At the World Cup, global brands won't be judged on their biggest moments but on whether they made every small interaction feel like it was made for you, writes Sparks’ William Quinn.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be the biggest yet: 48 teams, 104 matches and three host countries across Canada, Mexico and the US. It's easy to see the appeal for brands. Few events, other than the Olympics, offer that same concentration of global attention, with an estimated 5.8 billion viewers watching. That’s almost three-quarters of the world’s population all tuned into the same event. But attention is just the first step.
This event will test how well global brands understand the people they're trying to reach. Millions of fans moving between countries, all speaking different languages and bringing different cultures with them. They won't just come across brands via advertising and sponsorship, but also through all the other little details that shape the whole experience: signage, packaging, customer service and support, payments, digital content and follow-up messaging, to name a few.
For brands, this is where localisation becomes a major part of the customer experience. Done well, it makes people feel welcome and understood and offers potential customer loyalty and an opportunity to build trust. Done badly, it can make even the biggest brands feel careless and disconnected from communities. The opportunity here isn't simply being seen, but creating experiences that stay with fans long after they've gone home.
The small moments matter
When we think about global sporting events, it's often the biggest and boldest branding that jumps out first: the major sponsorship deals, the fan zones, the branded merchandise. Take adidas’s £50M blockbuster of an advert!
These absolutely have their place, yes, but there’s also a lot of opportunity to be found in the smaller, more personal interactions along the way that help to build a relationship between a brand and a consumer.
A fan doesn’t experience a brand across one neat, linear journey. They experience it in lots of different ways, like trying to find their way through an airport, for example. Buying drinks before the match. Making a payment in a foreign currency. Using an app. These may not be the major moments that end up winning awards or grabbing headlines, but they are the ones that, when added up, determine whether a brand feels useful and, most importantly, trustworthy.
A fan from Brazil, Japan or Germany might be in the same stadium, in the same city or even the same shop, but that certainly doesn't mean they share the same expectations, language or culture. Four in five consumers say they won't buy from a brand that doesn't offer local language support. Treating people all as one generic ‘international audience’ is where things can go very wrong and trust can be lost.
Localising global campaigns, like the World Cup, involves significant legal, cultural, and values-based risks. Potential issues to consider include:
The solution isn’t churning out endless versions of every asset. Brands need to understand where localisation makes the biggest difference to audiences. In some cases, it might be translated signage or packaging. In others, it could be adapting imagery, payment options, customer support scripts, offers or post-event communications.
When we remove those seemingly small frustrations that make people disengage or lose interest, we make it genuinely easier for fans to connect with brands. And when attention is this expensive, those are the details that set you apart and earn trust.
Localisation is more than just language
All too often we see localisation treated as something that happens at the very end of the process: the campaign gets approved, the assets are created, and then someone works out how to translate or adapt them for different markets. But by that point, most of the important decisions have already been made.
Brands have to be thinking early on about which assets should be adaptable, what messages have to stay consistent, where cultural nuance matters most, and who can actually sign off on any changes quickly. Without that structure in place, everything becomes too reactive. Teams move too slowly, the quality slips, and local markets are left desperately trying to make global ideas work in contexts they were never originally intended for.
The big question for any brand shouldn’t be “Have we translated this?”; it’s: “Have we got a system that allows this experience to work properly for the people we want to reach?”
Where AI helps (and where it doesn’t)
Global brands are often managing huge amounts of assets across multiple markets. In that scenario, AI can be very useful. It can’t, however, replace the human judgement needed to decide what should change and what should stay the same. And that’s where brands are still getting it wrong. 30% of localisation failures in 2024 were directly attributed to over-reliance on unreviewed AI output.
Speed is absolutely where AI earns its place in localisation – but it’s also where things can go very wrong. The issue here isn’t the technology itself, but rather where brands draw the line between what AI handles and what a human stays responsible for. Get that wrong, and you end up with content that’s been processed quickly but not properly adapted - technically correct, but culturally inert. Or, in the worst cases, actively off-putting to those it was originally intended for. The brands doing this well aren’t using AI less, but they are being more deliberate about where they keep human judgement.
At Spark, we talk about a “human-in-the-lead” approach: people set the strategy, cultural context and quality standards, while technology supports the workflow underneath. The goal isn’t using AI everywhere, but using it where it genuinely adds the most value.
The real test
The World Cup is a time-limited event, but the impact of a good or bad brand experience carries on long after the final game.
For visiting fans, what happens during the tournament will shape how they think about a brand when they go home and for a long time afterward. They may already be a customer in another market. They may become one. They may become an advocate, sharing their experience with friends, family, or followers. After more than 50 years of helping brands adapt across markets, we know this is where localisation earns its return: not just in the campaign window, but in the months and years that follow.