The 2026 FIFA World Cup: A Bilingual Marketing Agency's Retrospective
Introduction
The World Cup is back on North American soil, and it did not disappoint. Bigger, louder, and more electric than any tournament before it, the 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted jointly across the United States, Mexico, and Canada — turned into one giant, month-long celebration that nobody could ignore. And for bilingual marketers, it was more than a cultural moment. It was the biggest stress test our industry has faced in years, one that yanked Hispanic audiences from the margins of the media plan straight into the center of it.
The numbers back this up. Nielsen found that 83% of Hispanic fans who primarily speak English still chose to watch matches in Spanish. Even more striking: 65% of non-Hispanic fans preferred Spanish-language broadcasts, despite not speaking the language themselves. That's not a niche audience behavior. That's a signal that Spanish-language content isn't a secondary market play — it's mainstream demand.
As a bilingual marketing agency, we spent the tournament watching how brands responded to that signal. Some got it. Many didn't. Here's what we learned.
Why This World Cup Was Different
Every previous World Cup cycle treated the U.S. Hispanic audience as an important, but secondary, segment of the broader campaign. This one broke that pattern, for a few reasons.
First, the trinational hosting model meant the tournament was never just an "American" event to begin with — it was built around three countries, two of which are majority or heavily Spanish-speaking. Second, the commercial stakes were too large to ignore: Nielsen now puts U.S. Hispanic purchasing power at more than $4.1 trillion. Third, engagement intent rose sharply across every ethnic group compared to the 2022 tournament, with Hispanic and Black American audiences leading that growth.
And yet, even with all of that momentum, the spend didn't follow. Hispanic consumers represent 19% of the U.S. population and drove roughly 23% of the country's retail dollar growth — but Spanish-language properties still receive less than 1% of digital ad spend. That gap is the tension every campaign this cycle had to navigate: massive, proven demand on one side, and habitual underinvestment on the other.
The Successes
The brands that won this tournament weren't the ones who translated their existing campaigns into Spanish. They were the ones who built bilingual, bicultural strategy into the work from the start.
Telemundo: The Standout Case Study
If there's one campaign worth studying in detail, it's Telemundo's. While most advertisers built their World Cup creative around star power — Messi, Ronaldo, the usual roster of global icons — Telemundo took a different angle entirely. Its campaign asked a simple, human question: "¿Y tú, con quién lo vas a ver?" ("Who will you be watching with?")
It's a small shift in framing with a big strategic implication. Instead of selling the match, Telemundo sold the ritual around the match — the idea that for Latino audiences, sports fandom is inseparable from family and community. Who you watch with often determines which language you watch in, and Telemundo built its entire campaign around that insight rather than around any single player or storyline.
The deeper lesson here is about audience unit. Most World Cup advertising was built to reach an individual viewer. Telemundo built for the household — "en ambos idiomas, al mismo tiempo" (in both languages, at the same time) — recognizing that language in a bilingual home isn't a fixed choice; it's a fluid, situational one. That's a far more accurate model of how bilingual audiences actually consume media, and it's why the campaign resonated as authentically as it did.
Ikea: Systems, Not Slogans
Ikea's "El Lineup de Tus Sueños" campaign took a different but equally effective approach, positioning Ikea sofas and snack tables as the foundation for Hispanic households turning match days into watch-party destinations. What made it work wasn't the concept alone—it was the execution across TV, connected TV, social, out-of-home, radio, and digital, built as a cohesive system rather than a single asset translated six different ways.
DraftKings: Infrastructure, Not Just Advertising
DraftKings took the investment a step further by expanding Spanish-language functionality across its platform—not just its ads—while also hosting in-person watch parties in Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, and Hoboken. That combination of product-level bilingual access and real-world community presence reflects a strategy built around a community that, as DraftKings itself acknowledged, helped shape American soccer culture long before brands started chasing the World Cup opportunity.
The common thread across all three: none of these campaigns started as an English-language idea that got translated afterward. They were built bilingual and bicultural from the brief stage forward.
The Failures (and the Traps Brands Keep Falling Into)
Not every brand learned this lesson — and the mistakes this cycle echo a pattern that has repeated for decades. KFC's "finger-lickin' good" famously became "eat your fingers off" in Mandarin. American Airlines' "Fly in Leather" campaign translated into Spanish as "fly naked" across several Latin American markets. These are old stories, but they're still taught precisely because the underlying failure hasn't gone away: treating translation as a word-swap exercise instead of a cultural one.
This structural mistake shows up constantly in 2026 campaigns. Most marketing teams still build the campaign — strategy, creative, copy, design — fully in English first, lock it, and only then hand it off for translation. By that point, every decision about tone, metaphor, and cultural framing has already been made for an English-speaking audience. No translator, however skilled, can fully undo that at the finish line.
AI has amplified the problem rather than solved it. Roughly 30% of localization failures in 2024 were directly caused by over-reliance on unreviewed AI translation output, and brands that skip proper localization of slogans, imagery, and user experience lose up to 25% in engagement and conversion, according to a 2025 industry report. The tools have gotten faster; the discipline hasn't caught up.
And then there's the quieter failure — the one that doesn't generate a viral screenshot but costs brands the most over time: underinvestment. Plenty of brands showed up for the World Cup with a Spanish-language ad or two, treated it as a seasonal nod to the Hispanic audience, and then reverted to an English-only strategy once the tournament ended. Given that this audience represents nearly a quarter of retail dollar growth in the U.S., that's not a marketing oversight — it's leaving revenue on the table year-round.
What Marketers Should Take From This
A few clear principles emerge from watching this tournament play out:
Bilingual doesn't mean translated. The brands that succeeded built bicultural strategy in from the brief, not as a finishing step applied to a locked English campaign.
Hispanic audiences aren't monolithic. Language preference varies enormously by generation — younger Hispanics skew English-dominant, adults 18–49 are the most fluidly bilingual, and many older Hispanic consumers are Spanish-primary. A single-language strategy, in either direction, misses real segments of the audience.
Speak to context, not just language. The most effective campaigns used Spanish where it landed emotionally and English where it landed functionally — not the same message duplicated twice.
Build for moments, not just launches. The World Cup unfolded in real time, with goals, upsets, and viral moments reshaping attention throughout. Campaigns built as flexible creative systems — able to respond to that rhythm — outperformed those built as a single static asset.
Closing Thoughts
The 2026 World Cup didn't create the case for bilingual marketing — it just made it impossible to ignore. The brands that treated Spanish-speaking and bicultural audiences as central to the strategy, not adjacent to it, are the ones whose campaigns are still being talked about weeks later. The brands that treated language as a translation checkbox are already forgotten.
That's the gap we work in every day. If your brand is thinking through what a genuinely bilingual strategy looks like — for your next campaign or for the long term — we'd love to talk.