After over 20 years on the agency side, FIFA's Bettina Garibaldi made the leap to an in-house role only when a unique, passion-driven opportunity arose. For seasoned agency talent, the move to the brand side requires more than a title; it demands a cause or moment they are truly passionate about.
The World Cup Host Committee, a newly created entity, functions like a startup but benefits from big-brand discipline. By applying processes learned from clients like P&G and Unilever, the team brings structure, rigor, and speed to a complex, fast-moving environment, blending startup agility with enterprise best practices.
Having worked on World Cups as a sponsor and agency, the biggest surprise for FIFA's CMO upon moving in-house was the immense, hidden operational complexity. Marketing is just one visible piece of a massive logistical puzzle involving transportation, security (FBI, Homeland Security), and multi-state government coordination.
When marketing to a vast, diverse audience like the World Cup's, the team stops thinking about engagement as a metric and starts treating it as a behavior. People organize their lives around the event, so the strategy is to bring the experience to them through local initiatives, making them feel it's for them.
The ultimate marketing goal for the World Cup is not just awareness but active participation. Success is measured by getting someone—a fan, a family, a local business owner—to engage in an experience they otherwise wouldn't have. This shifts the focus from passive impressions to meaningful, active involvement.
Instead of a simple reveal, the World Cup poster launch was a multi-layered, hyper-local campaign. It combined an exclusive art gala at NYC's Poster Museum, authentic grassroots wheat-pasting in a neighborhood relevant to the artist's heritage, and a final mass broadcast in Times Square to create multiple angles of engagement.
A core marketing principle is that agility and seamless execution are earned through intense, unseen preparation. The public only sees the final, polished output, but its success is entirely dependent on the foundational behind-the-scenes work, planning, and coordination that remains invisible.