Elizabeth Maxson, chief marketing officer at Contentful, explores the ways brands can successfully leverage major sporting moments – and how they risk missing out.
With the London Marathon behind us, Wimbledon and the FIFA World Cup still to come, 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most concentrated sporting summers in recent memory. For brands, these are the most competitive marketing windows of the year, with captive audiences, heightened emotion, and the kind of cultural attention that is almost impossible to manufacture outside of live sport.
UK ad spend is forecast to exceed £50 billion for the first time in 2026, with the World Cup alone expected to inject a further £7.7 billion into the global ad market. Scale of investment, though, has never been a guarantee of impact. AI has made it easier than ever to produce content at volume around these moments, and the result is a landscape so saturated that audiences have become expert at filtering most of it out. More is being spent, more is being made, and less is breaking through than ever before. The problem isn’t the budget, but what brands are doing with it.
When bigger stops meaning better
Over half of the UK’s World Cup audience will be casual viewers, yet most brand plans are built around the assumption of a core football fanbase. The majority of people watching are there for the occasion, the atmosphere, the shared experience of a tournament rather than the sport itself, and campaigns pitched squarely at the devoted supporters tend to pass the rest by entirely.
The instinct to match the scale of a moment with the scale of the spend is understandable, but it is increasingly the wrong one. Audiences are not passive recipients of whatever a brand chooses to put in front of them during a major event. They are making constant, largely unconscious judgements about whether what they are seeing was made with them in mind. In a landscape saturated with content, that filtering instinct has only sharpened, and no media budget overrides it.
The campaigns that actually break through
One response to an oversaturated market is to stop competing on its terms entirely, and build campaigns around the human experience of a moment rather than the moment itself. Asics has done exactly that with its London Marathon campaign, focusing not on finishing times or personal bests but on the micro-moments that define race day – people gathered at the start line, exhausted runners supporting each other mid race, the collective experience of thousands of people driven by something far more personal than a result.
The same instinct drives sportswear brand On, which has built its Squad Race series around the crews and communities at the heart of modern running culture, rather than product launches or performance metrics. The global series, which stops in London among other cities, places community and shared experience at the centre of the brand’s sporting moment strategy, creating something runners want to participate in rather than simply consume.
The best campaigns at major sporting moments start with the person on the other side of the message rather than the moment itself. What do they actually care about, what are they feeling, and what will make them stop and pay attention? Alibaba’s approach at the Winter Olympics earlier this year answered those questions by turning the campaign over to fans entirely, inviting people from over 120 countries to use AI to create and submit their own expressions of what the Games meant to them. The technology wasn’t the central appeal here, but instead the human stories that emerged were. AI simply made it possible for those stories to exist at a scale no conventional campaign could have reached, with more than 10,000 entries created as a whole.
What connects these two different approaches is a business to human mindset – the understanding that whether you are speaking to consumers or business buyers, the goal is always to create something a real person can see themselves in. That is what determines whether a campaign earns attention or simply occupies space.
When more becomes less
The temptation to fill every available space with content and match the noise of the moment has only grown with the arrival of AI. What has fundamentally changed is not just the volume of content, but who can create it. The barrier to entry for major sporting moments used to be twofold: affording the media buy and funding production. Now, AI has effectively levelled that playing field by allowing brands to produce campaign-ready creative for multiple channels at speed and scale.
Brands’ newfound ability to develop and execute within the same budget is only further accelerating saturation. This contributes to an increasingly noisier landscape where the sheer volume of participation makes it even harder for any single message to land.
This shift also introduces a downstream effect. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, it risks becoming more uniform. If a growing proportion of campaigns are built using the same tools, trained on the same data, and optimised for the same outputs, differentiation becomes harder to achieve.
Research from Gartner found that half of consumers actively prefer brands that don’t use generative AI in consumer-facing content, and 68% regularly question whether what they’re seeing is even real. In a marketing environment already struggling with audience trust, volume without a clear underlying idea doesn’t just produce weak creative. It actively erodes the credibility that sports sponsorship is supposed to build in the first place.
More brands can now show up. More content can now be made. But without a distinct human idea at the core, that accessibility risks creating a sea of interchangeable campaigns that audiences are increasingly inclined to ignore.
Playing the long game
The opportunity at major sporting moments has never been bigger, and neither has the risk of wasting it. Almost half of World Cup viewers will stop watching once their team is eliminated, which means a campaign built purely around tournament visibility has a natural expiry date. Attention is available, but it is not guaranteed, and spending more can’t be a substitute for saying something worth hearing.
Human-first storytelling is critical to creating enduring campaigns. From there, AI can be used as a genuine force multiplier, extending what is already working across channels, formats and timeframes rather than generating volume in its absence. In a landscape where more brands can participate than ever before, attention is no longer won by simply showing up; it has to be earned through relevance, clarity and trust. The brands that are thinking about this correctly will use this summer as a way to build lasting connections and long-term customer relationships rather than focusing on noise during a fleeting moment.
