In this op-ed, Bench Media co-founder and chief operations officer Shai Luft ponders whether the slow long burn of a World Cup is as powerful to brands as the short, sharp burst of a Super Bowl.
Would you rather have two hours to make the perfect burst, or seven weeks to build momentum while people are still paying attention?
That is the advertising lesson sitting between the Super Bowl and the FIFA World Cup. The Super Bowl rewards the perfect burst: one huge stage, one huge cheque, one polished piece of creative and one chance to be brilliant or look ridiculous. The World Cup rewards something else entirely. It rewards brands that can listen, adapt and build momentum while culture is still moving.
In Australia, culture moves in very particular ways during a World Cup. It moves at 4am, when people are half-awake on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the Socceroos while trying not to wake the rest of the house.
It moves through WhatsApp groups where families switch between English, Arabic, Spanish, Korean, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German or whatever language carries the emotion best.
It moves in offices where people who have never cared about football suddenly have very strong opinions about the left-back, and in schoolyards where kids wear jerseys for countries they may have never visited but still feel connected to through parents, grandparents, food, language and memory.
That is what makes the World Cup so powerful. It is not just a sports event people watch. It is a temporary emotional infrastructure people live inside for a few weeks. It turns pubs, offices, living rooms and family breakfasts into little cultural meeting points. It gives migrant communities a moment to feel visible inside the broader Australian conversation, while giving the rest of the country a reason to lean in, argue, celebrate and occasionally pretend that waking up before sunrise for a nil-all draw was somehow a good life choice.
Marketing gold
For advertisers and brand marketers, that’s gold. Not because football magically solves every brand problem, it doesn’t. But because the World Cup gives brands something most major media moments don’t: repeated, emotional, real-world moments to show up in.
A Super Bowl ad is judged in one hit. Did it land? Was it funny? Was the celebrity worth it? Did people talk about it the next day?
The World Cup gives brands longevity. There is the morning after a Socceroos win, the late-night match that becomes a meme, the controversial penalty, the migrant community celebration, the office pretending to function after extra time, the pub that suddenly becomes the centre of the universe, and the ad someone sees while still curled on the couch, phone in hand, checking what happened while they were half asleep.
That’s a very different kind of attention. Less polished, maybe. More valuable, probably.
The Super Bowl is still the big bang model at its most glamorous. Big celebrity, big idea, big panic. Everyone gathers around to see whether the brand has nailed it or embarrassed itself. It is fame, theatre and ego wrapped into 30 seconds, and there is obviously a reason brands still want to be part of it.
But it is also a brutal way to spend money because you get one shot, no warm-up, no second version, no learning period and no chance to see what people are responding to, before moving the money accordingly. You make the ad, you pay the bill and you pray, that’s not strategy, that’s gambling with a better director.
The FIFA World Cup doesn’t work like that. It drags people in slowly, changes every day and throws up heroes, villains, controversies, stupid memes, national delusion, early alarms, office arguments and that uniquely Australian belief that if we just get through the group stage, anything can happen. It is messy and hard to control, which is exactly why it is such a useful lesson for modern advertising.
What brands get wrong
Brands don’t get to decide the conversation in advance, they have to earn a place as the conversation unfolds.
That is where a lot of brands will get this wrong. They will buy around the World Cup and call it a World Cup strategy. A few TV spots, some BVOD, some social, a ball in the creative, maybe a bit of green and gold, and a line about passion, fans or bringing people together. Fine. It will probably deliver reach, but reach is the lowest bar in the room.
The better question to solve is what role the brand is playing while people are watching, arguing, celebrating, recovering from no sleep and pretending they always cared about the left-back.
And that’s where the World Cup gets interesting in Australia, because this is not just a sports audience and it is not even just a football audience. It is a multicultural, multi-generational, multi-platform mess, and I mean that as a compliment. For some Australians, the World Cup is about the Socceroos. For others, it is Argentina, Brazil, England, Japan, South Africa, or whichever country is tied to family, language, food, childhood and identity. We are a multicultural society after all, and never has that been more evident than when we watch the World Cup play out.
That is not some niche multicultural footnote; that is a pretty accurate picture of modern Australia. And yet brands still love talking about multicultural audiences like they are a side strategy.
Multicultural mainstream
During the World Cup, multicultural Australia is not a segment, it is the mainstream.
The lazy approach will stand out quickly: the generic football ad, the fake fan energy, the brand that has never cared about the game suddenly talking about “the beautiful game”. The same creative running before a Socceroos match, a Brazilian match and a Korean match as if the audience mood is identical.
People spot that very quickly, especially when the moment is tied to family, identity and a team they actually care about.
The more in-tune brands will not try to own FIFA. Most cannot, and most shouldn’t. Instead they will try to be useful, timely or genuinely entertaining around the way Australians actually experience the tournament. A supermarket can make the match-day feed easier. A fast food brand can have some fun with the questionable decision to stay up for the late game. A travel brand can lean into the dream of being there. A car brand can connect back to weekend football, families and local communities.
None of this means brands need to pretend they are part of FIFA or suddenly become lifelong football devotees. It just means they need to understand the occasions, the communities and the emotional texture around the tournament before they start throwing footballs into the creative.
Old world vs new world
And that’s the real point. The World Cup rewards brands that can pay attention as things unfold, while the Super Bowl rewards brands that can make a big entrance and get judged immediately. Both have value, but they are not the same discipline. The Super Bowl is the old world at its most seductive: buy the biggest stage, make the biggest noise and hope for the biggest headline. The World Cup is closer to the new world: listen, move, test, react, adapt, localise, optimise and build momentum while the audience is still emotionally available.
Culture does not sit still while your campaign goes through approvals, sport definitely does not. Football, with all its chaos, heartbreak and irrational hope, absolutely does not.
Australian brands can either treat the World Cup like another block of premium inventory, or they can treat it like seven weeks of live cultural data wrapped in emotion, identity and belonging.
One approach will probably deliver impressions, the other has a much better chance of earning actual relevance.
