Morning!

Today, I bought my first England shirt in maybe 20 years. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I wore an England shirt. But it’s the World Cup, so there’s no better time to get a little bit patriotic.

But after buying it, it really did make me think about just how commercial the World Cup must be for some brands. For Nike, they must sell more England kits over the next few months than they did for the last few years? But what about the other brands? The sponsors? The advertisers?

Well, it turns out after a few hours of research, I have a lot of those answers.

Here’s a deep dive into the marketing behind the World Cup 👇🏻

In 1970, just before the Brazil vs Peru quarter-final at the World Cup in Mexico, Pelé walked to the centre circle with 800M viewers at home looking on. He then looked at the referee, asked for a moment, before kneeling down and tying his laces.

As he did, the broadcast cameras zoomed in on the moment, unknowingly showing the 800M viewers behind their screens that Pelé (the greatest player in the world at the time) was wearing Puma football boots.

To most viewers, it looked like a nothing moment. Just Pele tying his shoes. But what people didn’t realise was that Puma had paid Pelé $120,000 for that single moment (Roughly $735,000 in today's money). They'd even paid the cameraman to make sure the close-up landed.

At the time, Puma weren't an official sponsor of the World Cup. They didn't have a deal with FIFA. They hadn't paid a single dollar for a stadium board, a commercial slot, or a player kit deal.

What they had was a man tying his laces in front of half a billion people.

Within months, Puma's global sales had risen by 300%. Adidas, their bitter rivals, were reportedly furious. Sneaker historians now look back on that moment as the birth of modern ambush marketing.

But it also marked the start of something much bigger.

For the next 55 years, the World Cup would quietly become the single largest marketing battleground on Earth. The 2022 Qatar tournament generated FIFA $7.5 billion in commercial revenue. The 2026 USA, Canada and Mexico tournament is forecast to do over $11 billion. Every four years, the biggest brands on the planet pour billions into the same event, all trying to win the same eyeballs.

But here's the bit that's actually interesting…

The brands that have made the most money from the World Cup haven't all used the same playbook. They've used three completely different ones. Each rooted in a different psychological insight about how attention works.

I'm calling it the World Cup Playbook.

Let’s take a look!

I was quite shocked today when I found out that Adidas have supplied the official match ball of every World Cup since 1970.

That's 14 consecutive tournaments. Over 55 years.

Every World Cup goal you've ever seen has been scored with an Adidas ball.

But the ball is just one part of it. Adidas have also been the official FIFA partner since 1970. Their logo is on the referees' kits. The volunteer uniforms. The ball boys' shirts. The match official equipment. The current contract runs until 2030, worth $800 million.

By any normal metric, Adidas have spent more money sponsoring the World Cup than almost any other event in marketing history.

The question every marketer should be asking is “why?”

The shallow answer is "for visibility." But the deeper answer comes from a psychological phenomenon first identified by a researcher called Robert Zajonc in 1968. He called it the ‘Mere exposure effect’.

The idea is painfully simple. The more times you see something in a positive context, the more you trust it, like it, and feel familiar with it. Crucially, you don't even have to be consciously paying attention. The exposure works subliminally. Your brain just quietly logs it.

Now think about that in the context of the World Cup.

If you're 50 years old today, you've watched 13 World Cups. Every single match of every single tournament has had Adidas in the corner of the frame. The ball. The referee. The volunteers. The kits of nearly half the teams on the pitch. You've never once consciously thought "Adidas is a great brand." But your brain has stored thousands of unconscious memories of Adidas being associated with the greatest moments in sport.

So when you walk into JD Sports to buy your son a pair of football boots, you don't deliberate. Adidas just feels like the obvious choice. The decision has been pre-made in your head over 50 years of viewing.

This is why Adidas's revenue jumped 19% in 2022 from football merchandise alone. That number isn't really about that World Cup. It's the dividend on 50 years of compounding exposure.

You see this exact same principle play out in other categories too.

Rolex has been the official timekeeper of Wimbledon since 1978. Every clock at every court in the tournament has a Rolex logo on it. Every time a tennis presenter mentions the time, they're indirectly mentioning Rolex. Today, when most people think of luxury watches, they think of Rolex first. Not because of the watches themselves, but because of 47 years of association with one of the most prestigious events in sport.

But compound exposure is expensive. And it takes 50 years to compound. So what about the brands that don't have that kind of patience, or that kind of budget?

In 2014, Beats by Dre were not an official sponsor of the World Cup - Sony were. Sony had paid FIFA enough money to ban every other headphone brand from being worn by players inside stadiums during matches and media events. By the rules, Beats had no business being anywhere near the World Cup conversation.

But by the end of the tournament, Beats had dominated it.

A study by the Global Language Monitor put Beats at the top of the ambush marketing rankings for the entire 2014 World Cup. Beats's "The Game Before The Game" ad got 23 million YouTube views and was named the best advert of the tournament. It outperformed every official sponsor's campaign, including Nike's and Adidas's.

The genius wasn't sponsoring the players (loads of brands sponsor players). The genius was understanding exactly where the camera was going to be, and engineering for that moment.

Most marketers fight for attention during the high-concentration windows. The match. The half-time ads. The post-match highlights. But the high-attention windows are expensive precisely because everyone is fighting for them.

Beats looked at the World Cup and saw something different. They knew that with the rise of social media players would be posting all over the internet and journalists would be sharing photos of players in and outside of games. So that’s what Beats jumped on.

And critically, none of these moments were technically "in the stadium during a match."

So Beats gave their headphones to Neymar, Suárez, Wayne Rooney and dozens of other players. Players who, of their own free will, wore Beats during every single one of those liminal moments. Walking off the team bus, sitting in the dressing room, etc.

Every photographer at the tournament caught the shot. Every newspaper ran the photo. Every news clip leading into a match had a player in Beats by Dre headphones.

Fans saw their favourite stars wearing Beats headphone and over the next few weeks, Beats made over $100M in product sales.

You see this same play executed beautifully in the luxury watch world.

Richard Mille have built a billion-dollar watch brand on this exact principle. They don't sponsor major sporting events, they don’t have their logo under every clock at Wimbledon. What they do is give their watches, which retail at upwards of £200,000, to specific athletes. Rafael Nadal wears one when he walks onto the court at Wimbledon. Charles Leclerc wears one when he steps out of his Ferrari. Bubba Watson wears one when he tees off at the Masters.

Richard Mille has never paid Wimbledon a penny. They've never paid the FIA. They've never paid Augusta National. But every time those athletes walk into frame at the biggest sporting moments on Earth, Richard Mille is on their wrist.

The deep lesson is this. Don't fight for the most expensive attention. Find the moments your competitors aren't watching, and own them completely. Sometimes the most valuable real estate in marketing isn't on the pitch. It's the walk to it.

COCA-COLA: Become Part Of The Ritual, Not The Broadcast

Coca-Cola have been part of the World Cup since 1950. They became an official sponsor in 1978. They have one of the longest-running brand sponsorships in the history of professional sport.

But sponsorship is just the price of entry. What Coca-Cola figured out, decades before any other sponsor, is that the World Cup isn't really a TV event.

It's a ritual.

Every four years, millions of people stop their normal lives and gather around the TV to watch their country on the national stage.

Most sponsors look at the World Cup and ask, "how do we get our logo seen?" That question is solved by the sponsorship deal itself.

Coca-Cola asked a different question. They asked, "how do we become part of the ritual?"

So they built campaigns where drinking Coke became part of how people experienced the tournament.

In 2006, they launched the Coca-Cola World Cup Trophy Tour. The actual World Cup trophy is taken on a tour of over 100 countries, and ordinary people are invited to stand next to it. The campaign has now happened every four years for two decades. For millions of fans around the world, getting their photo with the World Cup trophy is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and Coca-Cola is the brand that made it possible.

In 2022, they ran a label-scanning campaign that prompted customers to scan 28 million Coke product labels. Each scan let fans enter contests, predict scores, collect digital stickers, and win match tickets. The drink became the way you participated.

Their executive Arnab Roy described the World Cup as "one of our best recruitment tools for young consumers."

This is rooted in a deep psychological principle. When you hold an object that's associated with a meaningful event, your brain encodes it as being part of that event. The Coca-Cola bottle in your hand during the final isn't just a drink. It's an artefact of participation. It becomes emotionally encoded as part of the memory.

Coca-Cola weren't selling Coke during the World Cup. They were selling the tool you used to take part in it.

This year, it’s estimated they’ll be 44 BILLION servings of Coca-Cola during this year’s World Cup. Bonkers.

But forget the marketing, the real question is…. Is England going to win it???

Until next Sunday,

— Niall

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