Publishers will be the real winners of the 2026 World Cup

While I’m not sure I have the credentials to predict who will win the World Cup on the field, as ID5’s SVP of Partnerships I’m in a unique position to place a good bet for who will win off the field. So, if you were to ask me who I think the real winner of the 2026 World Cup will be, I won't hesitate: it's publishers.

A World Cup Like No Other

Excitement and engagement with the World Cup is a gradual build, not a spike as seen by other multi-week sporting events like the Olympics. Starting with qualifying buzz, group stage announcements, and match scheduling, we've already started to see the buzz about the World Cup begin with advertisements running since the end of the 2025 holiday season. Now, just a couple of weeks out, we're starting to see momentum building more and more, culminating with the end of the tournament.

While sporting events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, and Wimbledon are always big revenue drivers for publishers, this World Cup will be even bigger. For the first time in history, the World Cup will be hosted not by one country but spread across all of North America, with Canada, the US, and Mexico hosting games across 16 cities. It'll also be the longest World Cup to date, with 48 teams participating and 104 matches compared to the standard 64 matches in previous years.

Scale is everything. These increases and changes will drive up viewership, with a projected 6 billion viewers and a projected $10 billion in ad spend. Not to mention, FIFA predicts 5.5 million people from all around the world will travel to multiple cities across North America to attend the matches in person.

Let me be clear, it's not just linear TV, CTV and sporting publishers that stand to benefit. Local businesses and big brands alike that operate in the 16 host cities will benefit from the in-person crowds who won't just be watching the matches in the stands but they will also be traveling, planning, spending, and exploring the cities they are visiting. This rising tide will also lift publishers across all verticals including travel, food, culture, local news, entertainment, and lifestyle.

Publishers that started early to take advantage of this massive advertising opportunity will have the chance to ride the wave from start to finish.

Can a rising tide lift all CPMs? 

Not all publishers will win, a win still has to be earned. Even the best teams face their fair share of obstacles and, of course, need the right strategy and training to get the win on match day.

The publishers that will command premium CPMs will be those who have first-party data strategies in place to give them the clearest picture of the right target audiences. Like any championship team, a strong offense gets you into the game but it's not the whole picture.

The best teams also protect what they've built. For publishers, that means defending the quality of the audience experience through frequency capping to avoid over-serving the same ad, ensuring retargeting reaches the right audience across channels, and measurement to connect campaigns to conversions. Without these, even the strongest first-party data strategy won't convert into the premium CPMs publishers are after.

This is where having an effective identity layer comes into play. Identity infrastructure bridges publishers first-party data across properties and channels to create a more comprehensive understanding of their audience enabling accurate frequency capping, retargeting, and reliable measurement. This way, publishers can prove their value to advertisers to get the win with the best CPMs. 

Privacy: The Part Publishers Can't Ignore

The global scale of this tournament also raises the stakes on privacy compliance and this is one area where being underprepared has real consequences. Publishers will be inundated with international visitors and viewers, and traffic coming from different markets that carry different privacy requirements.

Publishers need geo-targeted consent mechanisms and multi-jurisdictional compliance frameworks in place. To name a few, that means being CCPA/CPRA (California), PIPEDA (Canada), GDPR (EU), and LFPDPPP (Mexico) compliant. 

And in 2026, blocking international audiences is not a strategy. It simply means losing a significant share of the audience and advertising budget at a pivotal moment. 

Let the Games Begin

Winning publishers won't be the ones who react in the moment but the ones who prepared. The audiences are coming and the ad dollars aren’t far behind. The publishers who've done the work on first-party data, identity infrastructure, and privacy compliance will be the ones left standing with a well deserved win.