra pits Messi against Christian Pulisic in “The Superior Match” — with Billy Bob Thornton inexplicably in the mix — tied to a fan-vote MVP trophy activation. It leans most directly into the U.S.-hosted dynamic, turning the Argentina vs. America tension into a beer commercial with genuine stakes. Bold, specific and actually funny, which in 2026 counts as a creative breakthrough.
The bottom line
The 2026 World Cup stress-tests programmatic live-sports buying, retail media integration, AI creative production and agentic campaign management — simultaneously, in front of the largest audience in sports history. The infrastructure is ready, more or less. The strategies? That’s on you.
The tournament kicks off today. Good luck out there.
This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.
