Nike goes nuclear, Burberry plays the terrace, IRN-BRU recruits Susan Boyle — Issue 2 of the 2026 World Cup ad roundup

Five days before kick-off, the final wave of pre-tournament campaigns has landed — and the gap between the biggest spenders and everyone else is widening fast.

This week's selection spans a six-minute Hollywood-scale chaos film from Nike, a fashion house that decided football kit launches were not enough, a Scottish soft-drink brand turning a classic jingle into a national anthem, and a fast-food chain that handed out collectible cups as if the World Cup were a Panini sticker album. Plus: a South Korean robot learns to play football, and a French telecom brand gets 14 million views by simply putting the Bleus on a plane to America.

Nike dropped a six-minute film on June 4 that is, structurally, a comedy about a director who cannot control his own commercial. The cast ignores every instruction: Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland go off-script; so do LeBron James, Serena Williams, Kim Kardashian, Travis Scott, and rapper Young Miko.1 The creative logic runs as follows: the greats never follow rules, therefore Rip The Script.

Created by Wieden+Kennedy and directed by Dan Streit, the film is the centrepiece of a 12-week "Universe of Football" campaign — Nike's answer to the fear that it had gone too quiet after a period of brand drift and flat sales.2 The full cast runs to more than 30 names across sport, music, and pop culture, including Ronaldinho, Alphonso Davies, Vini Jr., Jamal Musiala, Ted Lasso (the fictional character, not Jason Sudeikis — more on him in a moment), K-pop star LISA, and Travis Scott's son Saint West.

What separates this from Adidas's "Backyard Legends" (which led Issue 1) is register, not budget. Adidas went cinematic and sincere. Nike went loud and meta — the film is partly about itself, a commercial that admits it is a commercial while daring you to stop watching. Whether that self-awareness reads as wit or exhaustion depends on the viewer. The YouTube view count was modest at launch (under 9,000 on the LLLLITL playlist repost), but editorial coverage in Ad Age, Adweek, and Hypebeast has been immediate, and the official Nike Football upload is tracking separately.

For Nike, this is also a business story. The company has publicly framed the World Cup as a platform for brand recovery after sluggish recent quarters. Doubling down on football — historically its most culturally connected sport — and pairing it with the biggest non-American tournament ever staged in the US is a calculated bet on relevance.

Burberry launched its Autumn 2026 campaign on May 26, and the brief is unambiguous: dress the pitch-side energy, not the pitch.3 Jason Sudeikis cheers from the stands alongside Romeo Beckham and Thai actor Bright. "Adolescence" star Stephen Graham plays a Sunday league coach. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley paces the touchline as — and the brief is apparently this specific — "a yummy mummy."

The footballers proper include Declan Rice, Son Heung-min, Eberechi Eze, Leah Williamson, and US defender Naomi Girma. The campaign was shot at the kind of terraced ground that exists only in British memory and fiction, with trenchcoats, parkas, and Harringtons cut in tropical gabardine for people who want to look like they might leave at halftime for a gallery opening.

Chief creative officer Daniel Lee described the attitude: "There's a certain attitude to being a good sport that is very British and very Burberry." The World Cup is not Burberry's only play this summer — the brand is also taking over the beach terraces of the Hôtel Belles Rives in Cap d'Antibes with its signature check on parasols, loungers, and even ice lollies. But the campaign's football-facing framing is pointed enough that it functions as a brand moment tied to the tournament even without official sponsorship.

One thing worth noting: Burberry's sales recovered last year (comparable store sales up 2% versus a 12% decline the prior year3), so "A Good Sport" arrives from a position of cautious momentum rather than desperation. The terrace casting is its own argument: when a British fashion house brings together the "Ted Lasso" actor and three England internationals for a fashion shoot, the brand-as-culture-broker play becomes harder to ignore.

Wieden+Kennedy also handled McDonald's this week — which means the same agency ran both Nike's star-chaos film and McDonald's collectible-cup QSR push within days of each other. The two briefs could not be more different.

McDonald's declared this its largest-ever World Cup campaign.4 The headline mechanic is nine collectible cups featuring Ronaldinho, David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Son Heung-min, Lamine Yamal, Christian Pulisic, Santiago Gimenez, Alphonso Davies, and Luis Suárez — each cup tied to a limited-time FIFA World Cup Meal.5 A Happy Meal tie-in with Squishmallows adds a family layer. The one-minute hero spot launched June 2.

The creative logic here is old-school collectible culture transposed onto fast food — the same mechanism that made Panini sticker packs indestructible in popularity. By making the cups the physical artefact of fandom, McDonald's sidesteps the need for a narrative. You don't need a story when you have Ronaldinho's face on a cup your child will refuse to throw away.

The campaign also doubles as a World Cup entry point for casual fans in the host markets (US, Canada, Mexico), where the brand's reach extends far beyond the existing football audience.

Scotland qualified for its first World Cup in 28 years. IRN-BRU, the Scottish soft drink brand, responded by making a song about it. Not a jingle — a two-minute music video with a proper narrative arc, a bridge performed by Susan Boyle on top of the Forth Bridge, Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos on guitar, and comedian Paul Black riffing on the culture shock of following your national team to the United States.6

The track adapts IRN-BRU's iconic 1980s "Made from Girders" advertising tagline into a terrace anthem, complete with lines like: "We may not be the pundit's favourites to win, but what we lack in flair is made up with McGinn." Scotland midfielder John McGinn introduces Boyle's entrance. Five fans were selected through a karaoke-style casting call and appear in the video — their first time in a national advert.

By June 6, the video had crossed 1.1 million views on YouTube. That is a number that dwarfs the organic reach of most official sponsor content this week. Boyle described it as "a bit bonkers but in the best way."

The creative strategy here is one no official sponsor can copy: it is built entirely on fan anxiety — the specific, 28-year accumulation of Scottish near-misses, overhyped build-ups, and collective survival — reframed as a superpower. "Made from Girders" is shorthand for a kind of stubborn resilience that only Scottish football culture would understand, and the campaign is smartly calibrated to mean nothing to anyone outside that context and everything to those inside it.

Hyundai's World Cup spot takes a different tack from almost everything else in the field: no football legends, no celebrity cameos, no terrace nostalgia. Instead, the official FIFA partner brought in Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot and filmed it learning to play football.7 The tagline — "Next Starts Now" — extends the brand's EV and innovation positioning into the tournament.

At 46,000 views within a week of publication (May 31), the spot has outperformed several celebrity-driven campaigns on organic engagement. Part of the appeal is novelty: a robot attempting bicycle kicks sits outside the visual grammar of every other World Cup ad. Part of it is the Hyundai-Boston Dynamics relationship, which has been building in the public imagination since the company acquired Boston Dynamics in 2021.

The campaign is officially timed to younger audiences — the "next generation" framing suggests Hyundai is less interested in today's football fan than in the family buying its next EV in 2028.

The most-viewed video this week is not from a World Cup sponsor. Nike released a 47-second film for its France x Jacquemus collaboration kit — a limited-edition design created with French fashion designer Simon Porte Jacquemus — and it has collected 148,000 views since June 1.8

Jacquemus, speaking in the film, described working on the French national team kit as "the world to me." The film is shot in his characteristic sun-bleached, Provence-adjacent aesthetic — all warm light and fashion-forward staging, with no football action at all. Nike and Jacquemus's collaboration kits go on early access June 11 (the day the tournament starts) via Jacquemus and the French Football Federation, followed by wider retail on June 16.

This one sits in an interesting category: it is technically a kit launch, not a campaign. But at 148,000 views in five days, it is also the week's clearest example of how fashion-sports crossovers now generate marketing reach independent of conventional ad spend.

The French telecoms brand Orange, a major partner of the French national team, published "Les Bleus en Amérique" on May 11 — and by the first week of June, it had 14.6 million views.9 The spot is a minute-long dramatisation of the French squad departing for the US, scored with rising orchestral tension. No celebrities, no plot. Just players arriving at an airport, boarding a plane, and looking out at America.

The view count is the story here. 14 million is roughly 400 times IRN-BRU's number and dwarfs every official sponsor campaign in this week's selection. Partly that is a home-market effect — France has 68 million people, many of them invested in the Bleus. But it also shows what happens when a team with genuine international star power (Mbappé, Dembélé, Doué) is sent to an English-speaking World Cup: the creative doesn't have to work very hard.

Wieden+Kennedy is everywhere. The agency ran Nike's meta-chaos film and McDonald's collectible-cup campaign in the same week — two briefs that sit at opposite ends of the ambition spectrum. Nike needed cultural relevance at scale; McDonald's needed activation mechanics for 40,000 locations. W+K served both. For creatives tracking agency landscape, the week was a case study in range.

Fan-nation campaigns are outrunning sponsors on reach. IRN-BRU (1.1M views, no sponsorship), Orange France (14.6M views, team partner not a tournament sponsor), and France x Jacquemus (148K views, a fashion collab) all drew attention this week without a single official FIFA badge. The emotional specificity of "our team, our tournament" beats the generic warmth of global sponsorship assets almost every time.

The star-packing ceiling is becoming visible. Messi has anchored Adidas, Michelob ULTRA, and Lay's. Beckham appears in Adidas, Lay's, McDonald's, and Stella Artois. Son Heung-min turns up in McDonald's and Burberry. By the time the group stage is over, audience exhaustion with recognisable faces may push later-in-tournament brands toward either no-name storytelling or extremely local casting — both of which tend to perform better on earned reach anyway.