The 2026 World Cup, which begins June 11, is shaping up to be a logistically challenging proposition for anyone hoping to attend in person, and an equally challenging proposition for marketers hoping to reach them there.
With matches spread across 16 cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada, ticket prices exceeding $1,000 for many games, and transportation arrangements that remain, charitably, a work in progress, brands are increasingly turning to creators who can make the tournament feel accessible to the millions of fans who will be watching from their living rooms. (Which is to say, from the place where most World Cups have always been watched, only now with more strategic intentionality about it.)
"Creators are going to be the key to success of how to build the fandom," said Matt Grandchamp, senior vice president and head of revenue at NowThis, the digital media publisher. "The logistical nightmare that is the World Cup in New York and New Jersey — what can brands do?"
What they are doing, apparently, is hiring people like Julie Sousa, who has 2.4 million Instagram followers and a specialty in home event planning, to create party décor content around the tournament for brands including King's Hawaiian and DirecTV. The idea is to ease the sting of not being there by making the experience of not being there feel more like an event.
"A lot of people can't afford going to an expensive football game, especially the World Cup, right now," said Emma Clarke, Ms. Sousa's manager. "So how can you still make this an experience without having to actually be at the stadium?"
The approach extends beyond watch-party aesthetics. Quaker Oats, an official FIFA sponsor, commissioned the family-focused creator Kenzie Williams to produce content showing how she "fuels" her day, while DAZN, the sports streaming platform, has recruited one creator "correspondent" from each of the 48 participating countries for what it calls its DAZN48 initiative.
"This is all about how we tell the story of the World Cup through the fans' eyes," said Walker Jacobs, DAZN's chief revenue officer and president.
Scott Sutton, chief executive of the influencer marketing platform Later, suggested that the early rounds of the tournament — which feature multiple games daily for weeks — will create what he called a "two-screen viewing experience," with fans watching matches on television while also scrolling on their phones. That dynamic, he said, limits the effectiveness of traditional advertising and opens opportunities for more targeted creator content.
"The average person will probably spend more time interacting with this tournament on social media than they will spend time interacting with it on the television," said Shawn Francis, executive creative director at COPA90.
Several marketing executives told Digiday that World Cup-related briefs are still arriving on their desks, suggesting that both official sponsors and ambush marketers are still building strategies for an event that is, by most measures, quite large and also quite difficult to reach.
The first World Cup held primarily in the United States since 1994 will test whether American fans can be persuaded to care about soccer when the matches are nearby but the seats are not.
Original story published in Digiday: "Brands turn to creators to build World Cup buzz amid a logistics nightmare - Digiday", by Alyssa Mercante