FIFA World Cup 2026 Advertising

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is underway! Join Mark and Lorraine on this week’s episode of the Brand Shorthand podcast as they discuss some of the advertising for this worldwide sporting event. From LEGO and Lay’s to Adidas and Valvoline, tune in as the positioning duo breaks down these ads and determines whether they scored a goal or received a red card. 

Join Mark and Lorraine for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning.

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift. And with me today is a World Cup positionist, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, we're in the midst of FIFA World Cup 2026.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
The World Cup is, believe it or not, the most watched sporting event in the world. And it has a global audience of about six billion. 

Lorraine Kessler
Oh my gosh. 

Mark Vandegrift
So that's B with billion.

Lorraine Kessler
With a B with a B billion.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, I figured we would do this because we always give the Super Bowl a lot of attention for its ads. So I thought we'd do a mid year Super Bowl ad thing here, but it's with the FIFA World Cup. The total viewership, just so you kind of get a perspective here, it's not at the level of a single event like the Super Bowl. And that had 125.6 million US viewers this year. But over the course of 104 matches, they are anticipating 150 million US viewers will tune in. So it's actually larger. It's just spread over 104 matches.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, it's not one one event.

Mark Vandegrift 
So yep. And you probably know, I don't know if you watch soccer or not, but it's returning to the United States for the first time in 32 years. And it's going to be hosted in the US, Canada, and Mexico. So basically, it's the biggest World Cup to date because they expanded it to 48 national teams.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, that's a lot. It's incredible. Yep.

Mark Vandegrift 
So I thought it'd be fun to discuss advertising for this most watched worldwide sporting event and go through some of the ads people are talking about. And I gave you a difficult one to start with because I think you and I were both like, what the heck is this thing? So I'm gonna cue you up or tee you up or pitch you up. I don't even know what the World Cup thing is. I'm gonna set you up for a goal here. So this first one is I think Kalshi. K-A-L-S-H-I. And I actually found it the product to be intriguing after I did research on it. But after I watched the ad a few times, I was like, I don't know what this thing is. So give me your thoughts on it, and then I'll tell our viewers what it actually is.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, what a waste of an ad and expensive talent, right? They had I don't know how many famous soccer players. I guess if you follow soccer, which I don't, they're all famous, they're all outstanding in their field. I watched it four times, five times. I'm like, what is this thing? What is it that they're talking? And even I think in the thing you sent me, they whoever commented on it misspelled it.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, they did in the main line. They had Kalashi.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, Kalashi. And I was like, Kalashi, that's like I forget what that was when I looked it up. It was had nothing to do with this. So I still don't know and what a waste. I just think, you know, more money than brains, whoever advertised this or hired the ad agency.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, here's my thing. So we always say when you do a new thing, right, you need to connect it to something to the past. Like we you always use the example of the horse and buggy before it became an auto a car, it was the horseless buggy. The typewriter wasn't called a typewriter, it was the personal printing press. Like you have to connect to the past. And when I was looking this up, it was hard for me to like really comprehend it. But let me see if I can explain this to people. Because I'm not sure an ad is the way you could even explain this unless you could connect it to something else. So my sense is just so you know what I think their position is, it's for stock market type people like brokers who think it's cooler than betting sites. If you get my drift. So in other words, I'm too good for a betting site, but I'll use this. So here's what AI explains because I looked it up. Says unlike standard sports betting sites, they are licensed by state gaming commissions. Kalshi is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner, this FTC, as an event exchange. So basically, you're buying a commodity that's either worth a dollar or zero dollars when the betting ends. So it's to me, it's no different if you buy a stock in a company that either makes a ton of money or it goes bankrupt. Because once you sell, you're selling either at a loss or a gain with the possibility that your share went out of business, which means you lost the bet. So I think it's a fancy man's game and probably one that skirts a lot of laws because, well, the stockbrokers in New York City, right? So that's really, I mean, that's what it is. I don't know if it'll catch on. I don't even know what you call it. Stock market betting, maybe?

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, I've seen them refer to it 'cause I did check it out 'cause I was like, Well what the heck is this thing? Like a prediction market app. But it's prediction market app related to betting. And maybe it's just me, but I have a problem with professional sports players who are part of the betting, I mean who people bet on being part of the advertising. I just feel like that's a setup for failure and for problems. You know, so I don't get what it is, and what you're talking about is what I would call familiar surprises, right? You want to take something familiar and then twist it, add a surprise to it, so people understand what it is. So the horseless carriage was carriages familiar, horseless was the surprise. So and that's because as Derek Thompson writes and I think the book Hit Makers is that people are both neophilic and neophobic. We love the new, but we're afraid of it. And we neophobic is, you know, so that's the neophobic, and then neophilic is that we want we want things that are familiar. So but if they're too old, then they're stale. So there's kind of this schizophrenic way that we approach things. But you might be right, this might be way too complicated to communicate in the kind of spot that they're doing. The kind of spot that was totally about personality, celebrity, celebrity, soccer players, entertainment driven, with a lot of inside baseball kind of comments between the players. Right even the concept was hard to follow for something you would know, like Doritos, with all these phone exchanges and connections. So to try and come across something completely new like this that is that has a nuanced bedding schema to it, I think was a mistake.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I think they're if I had written the creative brief for this and got this result, here's a creative brief. No one's gonna know what this is after the ad. So let's just say the name over and over again. And by the way, mix it between English and Spanish so that people have to concentrate. Cause I don't know if you found yourself concentrating, but sometimes they were talking English and sometimes it was Spanish, so I had to look at the subtitles, but I found myself reading the subtitles because I didn't know when they were going to switch back and forth. So you know, maybe at the end of the day they're gonna get out of it what they were hoping, which is everyone goes to AI and tries to figure out what this thing is. And then if it sounds good to them, they'll get on the platform. That's all I can get.

Lorraine Kessler 
I don't even know how you would I mean, I had to just Google the name. I don't know how you would even begin to Google the concept 'cause you don't know what it is. Right? We didn't even know what it was.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, at least kalshi, I mean, that name doesn't exist anywhere else. So if I put in, you know, kalshi, what is this? And Gemini tells me this is what it is, I mean, I'm not gonna stumble on some other name called kalshi because people could hardly even spell it. So that made it even another layer difficult, or maybe it made it a layer better because there was gonna be no competition in AI as to what this thing was.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well and even the weird thing and I forget, kalshi, the name has no relevance to what the product is at all. Like zero. I mean I forget what it means. But it has people can Google it, it but it has zero connection, even in some other language, to what this thing is.

Mark Vandegrift 
Huh, interesting. Well, AI says it is derived from Arabic that means everything.

Lorraine Kessler 
Okay. Okay.

Mark Vandegrift 
So as we've always said, if you stand for nothing or if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. Yeah. This literally is everything in Arabic.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, okay. Well well, maybe the Internet of Everything, Amazon should change their name to kalshi.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yes.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Well, I think we beat that horse, literally. So let's move on to the next one, which I thought was a nice shift to something that was really well done. And that's Lay's. I thought that, you know, people know, they know who Lay's is, and the personalities that were used just it the comedic relief was great. I thought they did a good job. So, Lorraine, give us your take on both the Will Farrell ad and the Steve Carell ad.

Lorraine Kessler 
Well, I think the Will Farrell ad, I mean, talk about fun, right? I mean, and Welcome to the bandwagon for for those in the US, this just represents how soccer is becoming so dominant and has been growing for many years, but now it's finally kind of a center stage event. So I thought Welcome to the bandwagon was a great little theme. It fits the environment of the sports and the games. It's good humor, good use of the celebrities that were in it. It's very effective. I thought I thought a small piece in this spot was is surprisingly interesting to me. And that's where he makes the lei out of Lay's, which I thought was this is like genius. And it's you know, here we have an old standard brand, but they really made the chips fresh with this approach. And I think that Beckham is in this spot and in the Carell spot, is living up to Ham and his name. He's really becoming much better in his performance and acting in these spots. So very good. It fits and we'll talk about this, but it really fits the environment. People want to watch these kinds of events. They see them as celebratory, fun, amusing, engaging with people. So spots have to respect the environment that they're in. And I think this does. It doesn't, it, there's that sense of humor, that sense of camaraderie, making the product fun. And of course we know snacks fit already with the occasion. I thought the Carell, the super party with those who come out of the grocery store with Lay's, that is just pure genius.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, that was great.

Lorraine Kessler 
I just think that is so much fun. Again, there's this great humor. It celebrates the product as much as the event. The product being Lay's and the occasion of the World Cup. So I think, you know, A plus for Lay's in this in this alley.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, and it's following a trend. My wife and I watch a new show called Crashers, and they basically show up at a like a hardware store and they say, Hey, do you have a room that you really want to have renovated? Here's the requirement you have to leave today, you have to be gone for three days, and you have no say in the design of it. And so the people right there in the hardware store have to make a decision. And you see these guys because it's been, I think, guys so far. They're calling up their wife and Jonathan Knight, I think is his name, or John, I forget. He's from one of the boy bands back in the day. But he's I think he has a Boston accent, his accent's different, but he's basically talking to these wives on the phone, and they're like, who is this? Like, what are you talking about? It's funny, but it that's what this Steve Carell ad is doing it they're going into a place and these people are like, yeah, I bought Lay's and now they're showing up to this watch party with Steve Carell. And who was it that walked in? Was it Messi that walked in, I think, into the party. And then you got a couple other celebrities that I didn't really know well, but it was well done. I enjoyed both of the ads.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yeah, yeah, it's good for Lay's. It to me it breathed a little bit of life into Lay's and their branding and what they've been doing and so yeah, very good.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. Well, next up is one of those really, really long I wouldn't call it a TV spot. You'll never see this on TV, but it's a YouTube video, probably as a pre-roll for Adidas. And this one has generated a lot of online chatter. The premise of it, and and Lindsey will show it on screen here, but we'll have to talk for at least five minutes on it because I think the spot's about that long. But there's this supposed urban legend, these three kids that grew up playing soccer on a on a basketball court, in urban city somewhere, and this ball falls from the sky every time the game starts, and they keep beating everybody, and they haven't they haven't lost since 1996. And so this guy decides he's going to get together the top people, the top players in the in the world to come in and try to beat these guys. And so that's kind of the premise for this. It's their ride to the actual basketball court where they're playing soccer, and the buildup to that, because you just get this urban legend being told the whole time. So Lorraine, having said all that, give me a sense for your take on this one because it was it was good storytelling, but it there was also a lot of inside baseball stuff.

Lorraine Kessler 
Was it the recruiter, Timothee Chalamet? Yeah, I love that he spells his first name with two E's with an with an acute accent over the first E, like okay. It's like, and he seems to be quite the hot prospect right now. I enjoyed him in Dune. I haven't really seen him in many other things. I had to frankly look up all these players 'cause I didn't know I don't follow soccer, so this is out of my realm. It's very much as you said, like a mini mov movie. Great storytelling, right? It's kind of interesting how they tell the story in this ride. but I think it's very inside soccer. I mean, you have to be a soccer enthusiast to really stick with this. And that's great. I mean, if that's what what you are, I think that's great if Adidas drive is to own this sport, like to become synonymous with soccer, then they not they'll need more of this. This one and done won't work. They need to do more advertising. They I think they have an opportunity to bring this brand some new life against Nike, which has kind of taken over football, US football, not soccer football. Right. And I think that it's it could be a very good brand move for Adidas to tie itself more to soccer than to any other sport. And so that could be interesting from a brand position standpoint of branding. But yeah, I guess while it was enjoyable, I was bored. I wanted to be out of it. I was like, where's this going? And I don't really care because I'm not a huge soccer aficionado, but for those who are uber soccer people, I think they from the comments, which you looked at more than I have, I think they loved it, right? So if one thing we have to remember when we instruct clients, and this is very important, is that every strong brand has a core audience whose uber cares a lot about what that brand stands for, what that brand means to them and the benefits it delivers uniquely. And you should play to that core audience. So Adidas should play to the core audience and know others are listening. So there are always co-centric rings of people who may not be the uber soccer enthusiast, but who have some interest and share some of the same values as the uber audience. And they actually listen and they listen not only to the brand but to the core audience and what they're doing as affirmation, because people are basically insecure, right? So they listen to others who are Uber enthusiasts because that's a way of getting validation that I'm making the right decision. So I think that's what's going on here. And that's why for you and maybe I don't know, I can't speak for you, but for me, I'm like, so what? But I think there's potential here and I think I may I'm not the audience.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I wouldn't run out and buy Adidas. That's I, these folks don't do that for me. And frankly, no one that's a celebrity makes me go buy anything. But I think that's what they're playing off here. They're trying to show all these well known soccer players in their Adidas apparel and then these I guess what you call the the street kids that are beating everybody also in their Adidas apparel and they're the cool ones because no one can beat them. So it's, I mean, yeah, like you said, you almost have to be initiated to the brand before you're going to decide whether you want to go the route of these particular celebrities. So for what it's worth. The next one I thought was good for you because of your days in the old, the old days of the automotive industry. And this one's Valvoline. So I'm not gonna do an intro on this one. We'll let everyone watch it. But tell us what you think about the Valvoline spot.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I think this is great for Valvoline. I mean, the position which is the first time I've heard them state it, is very clear. The original motor oil. It really fits. They're a hundred and sixty year old brand. In fact, I was at that ice cream shop that you and I have talked about in Arcadia, Michigan, and that your friend goes to near Necima and this ice cream shop called the Ice Hats has all these old brands of stuff all over, like in cans and all sorts of stuff. Most of them you've never they've come and gone. A few you'll see a Kraft milk can and it's like wow, I didn't even know Kraft did milk, but it's Kraft. But Valvoline everywhere. And I just thought it was just because I just came back from the lake and I just was there and I was like, What my God. So they like the World Cup being the first right now, with its FIFA games here this year, they're sharing a lot of firsts. Valvoline was the first petroleum-based lubricant. They were the first trademarked lubricant in the US in 1873. So it's very he reason I'm bringing this out, of course we have this World Cup that's the largest tournament in history, first hosted across three countries, Mexico, Canada, US, first held in sixteen cities, first to feature 48 teams. So it all says this is relevant sponsorship for the brand. And it's relevant too because it takes an old brand and puts it in a new context. And I thought that the commercial felt good. It just really felt Good. It built on that history not in a dour way, but in a very refreshing kind of celebratory way that fits the games. So I think kudos for them. I think whoever their brand manager is, great job. You were able to kind of reposition in terms of this old brand, in terms of a new context, right? Which has a lot of eyeballs on it and you got the right tone and feeling and I think that's it's an excellent spot.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. Well, we only have time for one more. And I want to go to a completely different industry. Let's go with Lego. I thought they hit it out of the park and you know, we have some Lego enthusiasts here that are they're not kids, so Lego's not just for kids. Give us your thought on the Lego spot.

Lorraine Kessler 
I think it's pure genius and I think of all the spots we that you had me look at it is absolutely the it takes the top prize. Think about this. People who watch this ad, no words, no words in the ad. And it says all that needs being said. I mean that's I mean the creative inspiration for this is beyond belief. So they build on the fact that people know what Legos is and what you do with it and of course they repositioned this brand from bankruptcy or near bankruptcy, I think in two thousand three. and that's a classic story of of rebranding, repositioning that anyone should take to heart, right? And what they did to refresh this brand, at a time when kids were losing interest because of gaming and they had more competitors coming out that were I forget the competitor now even, but there was a competitor that came out. You've seen I can't remember their name. 

Mark Vandegrift 
Blocks, I think, is what you're thinking of.

Lorraine Kessler 
Yes. And so they really took to task how to reposition this brand and move it more towards an adult thing where it's not just about kids anymore. But they did some hard things. They sold off peripheral assets. They had things like theme parts and clothing, got rid of that. They reduced the number of pieces being manufactured. I think the big move is they embraced pop culture and that's what it is doing right now, embracing the World Cup as pop culture. But they did it with blockbuster licensing like Harry Potter, Marvel, Star Wars, all of that set them apart. Then they made entertainment a thing by the Lego movie. They actually entered that like Barbie and Mattel. So everything they've done and this just so fits, but to have these soccer players sitting around and having the trophy, right, and then all needing that piece and no words. It just, it just, everything about it is it's engaging, it wasn't too long, it was fun, it played back to the game, it made Lego the ultimate relevant adult toy if you will.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, I have to say.

Lorraine Kessler 
I mean I don't play in a bad way.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, I was really happy because you remember the Super Bowl spots this year disappointed me for the most part. And I would say that these delighted me, other than Kalshi, but you know, I think they had a different strategy in place. We're getting one question in here that came from a viewer, and that is they're comparing and contrasting the Super Bowl with the FIFA World Cup, meaning one is a single event, you know, the Super Bowl, and one is scattered among 104 different matches. So she wants to know, does that change the strategy the ads either creatively or how the media is playing?

Lorraine Kessler
Absolutely. I mean the difference between the Super Bowl is you're dealing with essentially a US American populace, right? And while we have many ethnic groups and cultural groups within, we all share, I hope, still, some sense of what it means to be American in the United States. So culturally we tend to assimilate into what it means in that sport means in the American culture and you know, and like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, you have to as an advertiser, you have to respect the environment. The environment of these games is celebratory, it's fun, people are looking for entertainment, they don't want the dead kid ad from Nationwide, they want they want to be entertained, it's a party moment, so you have to enter the moment. And so in both events, I think you've done that. But the difference with the World Cup is that and most many of these brands, if not most of them, I think, are global. So that means they have global advertising units in different countries. They might have French, they have Spain, Italy, whatever. And what you have to do in this is creatively be mindful of the fact that you have multilingual audiences and multicultural audiences, and you need to check that. Because if you just allowed an agency, let's say, who only does a US marketing, what we consider funny or an idiom could be insulting to someone else. So these global agencies creatively have to kind of vet how they're doing the creative. And also do they want to do different versions? Do they want to do an all-Spanish version? Do they want to do an all-English version and etc? So creatively you have to be in mindful of that from a media standpoint, of course, it's going to be very diversified because media is different by country. It's different by viewer and audience and what they consume. And so the platforms you use in each country and the media plan you have for each country could be very different. And that has to be have some global oversight as well. So it's a little more complicated, I believe, to do something on this simply because we're talking about global communication.

Mark Vandegrift 
That's great insight. Well, let's wrap up today's episode. Thank you, Lorraine, for being here as always. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. And until next time, have an amazing day.