The 2026 summer of sport starts today with the kick off of the World Cup, but its real impact will be on OOH, offline advertising and search marketing. Ashley Fletcher, CMO & VP of People, Adthena takes a look at what that means for marketers, retail media and brands
Every major sporting year reshapes the advertising economy. This summer’s World Cup – which starts today in Mexico – Wimbledon,and a packed calendar of global tournaments will create one of the most intense visibility battlegrounds marketers have ever faced. Stadium branding, fan‑zone activations, TV spots, influencer tie‑ins, and live broadcasts will flood consumers with brand messages.
Yet the real competition won’t happen on the pitch or on the billboards; it will happen in search.
When brands invest in OOH or sports sponsorships, consumers don’t always type in a URL or scan a QR code. They search. And if the brand isn’t defending its search landscape by backing up offline sponsorship with online advertising, competitors will happily capture the demand that the sponsorship paid to create. This is the “advertise twice” effect, a defining ROI challenge for sports brands and event sponsors alike.
The mechanism is simple, the losses are not
Offline media generates intent and paid search captures it. When those two channels aren’t aligned, the leakage is immediate.
Take Adidas in the UK market during the summer 2025 sports season. As Wimbledon and the broader summer sports calendar intensified through June and July 2025, Nike’s impression share within the adidas.co.uk search market nearly tripled, rising from 4.1% in June to 10.4% in July, then climbing further to 10.8% in August. This is a textbook example of a competitor capitalising on the elevated brand awareness a rival’s sports investment creates. Adidas built the audience; Nike harvested it.
The CPCs tell a similar story. Nike’s average CPC in the adidas search space increased by approximately 6% between June and August 2025 as bidding pressure mounted. More telling than the per-click cost, however, is the commitment behind it: Nike’s share of spend in that period moved from 7.8% in June to 17.7% in August, more than doubling its budget commitment across the period. Nike paid a higher price per click each month and judged that worthwhile because adidas was generating the underlying demand.
JD Sports demonstrated a sharper, more surgical version of the same playbook. In the week of 8 June 2025, JD Sports captured 16.6% of clicks on adidas brand terms, including “adidas trainers,” “adidas shoes,” and “adidas football boots.” In the week of 29 June, the opening weekend of Wimbledon, that figure was still running at 10.3%.
These are precisely the moments brands invest millions in OOH and sponsorships to dominate consumer attention, only for retail competitors to ambush the resulting search demand. The offline spend generated intent. The search defence wasn’t there to convert it.
The pattern is already repeating ahead of the 2026 World Cup. By May 2026, before the tournament had even kicked off, JD Sports’ impression share in the Adidas search market had jumped from 3.0% in April to 9.6% in May, signalling that competitors were warming up their conquesting strategies well before the first whistle.
How Macro Events Reshape the Entire Search Ecosystem
Macro events don’t just drive interest in sports brands; they reshape entire search ecosystems. During major tournaments, there are surges in broad, intent‑rich queries and location-specific queries as fans travel, gather and plan. Brands in the entertainment and hospitality sectors feel this most acutely.
Adthena data from booking.com’s UK market in April-May 2026 (the pre-World Cup window) illustrates this scale. “Hotel near me” query variants generated a combined ~130 million impressions across just two months, with up to 19 competitors bidding on a single term and max CPCs reaching £14.08 on core “hotels” queries. T
hese are the location-driven, high-urgency searches that OOH and event advertising generates: fans on mobile, in transit, trying to book within minutes of an offline trigger.
The venue-specific angle is equally sharp. “Radisson Red Twickenham”, a hotel adjacent to England’s rugby stadium, was among the actively tracked priority search terms in that April-May window. Fans searching for accommodation near a sporting venue create highly specific, venue-tied demand, and OTA competitors like booking.com, guestreservations.com and loveholidays.com are explicitly built to harvest it. “Loveholiday” and its variants generated 8 million to 8.2 million impressions each in this same window, with 12 to 32 competitors per term, confirming that the travel-to-event, host-city package angle is just as fiercely contested as pure hotel search.
AI is closing the attribution gap
At the same time, many advertisers still rely on outdated attribution models that assume consumers search within minutes of seeing a TV or OOH ad. Adthena’s client data shows that the real uplift often happens days or even weeks later. One advertiser discovered that their TV‑to‑search attribution window was capturing only a fraction of the true impact. When they extended their analysis to 7 to 28 days, the picture changed entirely: the offline spend was working, but the measurement model was broken.
This attribution lag is one of the biggest blind spots in modern marketing. It leads brands to undervalue their offline spend, cut budgets prematurely and misinterpret declining search performance as a failure of the channel rather than a failure of measurement. When JD Sports is pulling double-digit click share on your brand terms during Wimbledon week, the problem isn’t the sponsorship – it’s the absence of search defence coordinated to match it.
AI is increasingly what makes the connection between offline activity and search outcomes legible in real time. Modern search intelligence tools can now track how competitor impression share shifts before, during, and after a sponsorship; identify which search terms are being lifted by offline campaigns; spot CPC spikes that signal opportunistic bidding; and map search behaviour against major sporting events as they happen.
For advertisers investing heavily in sports sponsorships or OOH, this kind of visibility is becoming essential to understanding whether offline spend is actually converting into online demand.
The kinds of insights these tools can surface are often striking. During major fixtures, for example, it’s common to see competitor spend on generic terms jump, or to see entirely new clusters of search queries emerge in response to a stadium activation. When brands can see these patterns clearly in terms of which terms surged, who increased bids, and how long the uplift lasted, offline spend stops being a black box and becomes something measurable, optimisable, and defensible in budget conversations.
The stakes this summer
The data confirms the “advertise twice” dynamic with precision. Adidas UK created sports-season demand through its market presence and sponsorship investment, and Nike converted it, tripling its impression share while steadily increasing its CPC commitment. On the travel side, proximity queries explode during event periods, with OTAs spending heavily to intercept fans at the exact moment offline events drive intent.
Brands that treat offline and search as separate channels will lose the ROI battle this summer. Those that defend their search landscape, extend their attribution windows, and use AI to connect the dots will win. The Summer of Sport will reward the marketers who understand that visibility is only half the game; the real victory lies in capturing the intent it creates. Because if you’re not defending your search landscape during a stadium activation or a Wimbledon weekend, your competitors absolutely are.
Author
Ashley Fletcher, CMO & VP of People, Adthena
