The early kick-off: Advertisers need a new game plan for this World Cup
Opinion
The 2026 FIFA World Cup time difference will see match-day attention splinter across live broadcasts, morning replays and endless highlight reels. How will advertisers adapt? Yahoo DSP’s senior director, global strategy and partnerships, predicts the results.
They say nothing good ever happens after 2 am. Scotland fans will hope to break the mould as they play in their first World Cup since 1998, the last time the men’s side appeared in the tournament.
Hundreds of thousands of Scots will be tuning in at 2 am local time to see them line up against Haiti on 14 June 2026. Many others, however, will opt for sleep, knowing they can catch the action on replay the next morning, whether through curated highlights on their feeds or a TV recap.
These late-night kick-offs will have an impact far beyond tired eyes and long Sunday lie-ins. They will fundamentally shape how advertisers engage with their audiences.
So what does this World Cup mean for reaching night owls, and how can advertisers unlock new audiences while keeping passionate sports fans engaged?
Late-night kickoffs will disrupt ad strategies
Late-night or early-morning kickoffs will force advertisers to rethink how they approach the World Cup, as a late start affects more than viewer stamina. It reshapes how, when, and where audiences can be reached.
The dependable mass audience that defined last year’s Euros or this year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup will give way to a fragmented viewing pattern that mirrors broader trends across TV, streaming devices, and live sports.
An early-morning kickoff will attract a committed group watching the match live, but a larger audience will likely emerge gradually over the following day. Clips surfaced on social platforms, highlights viewed on demand, and commentary circulated long after the final whistle. Attention will be distributed across several windows rather than concentrated in a single broadcast moment.
For advertisers, this means cultural impact is no longer confined to the match itself. The audience has effectively been redistributed, and understanding this distribution requires joined-up data that can capture behaviour across both live and catch-up environments. Strategies built around incremental reach will become more valuable, as many fans will engage with the match only indirectly and at different times.
In practice, brands must plan for recurring engagement points rather than a single interaction.
The opportunity has not diminished. It has changed shape, and advertisers that adapt their planning to this multi-phase pattern of attention will be better placed to reach the night owls and the daytime audience who choose an early night’s sleep.
Advertisers can’t rely on TV alone
Sports advertising has long been associated with prime time television – from high-stakes halftime slots during the Super Bowl to perimeter boards lining Premier League pitches. Yet in 2025, the landscape is shifting both on and off-screen.
On-screen, live sport is steadily migrating to streaming-first platforms such as DAZN, Discovery+, and Netflix. This transition enables advertisers to take a far more precise approach in connected TV environments.
Modern TV technology can identify different audience segments within a single viewing cohort and deliver tailored halftime ads accordingly. Around 70% of live sports viewers are expected to watch games digitally this year, equating to more than 114m engaged fans.
However, refined media targeting alone is not enough. Campaigns still depend on creativity that resonates across formats and attention states.
Off-screen activity plays a critical role in delivering this, helping brands build a coherent and memorable presence. A blended approach that combines channels such as CTV with digital out-of-home consistently strengthens performance by reinforcing messages across touchpoints.
This will be the first World Cup where AI is the word on every advertiser’s lips. AI’s rapid development is transforming everything from creative production to predictive audience modelling, giving advertisers new ways to adapt messaging in real time and deepen relevance both during the live moment and across the broader campaign.
Even when live linear audiences dip, interest in the event doesn’t. It simply spreads across platforms.
Fragmentation: an excuse to reach audiences across platforms
When match-day attention splinters across live broadcasts, morning replays and endless highlight reels, advertisers can no longer rely on a single viewing moment. But fragmentation isn’t a setback, it’s a signal. The brands that will win are the ones equipped to follow audiences wherever they move.
Live sports create less predictable viewing patterns: unpredictable spikes, surging bid requests, and inconsistent supply. Programmatic ad systems built for these fluctuations help avoid budget blowouts in the first ad break and instead pace delivery across the whole arc of fan attention, from night owls to next-day scrollers.
Unified TV data closes the loop. It shows who watched live, who caught the highlights, and who engaged only through social chatter. That clarity lets advertisers reduce duplication, capture incremental reach, and tap into new audience segments that never appear in the live numbers.
The result? Agility. Brands can suppress overexposed viewers, retarget highlight watchers, reach late-night behavioural segments, and sequence creative across screens regardless of when the match is consumed.
A late kickoff is no longer an obstacle. It becomes a programmable moment, one that rewards advertisers who adapt to how fans actually watch today.
Who will lift the trophy?
As the World Cup airs on UK screens at unfamiliar hours, advertisers face a moment of reinvention rather than retreat. The late-night kickoff is a reminder that cultural relevance now unfolds across multiple waves of attention, not a single broadcast peak.
Brands that embrace this new rhythm – uniting programmatic agility, unified TV data and versatile creative – will be best placed to meet fans wherever and whenever they choose to watch.
In a tournament defined by dispersed viewership, the winners will be those who control the entire pitch, not just the broadcast.
Alice Beecroft is the senior director, global strategy and partnerships at Yahoo DSP