THE WORLD CUP IS SO BIG IT ALREADY EVICTED THE CANADIAN ARMY.
The only ad newsletter that won’t go to extra time with FIFA
The active military base near my apartment has packed up and left for the summer.
Yep, the Fort York Armoury houses three Canadian Army Reserve units. It sits next door to the Fort York National Historic Site, where a British garrison has stood since 1793.
The Armoury has temporarily surrenderd its base.
The Army moved out. FIFA has moved in.
That’s the scale of the 2026 World Cup. WARC says global advertisers will spend an extra $10.5 billion in Q2 because of this tournament. Not total. Extra. Adidas has already moved $292 million in branded merch before kickoff.
The Toronto government has made condoms. The Army is having a nice time at the summer cottage. Toronto hosts six matches starting June 12.
Here’s what the brands are doing with all that soccer money.
THE RENDERINGS ARE WORTH THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS, APPARENTLY
The city released its Fan Festival concept art on April 27. Fort York and the adjacent Bentway have been carved into thirteen zones.
Thirteen. Including the “Casamigos Clubhouse”. For the record, there’s no way it looks like this at all. Not a chance.
The Bentway is the strip under the Gardiner Expressway, so a meaningful portion of the world’s largest soccer fan zone is sponsored by a seventy-year-old elevated highway. Fun! The Bentway calls this “part of a larger shift that repositions infrastructure as a public destination.” Sure.
The art slate includes a shipping container turned into a recording studio that captures fans doing soccer-celebration dances and projects the moves onto a screen. A mural wrapping the highway columns. Interactive LED flags that respond when you touch them. Modular benches shaped like a soccer pitch. Furniture made of soccer balls and netting.
All of it described as “public art as a catalyst for urban transformation.”
Tickets are free. Tickets were free. Then the city tried to charge. Then there was backlash. Then they were free again. Then they went on Ticketmaster May 6 and were gone by lunch.
Premium tickets are $100 to $300. They get you expedited entry, a dedicated viewing area, and what the city calls “upgraded washrooms.”
For three hundred dollars, the city would like you to know you will pee well.
TORONTO PUBLIC HEALTH MADE INNUENDO CONDOMS, ON YOUR DIME
Toronto Public Health launched a limited-edition World Cup condom line last week.
Six designs. “Strings Attached” with floating soccer cleats forming a heart. “What A Finish!” with a ball in the net. “Block Those Shots!” with a wall of defenders. “Peaches & Cream,” which is a peach and an eggplant in front of a goal. “Ohhh, Canada.” And “In The 6ix for ‘26.”
This is real. The municipal health agency designed these. They’re being handed out free at four sexual health clinics. The Director of Health Promotion is on the press release saying “don’t pass up protection.” You can’t make this up.
ADIDAS BUILT A FIVE-MINUTE FILM. EVERYONE ELSE BUILT A COMMERCIAL.
A five-minute film. Timothée Chalamet plays a Pier 40 kid recruiting a team to beat a neighbourhood crew called Clive, Ruthie and Isaak whose win-or-go-home streak has gone undefeated for generations.
The roster Chalamet assembles: Messi, Bad Bunny, Bellingham, Yamal, Trinity Rodman, Dembélé, Raphinha, Pedri, Wirtz, Giménez.
The flashback opponents are de-aged AI versions of Beckham, Zidane and Del Piero who also failed to beat the local crew in 1996.
Agency LOLA USA, the Omnicom mash-up of adam&eveDDB New York and 180. Directed by Mark Molloy through SMUGGLER.
The de-aged AI legends will be the headline. The actual story is that Adidas committed to five minutes and treats this like a feature release.
Pier 40 is the soccer pier on the Hudson, a former shipping warehouse turned into the largest patch of athletic real estate in lower Manhattan because there’s nowhere else for NYC kids to actually play. Chalamet played there for a real club called Manhattan Kickers FC. Around 2006-2008 the Kickers went to London for a tournament and one of their opponents was a Charlton Athletic youth side featuring a pre-teen Joe Gomez, currently Liverpool and England’s center back.
There’s a viral photo from after that match — Joe Gomez sitting next to a 12-year-old Timothée Chalamet.
Chalamet’s said his original ambition was to become a footballer. “I am French, after all.”
BRAHMA IS THE ONLY BRAND HONEST ENOUGH TO ADMIT BRAZIL MIGHT NOT WIN.
Brazil hasn’t won a World Cup since 2002. Belief is depleted. Ancelotti just took over the national team. The country is wondering whether its football identity is still real.
Africa Creative made the most honest ad of the tournament.
A skeptical Brazilian watches a street match in Rio and gets pulled back into believing. Shot in 90s and 2000s Brazilcore. Ronaldo Nazário cameos. Cauby Peixoto’s “Tamanco no Samba” plays.
Most national-team ads pretend their team is invincible. Brahma knows the audience needs to be talked off a ledge. That’s harder to write than faux triumph.
THE GREATEST FOOTBALL AD EVER MADE GOT JOHN WOO MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II.
Brahma’s new spot is trying to be a 1998 Nike ad and most of you have probably forgotten that one.
Nike’s “Airport” was the moment the World Cup ad became a genre. Sergio Mendes’s “Mas Que Nada” plays. The Brazilian national team is stuck in Rio’s Galeão International waiting to fly to France. Ronaldo starts doing tricks. The whole squad joins. They blow past metal detectors, beat up x-ray machines, dance through moving walkways. Cantona appears. Ronaldo hits the post.
Wieden + Kennedy wrote it. The agency wanted to pull Nike out of its 1996 “Good vs Evil” era into something looser and more human. They needed a director who could make football feel like joy without choreographing it to death.
So they hired John Woo. The Hong Kong gun-fu auteur. The man who invented two-pistol slow motion in The Killer and A Better Tomorrow. They put him on a soccer commercial in Brazil at Christmas.
The production company was A Band Apart. Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender’s outfit, named after the Godard film.
So Tarantino’s production house produced the most influential football ad ever made, directed by the closest thing Hollywood had to a Hong Kong-action samurai, written by a Portland advertising agency, in a Rio airport over the 1997 holidays.
Where’s the documentary of that?
Multiple producers have said the players were impossible to wrangle because Brazilians genuinely enjoy Christmas. Romario kept disappearing to the beach. Ronaldo, between takes, told the crew “we’re going to win five World Cups.” Brazil lost the final to France that summer.
While Woo was on set in Rio, Tom Cruise called. Cruise had just watched Face/Off. He wanted Woo to direct Mission: Impossible II. Woo said yes.
Woo did one Adweek interview about the spot in March 1998. He couldn’t share specifics so he stayed broad. The quote: “People will recognize my work, even though there’s no violence or action scenes. They can touch the purity and the humanity.”
That’s a sentence written by a Hong Kong filmmaker about a shoe ad.He never did another ad of that scale.
Made MI:II in 2000, then Windtalkers, then Paycheck, then got quietly iced out of Hollywood and went home to China.
Some people put one piece of work on a flight to glory and never need to make another one. Woo is one of them.
The Airport ad is so good that Brahma made a love letter to it in 2026, twenty-eight years later.
MICHELOB ULTRA QUIETLY SUBTWEETED ADIDAS BY SAYING “NO AI”
A hotel lobby pickup game. Messi, Lautaro Martínez and Nicolás Paz Martínez against Pulisic, Sergiño Dest and Antonee Robinson. Ochoa in goal. Alex Morgan delivers the assist. Ronaldo Nazário cameos. Billy Bob Thornton orders a bucket of Michelob Ultra to his room and finds his bucket has become the prize.
Two flexes. First — Thornton plays a Mich Ultra-drinking character on Paramount’s Landman, so this is the meta-commercial. The actor plays himself drinking the beer his character drinks.
Second — and this is the more interesting one — the directors made a point of telling USA Today that no AI was used in the spot. Three weeks after Adidas resurrects dead legends with generative effects, the next major tournament ad quietly subtweets it.
A craft fault line just opened up and it is playing out in 60-second hotel lobby gags.
The Canadian version subs in Jonathan David. Billboards in his hometown of Ottawa and one going up directly across from BMO Field.
And a quick tally because it’s worth seeing on the page. By my count for the WC window, Messi is in six ads: Two Adidas ads, Michelob Ultra Superior Match, Duracell Reboot, LEGO Editions and Lay’s Most Epic Watch Party. Industry trackers put his lifetime endorsement count at 44 active brands.
Beckham is in four ads tied to the tournament: Pepsi, Lay’s, the de-aged AI version of himself in Adidas Backyard Legends — and yes, another beer ad I’m not covering because I’ve already covered enough beer ads.
So when WARC says spend doubled, the cast list didn’t. We just see the same faces more often.
Beckham’s de-aged AI face is now competing for media share against his actual face in what can only be described as a Black Mirror episode.
JIM BEAM MADE THE BEST AD OF THE TOURNAMENT AND IT STARTS WITH A FENCE
A groundskeeper rides a power mower across a soccer field. The mower is loaded with Jim Beam bottles. Doug Ford must be furious about this. He crashes through a fence into a backyard BBQ, then into a packed bar, then into an office break room. All watching the World Cup.
“This tournament may be fought on the pitch but it will be won at backyard BBQs.”
Someone goes, “are you Tim Howard?” Tim Howard, sitting at the BBQ, says: “I am Tim Howard.”
ARK Brands made it. Suntory Global Spirits owns Jim Beam and just locked in a US Soccer Federation sponsorship. Tim Howard, of course, is the Secretary of Defense — the man who set the World Cup record for most saves in a single match against Belgium in 2014.
Most fan-watching ads are gauzy slow-motion celebrations. This one starts with a man driving a riding mower into a fence.
It’s the best non-sponsor spot of the tournament.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK — THE MARY PICKFORD
Speaking of celebrity endorsement deals.
The Mary Pickford was invented in the mid-1920s at the bar of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, during the great American Prohibition migration when New York’s drinkers fled south to keep drinking.
The bartender was Eddie Woelke. Formerly of the Plaza in New York. Previously of the Ritz in Paris. He was the Forrest Gump of the cocktail world’s first golden age. Every hotel bar that mattered, he tended. I would also watch that on Netflix.
Woelke made this drink for Mary Pickford on a trip to Cuba with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. Pickford was the most famous woman in the world at the time. She co-founded United Artists with Chaplin, Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith in 1919 because she was tired of studios deciding what her movies were worth. She produced her own pictures. She won the second Best Actress Oscar ever awarded.
She also reportedly didn’t drink the drink named after her. Pickford was a near-teetotaler.
Same gag Messi is running a hundred years later. The biggest star of the era gets his name on a beverage, the beverage outlives the era, and somewhere in there nobody asks whether he actually drinks it. The only differences are that Pickford did it for free and Messi got paid by Anheuser-Busch.
1½ oz white rum
1½ oz pineapple juice
¼ oz grenadine (real grenadine, made from pomegranate, not the high-fructose stuff)
¼ tsp maraschino liqueur
Brandied cherry
Shake hard with ice. Strain into a coupe. Cherry on top. Light pink. Looks like a 1920s movie poster.
WHEN FIFA IS DONE FLIPPING NORTH AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, THIS IS HOW WE FIX IT.
For 39 days starting June 11, North America will be the loudest piece of real estate on earth. Stadiums in fourteen US cities, two Canadian, three Mexican. 104 matches. $10.5 billion in extra ad spend. De-aged Zidane. A man riding a lawnmower full of bourbon. Six different soccer condoms. A 40-foot screen under an expressway.
When the trophy is lifted on July 19 in New Jersey and the billboards come down and the AI Beckhams are deleted, the antidote is already booked.
The Louisville Bats — Triple-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds is offering up something called Nothing Night.
The promo image is the entire ad. Black text on white. “TODAY IS NOTHING NIGHT. THAT MEANS NO MUSIC, AD READS, VIDEOS OR ON-FIELD PROMOTIONS. JUST BASEBALL IN ITS PUREST FORM. CLICK THE LINK TO PURCHASE TICKETS.”
No walk-up music. No t-shirt cannons. No kiss cam. No “this strikeout is brought to you by.” Nine innings of crowd noise, the crack of the bat and a guy yelling at the umpire.
The post got 5,700 likes and 336,000 views on X. Roughly 335,000 more views than any individual Bats game gets with a gimmick.
A Triple-A team in Kentucky read the room and sold tickets to the absence of the room. The brands spending $10.5 billion this quarter are buying attention. The Bats sold the opposite.
That’s where I’d want to be in August.
Drink up.
The Drink Cart is a newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.