Matt Coote, Managing Director, GumGum Australia
With kick-off in Mexico City fast approaching, Australian brands are no doubt putting the finishing touches on their World Cup media plans. But, I strongly suspect, many are thinking about it the same way they always have.
The last tournament in 2022 saw 5 billion 1 people tune in, with an average of 143 million viewers per match, creating one of the largest and most receptive advertising environments globally – and a huge
opportunity for advertisers willing to meet them there.
The World Cup audience is about to splinter
Due to the North American time zones, viewing for Aussies will look different this year. Even though the games were played at unsociable hours, 2022’s midnight to 6am graveyard slot was at least predictable.
The 2026 schedule, however, is harder to plan around.
With games taking place in the US, Mexico and Canada, matches will either be as early as 4am or as late as midday for Australians, scattering fans across the day instead of clustering them in the dead of night.
Fewer people will be gathered around the big screen at a packed pub. More will be watching alone on their phone, half-asleep in bed, or sneaking a stream in between work meetings on their laptop.
Plus, the advertising landscape is only expanding, with more platforms offering their own content environments. Major brands are taking up official FIFA partnerships, focusing on behind-the-scenes content, creator-led coverage, and gamification. Each platform brings its own audience and rules of engagement. Together, they paint a picture of a fanbase that is anything but one-size-fits-all.
The result is a fragmented environment, with audiences spread across multiple touchpoints and in different emotional and receptive states. Any brand treating this as a traditional broadcast moment will miss the opportunity to capture this highly engaged fanbase. Yet many will.
The old sports-buying playbook is breaking
What I’ve seen consistently in this industry is that businesses default to the familiar. Typically, when approaching a major sporting event, a brand targets broad demographic segments, buying reach, and serving the same creative across every placement. But that approach assumes all fans are watching in the same way, at the same time, and in the same frame of mind.
Instead, GumGum is laser-focused on the mindset of the individual consumer, and it’s our contention that it’s the single most powerful driver of advertising effectiveness.
Why mindset matters more than demographics
Mindset goes beyond context, attention, and any individual signal. It reflects the full combination of factors surrounding a moment – what someone is watching, where they are in their day, what device they’re viewing on, and how those factors combine in real time to determine whether someone is truly responsive.
Appraising mindset also means understanding emotional peaks and shifts around the content. Picture the build-up of anticipation around kick-off, the controversy surrounding a dodgy VAR decision and the euphoria or devastation at the final whistle.
Each of those moments influences a viewer’s thinking and feeling differently. A brand that shows up with the right message during the right emotional phase will connect in a way that no amount of demographic targeting can replicate.
The Australian Open already showed the shift
To capitalise, brands should look into adopting a real-time, mindset-driven approach. We saw this dynamic play out during this year’s Australian Open.
According to GumGum’s proprietary Mindset Graph data, online mentions of the AO rose from fewer than 2,000 on January 1 to nearly 47,000 by January 20, a 2,395% increase. And while the ramp-up in attention to tennis mightn’t have shocked as the tournament neared, more interesting was consumer receptiveness to key verticals that ran alongside the AO.
During this period, advertising categories including Travel Planning and Food and Beverage consistently achieved attention times above 4.15 seconds, while lifestyle categories reached as high as 4.93 seconds 2, well above industry benchmarks.
It doesn’t take a CMO to spot the pattern here – as the emotional stakes on court rose, so did receptivity to seasonally appropriate content across the entire media ecosystem surrounding the event.
As my colleague Alex Hill, Account Director at Gumgum, observed back in January, “attention goes hand in hand with emotion, and during a tentpole sporting event, fans are in a highly receptive mindset”.
Emotion is becoming the new media signal
The World Cup will reward the same thinking. That means building creativity for the emotional arc of the tournament.
Brands using contextual, environmental, and timing signals will be able to identify when someone is genuinely receptive, rather than simply assuming a sports fan is always an easy target.
Time and time again, our team has seen that contextually relevant, emotionally aligned messaging outperforms traditional broadcast buys.
When we meet people in the right mindset, ads become
more effective at driving real brand outcomes.
With the kick-off in Mexico City fast approaching, the window to get this right is narrow. The fans will show up in droves. Make sure your brand does too.