As Mexico prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, global brands are accelerating entry plans. While many see a visibility opportunity, Alexis Soubran, CEO of Mexico City-based Minimalist Agency, offers a correction: Large cultural moments do not create demand. They expose whether demand was properly built.
Soubran has advised global giants like AMD and SharkNinja on adapting to the region. The pattern is consistent: Mexico rewards brands that validate early and punishes those relying on reach alone.
The Challenge: Attention Inflation
Major events create a hostile environment for unprepared brands. CPMs rise, influencer rates spike, and consumer attention fragments. In this scenario, pure awareness strategies lose efficiency. Visibility scales fast, but conversion does not follow without pre-existing trust.
Strategy: Influencers as “Trust Carriers”
A common error is treating influencer marketing as media buying—selecting for reach rather than authority. Soubran argues that in Mexico, especially for premium brands, creators must act as trust carriers.
• The Pivot: Content should be designed to explain the product, not just excite the audience.
• The Goal: Use creators to validate use cases and bridge the trust gap before the market becomes saturated.
Performance Integration
Winning brands integrate influencer content directly into performance systems. Creator output is used to test messaging, pricing logic, and friction points before scale. This ensures that when media costs rise during the World Cup, the brand is scaling a proven conversion engine, not testing a hypothesis.
Why 2026 is Too Late
Performance marketing tied to the World Cup must begin now. The months leading up to the tournament are for execution, not learning. Brands waiting until the World Cup to enter often spend heavily just to learn lessons competitors already absorbed.
Success in Mexico will depend less on how loudly a brand shows up during the event, and more on how well they learned to convert before the spotlight turns on.
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