Media Buying Briefing: Marketers are wary of civil unrest at this year’s World Cup

According to four sports agencies that spoke with Digiday, clients have begun asking whether geopolitical drama or U.S. federal agents’ immigration crackdown campaigns could be on a collision course with the tournament — and in turn, their media buys and marketing plans.

There’s recent precedent for domestic politics intruding on the sporting calendar. Following the killing of Alex Pretti last weekend (Jan. 24) the NBA match between the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Golden State Warriors was postponed. 

“There’s definitely concern overall,” said Adam Schwartz, svp, director of sports media at Horizon Media.

That doesn’t mean advertisers are yet considering pulling investments or pausing activity planned for the summer. “People are keeping their eyes on it, but it hasn’t really affected the advertiser interest at this juncture,” added Schwartz.

But with calls for sporting boycotts of the tournament rising, following President Donald Trump’s diplomatic brinksmanship over Greenland and the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis, and with officials at some international soccer authorities concerned, some marketers are asking the question.

“It’s a conversation that’s happening,” said Nick Anderson, partner, global strategy, sport and entertainment at agency Fuse.

Investment in the year’s big sporting events is expected to push ad spend growth from 5.7% in 2025, to 9.5% in 2026, according to the IAB’s latest forecasts.

Much of that investment will be tied up in TV. Brands planning to advertise against TV coverage of the World Cup can operate in the knowledge their ad dollars are backstopped by network contracts. Schwartz said that, in the event of the tournament’s schedule being disrupted, advertisers would receive make-goods on other TV live sports inventory.

“The network would have to make up those eyeballs for us in some capacity,” he noted.

For advertisers focusing on experiential work with other forms of marketing — unofficial TV spots, shopper marketing tie-ins, or creator activity, even experiential activations at the stadiums — there are fewer guarantees. Such activity would likely be canceled outright in the event of political disruption, said Anderson, in concert with a corporate communications response that “reaffirmed” a brand’s given values.

Advertisers running work around a big event will often go into action possessing a large crisis playbook that plots out initial responses to entire lists of imagined catastrophes. “It’s very normal to scenario plan, [to] map out eventualities that could transpire and what a response would look like. That’s part of being prepared,” said Andrea Nirsimloo, managing partner of MSQ Sport and Entertainment.

Making the most of the World Cup opportunity – which, it’s worth remembering, spans three countries and an entire continent – requires “logistics on steroids,” noted Robin Clarke, CEO of M&C Saatchi’s Sport & Entertainment business. He characterized clients’ approach as an “extra wariness” that their best-laid plans might be upended. 

Typical brand bibles don’t have much advice on how to respond to a threat coming from the federal government, though.

Now, marketers must weigh up whether the Greenland question might lead to World Cup boycotts — or the likelihood of Border Patrol or ICE agents interfering with pop-up fan events. Though flight bookings by World Cup fans have been filling up, international tourism within the United States fell last year, a decrease partially credited to the increased scrutiny of travellers at border posts. And President Trump has already mused publicly about shifting the location of World Cup host cities.

“If anybody boycotts, it would be a huge black eye to Donald Trump’s administration, for sure,” said one sports agency executive who declined to speak for attribution. “I’ll bet that FIFA said, ‘Let’s give him an award [the Peace Prize], let’s suck up to him and make sure that we can pull off this event, and then let’s get the fuck out of the U.S.'”

The anonymous sports agency exec said to keep a close eye on the Super Bowl to get a sense of how invasive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel may act at the World Cup. ICE is expected to have a heavy presence at the Super Bowl, largely due to the halftime performance of Bad Bunny, who performs in Spanish and showcases his Puerto Rican heritage.

“The Super Bowl will be an interesting bellwether of what might be coming” at World Cup stadiums, said the exec.

Other sports marketers are skeptical about the risk to brand advertisers. Concerns that the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, held in Russia and Qatar respectively, would be boycotted by fans proved incorrect. 

Meanwhile heavy-handed policing of soccer games is nothing new. Neither is poor treatment of fans by government authorities (a recent example being the 2022 Champions League final, when Liverpool supporters were tear gassed by French police as they tried to enter the Stade de France prior to kick-off).

Brands have been “relatively impervious,” to association with either phenomenon, noted Luke Fowler, vp of business leadership at media agency Kelly Scott Madison.

The caveat sports marketers keep adding, however, is that these are unprecedented times.

Marketers favor sports not just because of the large audiences they pull, but because moments like the World Cup span political and social fissures. That doesn’t mean they take place within a vacuum. 

— Michael Bürgi contributed reporting to this story

Color by numbers

As if AI isn’t already upending every other corner of life, within the media and marketing world, it’s having an effect on salaries too. According to recent research from workforce solutions company Aquent, there’s a growing divide between tech and non-tech salaries. For example, machine learning engineers experienced a median salary growth of 6 percent year over year, more than double the 2.8 percent growth seen among copy editors. Some salaries highlighted: 

• CMO / head of marketing: $417,881 (5.5 percent YOY growth)
• CTO / head of engineering: $434,453 (6 percent YOY growth) 
• Data scientist: $131,935 (5.5 percent YOY growth)
• Data engineer: $113,684 (5 percent YOY growth)
• Media planner/buyer: $70,127 (3.8% YOY growth)
• New position: AI product manager: $162,000
• New position: Natural language processing engineer: $155,623

Takeoff & landing

• Havas Media Network in the U.K. rolled out an opt-out system for sustainable media planning, making low-carbon media the default for its clients, since media accounts for 85% of its emissions. The system’s goals are to measure and reduce carbon impact, while reducing inefficiencies in media and production, and incorporating emissions data in reporting and analytics.  
• Also in the U.K. but with plans to expand globally in the first half of 2026, Dentsu launched Generative Audiences, an AI-powered audience intelligence and targeting system that blends deterministic, people‑based data with AI‑generated signals in order to connect persona generation with activation.
• Personnel moves: WPP Media brought on former IPG exec (most recently global CEO of UM) Andrea Suarez to be CEO of its Latin American region… Omnicom tapped Jantzen Bridges to be its global president of Credera, the holding company’s in-house consultancy; she was most recently founder and principal of EY Studio+ … Dentsu’s Carat hired Mitch Delaney to be its evp and head of growth, coming over from a similar position at UM … Media by Mother hired Kathy Richter as managing director to co-lead the New York office, and Maria Van Buskirk as co-lead and head of communications strategy … UK independent Medialab hired Mark Syal to be its new chief product officer, coming over from a similar position at Brainlabs …  Social/creator agency Billion Dollar Boy tapped Piet Southey as its first U.S. managing director, coming from London where he had been head of client services for Europe. 

Direct quote

“Billboards don’t exist in isolation anymore. They’re part of a wider content ecosystem where social, search, experiential and retail activation sit alongside outdoor. The strongest campaigns we run are the ones that treat OOH as the starting point for a wider conversation, not the final placement.” 

— Katie Smith, owner of U.K. independent OOH firm The Manchester Screen, on the power of OOH.

Speed reading

• As I documented, the Super Bowl is getting extra viewership via a simulcast on NBC’s Peacock, and ad rates are a surprisingly hefty $3 million per 30-second spot. 
• Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon took the temperature of the ad marketplace in the U.S. and Europe, and found that a more predictable market hoped for did not materialize. 
• Kimeko McCoy looked at how AI companies are adjusting brand strategies to fight the perception of AI slop, through the lens of this year’s Super Bowl ads.