The biggest sporting event on the planet isnât just testing creative and media strategies. Itâs exposing whether modern marketing measurement is actually capable of explaining how consumers make decisions.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is expected to generate more than $10.5 billion in global advertising investment during the tournament quarter, making it one of the largest marketing moments in history. Yet according to new analysis from Kochava, the real challenge facing brands isnât where to spend their budgetsâitâs understanding whether any of that spending actually worked.
For years, marketers have talked about omnichannel customer journeys. The World Cup may be the first global event that truly puts those journeys under pressure.
Todayâs football fan doesnât experience the tournament through a single screen or platform. They move fluidly between airports, public transport, streaming services, social media, mobile devices, fan festivals, retail stores and stadiums, often over several days before ever purchasing a ticket, jersey or sponsor product. While consumers experience that journey as one continuous brand interaction, marketers still measure it through disconnected platforms that rarely communicate with one another.
According to Kochava, that disconnect is becoming impossible to ignore.
One Fan. Five Media Channels. Four Days.
Kochava mapped a typical supporter arriving in Los Angeles for a World Cup match.
The experience begins with branded out-of-home media inside LAX before continuing that evening through social video and mobile engagement. By Friday, the same fan has watched streaming pre-roll advertising before travelling to SoFi Stadium on match day, where digital transit billboards, location-based mobile messaging and fan-zone activations continue the experience.
The journey concludes with a purchase at the merchandise stand.
On paper, it appears to be a seamless customer journey spanning four days and five different media environments. In reality, however, most brands will measure each interaction inside entirely separate reporting systems.
Jason Hicks, General Manager of Kochava for Advertisers, believes thatâs where the industryâs biggest blind spot lies.
âThis is the journey the industry has been building toward for thirty years, and most measurement stacks still canât follow it. The impression at LAX and the purchase at the merch counter are part of the same story. Most brands are reading that story across four separate dashboards and hoping the numbers add upâbut they donât.â
Physical Media Still Sits Outside the Attribution Model
While digital advertising has become increasingly measurable, physical media remains one of marketingâs biggest blind spots.
World Cup campaigns will rely heavily on airports, transit systems, fan zones, stadium precincts and digital out-of-home advertising to reach travelling supporters. Yet much of that exposure never generates an addressable digital signal.
The challenge extends beyond fans attending matches in person.
More than 30% of audiences watched last summerâs Gold Cup Final from home, a viewing pattern expected to repeat throughout the World Cup. Those audiences consume advertising across broadcast television and out-of-home environments that many attribution systems still struggle to connect with downstream behaviour.
Hicks argues that this creates a significant gap in campaign visibility.
âOut-of-home represents more than $11 billion in advertising this year, yet much of it remains invisible to traditional attribution tools. If brands havenât solved the physical-to-digital measurement problem, theyâre missing one of the most influential stages of the customer journey.â
Fragmented Streaming Makes the Picture Even Harder
The complexity doesnât end with physical media.
World Cup matches are now distributed across multiple broadcast and streaming platforms including Fox, Telemundo, Peacock, Tubi and YouTube TV, each producing its own audience data and measurement framework.
Fox and Telemundo alone are expected to generate roughly $850 million in World Cup advertising revenue, more than doubling previous tournament levels. At the same time, research suggests that 41% of buy-side leaders believe connected TV impressions remain significantly undercounted within their existing measurement capabilities.
Rather than simplifying television measurement, streaming has multiplied the number of disconnected data environments marketers must reconcile.
FIFAâs New Hydration Break Adds Another Variable
The 2026 tournament also introduces something entirely new for advertisers.
For the first time in World Cup history, FIFA has scheduled a commercial break during every match through mandatory hydration pauses around the 22-minute mark. Those interruptions create more than two minutes of premium advertising inventory during all 104 matches, with streaming CPMs expected to reach between $60 and $120.
The opportunity is enormous.
So is the measurement challenge.
âThe hydration break creates premium inventory in front of one of the most engaged audiences in media,â Hicks explains. âIf advertisers canât connect those impressions to what happens afterwards, theyâre paying premium prices without understanding the business impact.â
The World Cup May Be the Ultimate Test of Modern Measurement
With purchase intent among World Cup audiences approaching 90% and projected consumer spending expected to exceed $7.5 billion during the tournament, the stakes extend well beyond media efficiency.
For marketers, the event is becoming a large-scale stress test of measurement infrastructure.
Kochava argues that no single methodology will solve the problem. Instead, brands need to combine marketing mix modeling, which captures broader cross-channel effects that leave no digital fingerprint, with incrementality testing that isolates whether campaigns actually changed consumer behaviour.
Those approaches together offer a far more complete understanding than relying solely on platform dashboards or last-click attribution.
As Hicks puts it:
âMarketing mix modeling provides the wide-angle view, while incrementality testing tells you whether your campaigns genuinely changed behaviour. Use both together, because once the tournament ends, brands need to understand what actually drove growthânot simply what generated impressions.â
Why This Matters Beyond the World Cup
The World Cup is unusual because it compresses nearly every challenge facing marketers into six weeks.
Consumers move constantly between physical and digital environments. Media is fragmented across dozens of platforms. Purchases happen online and offline. Attention shifts between mobile, streaming, broadcast, retail and live experiences in real time.
In many ways, thatâs no longer unique to the tournament. Itâs simply how consumers behave every day.
The brands that emerge from the World Cup with the clearest understanding of those journeys wonât just know which campaigns performed best during footballâs biggest event. Theyâll have built a measurement framework capable of surviving the increasingly fragmented marketing landscape long after the final whistle has blown.